CloudHealth vs Cloudability: 5 Key Differences, Pros and Cons

As cloud spending continues to rise, FinOps practitioners are under growing pressure to manage costs with precision and transparency. Two of the most widely adopted tools in the cloud cost management space—CloudHealth by VMware and Cloudability by Apptio—aim to help organizations gain visibility, optimize usage, and align cloud investments with business goals. While both platforms offer similar capabilities, their pricing models, feature sets, and target users vary in ways that can significantly impact how effective they are for different teams.

In this blog, we’ll break down the key differences between CloudHealth and Cloudability, helping you make an informed decision based on your organization’s specific FinOps needs.

What Is VMware CloudHealth? 

VMware CloudHealth is a cloud management platform that provides organizations with tools to analyze and manage cloud costs, security, and performance. It serves as a platform for optimizing cloud environments, offering visibility into cloud infrastructure and resources. 

CloudHealth aggregates data from various cloud services, offering users a unified view of their cloud usage. This centralized management reduces complexity and enables organizations to operate more efficiently. Users can track expenses, detect usage patterns, and identify saving opportunities.

What Is IBM Cloudability?

IBM Cloudability, part of Apptio's portfolio, offers cloud cost management and optimization solutions. It gives enterprises visibility into cloud usage and spending. By providing detailed cost analytics, Cloudability enables organizations to allocate expenses and optimize cloud resources across various platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Cloudability breaks down cloud costs, providing insights that help organizations forecast future expenditures and optimize budgets. The tool assists organizations in transforming cloud spending data into actionable insights. The platform's interface visualizes complex financial data, making it accessible across an organization.

1. Deployment and Ease of Use

Cloudability integrates with major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, allowing for quick deployment with minimal configuration. Its interface includes organized menus and dashboards that allow users to access key insights without extensive training. Extensive documentation, such as guides and tutorials, supports users in resolving issues and customizing the tool.

CloudHealth offers cloud-based, on-premises, and hybrid setups to meet diverse infrastructure and compliance needs. The interface focuses on simplicity, with logically arranged tools that prioritize ease of use. Additionally, CloudHealth provides a structured onboarding process with detailed training, helping teams gain proficiency and realize value quickly.

2. Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloudability helps organizations maximize cost savings through committed use discount management, ensuring effective utilization of pre-purchased resources like reserved instances. It detects underutilized or idle cloud resources, allowing teams to cut unnecessary expenses. Integrated spot instance management automates the use of lower-cost, short-term resources.

CloudHealth offers similar cost optimization features, including committed use discount management and idle resource detection. However, it also offers autopilot instance management, which dynamically optimizes instances to balance performance and cost. This automated resource adjustment minimizes inefficiencies and provides ongoing optimization.

3. Cost Visibility and Insights

Cloudability delivers granular visibility into cloud spending, breaking down costs by account, resource, and tag to help teams identify cost drivers. Its customizable dashboards and reports allow users to create tailored views based on their priorities. With real-time cost monitoring and forecasting tools, teams can proactively track spending and anticipate future costs.

CloudHealth also provides cost visibility through reports that offer insights into spending patterns. Its customizable dashboards let organizations visualize data according to business needs, while cost tracking triggers alerts for significant spending changes. Budgeting and forecasting tools help align costs with financial goals and predict future expenses.

4. Security

Cloudability improves cloud security through role-based access controls, allowing organizations to manage permissions and restrict access as needed. It includes technical safeguards such as secure connections, network security, and data segregation, along with backup and disaster recovery features to protect critical data.

CloudHealth takes security further by providing identity and access management (IAM) to strictly control resource access. It tracks costs associated with security incidents, offering financial visibility into vulnerabilities. For AWS users, its Secure State service delivers over 900 security rules and compliance frameworks.

5. Pricing

Both Cloudability and CloudHealth use a pricing model based on a percentage of an organization’s total cloud spend. This aligns their cost with usage, making the tools naturally scalable—larger cloud bills result in higher fees, and vice versa. Each platform also offers tiered pricing to accommodate varying levels of spend, allowing customers to scale their FinOps tooling alongside their cloud infrastructure.

Cloudability typically structures its pricing through custom contracts, often based on forecasted annual spend. It offers modular add-ons and enterprise-focused features, which can add complexity but also enable tailored value. CloudHealth, on the other hand, tends to use a more dynamic monthly billing model, sometimes combining base fees with usage thresholds. While less predictable, this can offer flexibility for organizations with fluctuating cloud activity.

For large enterprises, both pricing models work well—proportional fees remain a small part of total cloud costs, and volume discounts are often negotiated. However, for smaller teams or companies with limited spend, these percentage-based models can feel expensive relative to usage. In such cases, the tools' enterprise-grade capabilities must be weighed against their impact on overall cloud budgets.

