Top 13 Cloud Cost Management Tools: Free + Paid

Jul 29th, 2024

What Are Cloud Cost Management Tools?

Cloud cost management tools help organizations control and optimize their cloud spending. They provide visibility into cloud usage and expenses, enabling companies to identify inefficiencies and adjust resources accordingly. By monitoring and analyzing cloud costs in real-time, organizations can make informed decisions that align with their budget and operational goals.

Cloud cost management tools also offer forecasting capabilities, allowing users to predict future expenses based on current usage patterns. This helps prevent budget overruns and ensures effective allocation of cloud resources. With features designed to simplify financial oversight, these tools are integral for managing cloud expenditures.

In this article:

Why Are Cloud Cost Management Tools Important?
Key Features of Cloud Cost Management Tools
Free Cloud Cost Management Tools
Notable Commercial Cloud Cost Management Tools

Why Are Cloud Cost Management Tools Important?

Managing costs can be a challenge in cloud-centric IT environments. Companies often struggle to keep up with complex and variable cloud billing structures. It is especially difficult to ensure accountability and ensure cloud users are aware and responsible for their spend.

Without the right tools, organizations can easily overspend on underutilized resources. Cloud cost management tools address this issue by providing granular insight into cloud spending, preventing financial waste.

Cloud cost management tools also help companies to stay competitive by enabling cost-effective cloud usage. They optimize spending through resource allocation and rightsizing recommendations, ensuring that organizations pay only for what they need. Most importantly, they help organizations create a culture of financial accountability in the cloud.

Key Features of Cloud Cost Management Tools

Key features of cloud cost management tools include:

Visibility and accountability: Detailed insights into cloud usage and expenses, helping organizations understand where their money is going and identify any inefficient resource allocation.
Cost allocation across the entire infrastructure: Managing cloud spend is not just about AWS and EC2. It’s important to allocate costs across the entire cloud infrastructure, making sure every cent you spend is cost effective.
Cost optimization: Through recommendations for resource allocation, purchasing options, and rightsizing, these tools help companies minimize waste and reduce unnecessary spending on cloud resources.
Forecasting and budgeting: Advanced forecasting features allow organizations to predict future cloud costs based on current usage trends, enabling better budgeting and financial planning.
Operational efficiency: By automating cost management processes, these tools save time and effort, allowing teams to focus on core operations instead of manual tracking and analysis.
Collaboration across teams: Supporting collaboration between finance, operations, and development teams, these tools help align cloud spending with business objectives and operational goals.
Customizable reports and alerts: Customizable reporting capabilities and real-time alerts on spending anomalies or budget overruns help organizations stay on top of their cloud costs and make informed decisions quickly.
Integration with cloud providers and services: Seamless integration with major cloud providers and other business tools enhances the utility of cloud cost management tools, providing a unified view of cloud expenditures.

Free Cloud Cost Management Tools

1. AWS Billing and Cost Management

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Billing and Cost Management helps users monitor, manage, and optimize their AWS spending. This platform gives detailed insights into AWS costs and usage, enabling users to understand their expenses better and make informed decisions to control costs. Features include the ability to set custom budgets, alerts for when spending exceeds predefined thresholds, and detailed reports that break down costs by service, geography, or custom tags.

The tool also supports cost optimization by identifying underutilized resources and suggesting changes to reduce expenses without compromising performance. Users can access recommendations for reserving instances or choosing more cost-effective service options.

Source: Amazon

2. AWS Compute Optimizer

AWS Compute Optimizer is a tool that helps AWS users optimize their compute resources for cost and performance. By analyzing usage patterns and configurations, it provides recommendations on how to adjust instances, volumes, and auto-scaling groups. It uses machine learning to understand application needs, suggesting resource changes that can lead to cost savings and improve efficiency without reducing performance.

This tool supports various EC2 instance types, and also provides recommendations for Lambda functions and EBS volumes. Recommendations may include changing to a different instance type or size that matches the workload more closely, thereby optimizing resource utilization. Users can view the rationale behind each suggestion, enabling informed decision-making.

Source: Amazon

3. Azure Cost Management

Azure Cost Management is a service offered by Microsoft to enable monitoring, control, and optimization of Azure spend. It provides cost management and analysis capabilities, enabling users to track spending across different services and departments. It identifies spending trends, helps allocate budgets efficiently, and offers insights into potential savings without compromising on service quality.

The service includes features for creating and managing budgets, setting up alerts for budget thresholds, and recommending cost-saving opportunities such as reserved instance purchases or scaling down over-provisioned resources. The solution also provides detailed reports of Azure spend.

Source: Microsoft

4. Azure Trusted Advisor

Azure Trusted Advisor is a service that offers personalized recommendations across various categories, including cost optimization, security improvements, performance enhancements, and operational optimization. By analyzing the Azure environment, it identifies underutilized resources and suggests actions to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

This service not only helps in identifying potential savings but also ensures that Azure deployments are aligned with best practices. Through continuous monitoring and analysis, Azure Trusted Advisor enables businesses to optimize cost while maintaining a secure and