Related content: Read our guide to CloudHealth competitors 

CloudHealth Pros and Cons 

Here are the key features of CloudHealth:

• Continuous cloud cost optimization: Identifies inefficiencies like underutilized resources and provides recommendations for cost savings. Automates governance policies to enforce changes.
• Reporting and dashboards: Offers customizable dashboards for cloud environment analysis. Aligns cloud data with business priorities.
• Resource and organization management: Groups cloud resources logically by business units, departments, or projects. 
• Kubernetes and multi-cloud optimization: Optimizes Kubernetes workloads for efficient resource usage in containerized environments. Centralizes management across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other platforms.
• Budgeting, forecasting, and cost allocation: Creates budgets and forecasts future expenditures to align with financial goals. Detects anomalies in cloud usage and spending
• Governance and automation: Implements automated policies to manage resource usage, reduce costs, and ensure compliance. 
• Additional capabilities: Supports migration planning and sustainability-focused GreenOps practices. Offers commitment-based discount management for long-term cost savings.

CloudHealth also has the following limitations, as reported by users on the G2 platform:

1. Platform-specific variances: CloudHealth’s functionality can vary across different cloud providers. For example, certain features, such as tagging or compliance frameworks, may work differently or be less effective on Azure and Google Cloud compared to AWS.
2. Complexity for small organizations: CloudHealth is best suited for large enterprises with multi-cloud environments. Smaller organizations with limited resources may find the platform overly complex and difficult to justify in terms of cost and resource allocation.
3. Focus on enterprise features: The platform’s features, such as Kubernetes optimization and Secure State for compliance, cater primarily to enterprises with demanding requirements. These features may be unnecessary for organizations with simpler cloud setups.
4. High dependence on AWS for key features: Some of CloudHealth's capabilities, like its Secure State service, are heavily tied to AWS. Organizations relying more on Azure or GCP may not derive equivalent value.

Cloudability Pros and Cons 

IBM Cloudability provides the following key features:

• Cost visibility: Provides insights into multi-cloud, container, and application costs. Enables anomaly detection and waste reduction for better cost management.
• Anomaly detection and cost control: Tracks and detects unexpected trends in usage and spending. Helps identify opportunities for cost optimization and waste reduction.
• Collaborative FinOps framework: Unifies teams from IT, Finance, and DevOps to work collaboratively on cloud financial management. 
• Automation and optimization: Automates commitment program coverage and rightsizing to minimize resource costs without sacrificing performance. Ensures performance-safe automation by dynamically adjusting resources.
• Budgeting, forecasting, and cost allocation: Enables forecasting using historical and current data, aligning costs with KPIs and budgets. Supports cost allocation across teams and projects.
• Customizable dashboards and reporting: Offers reporting tools, scorecards, and dashboards to provide insights. Maps cloud costs to business objectives for a clearer view of return on cloud investments.
• Integrations and sustainability focus: Integrates with various data sources to deliver a picture of cloud costs and usage. Incorporates sustainability metrics, helping organizations monitor and reduce their environmental impact.

Cloudability also has the following limitations, reported by users on the G2 platform:

1. Complex interface for beginners: Cloudability's interface can be overwhelming for users new to cloud cost management. Navigating its features may require a steep learning curve for teams without prior experience in similar tools.
2. Time-consuming implementation: Setting up Cloudability can be challenging for organizations with diverse and complex cloud environments. Initial implementation, including tagging and configuring integrations, may take considerable time and effort.
3. Limited real-time insights: While Cloudability provides historical data and forecasting, its real-time cost insights may lag behind the needs of organizations requiring immediate updates on spending or usage patterns.
4. Specialization in FinOps: Cloudability is optimized for financial operations (FinOps), which may limit its applicability for organizations seeking a broader range of cloud management functionalities beyond cost optimization.

Finout: Ultimate Alternative to CloudHealth and Cloudability

In the evolving landscape of cloud cost management, tools like CloudHealth and Cloudability have long been players in the game, but their relevance is fading fast. CloudHealth, once a staple for many organizations, has essentially been left dead and buried following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, signaling the end of its lifecycle as a competitive solution.

While Cloudability arguably offers a better toolset than CloudHealth, it’s not far behind in losing its edge, especially with IBM’s stewardship failing to keep pace with the demands of modern FinOps. Today’s cloud cost optimization isn’t about clinging to legacy platforms or settling for outdated approaches—it’s about embracing innovation.

Enter Finout, the ultimate alternative that redefines FinOps with cutting-edge capabilities, delivering unparalleled visibility, flexibility, and control for organizations navigating the complexities of cloud spending.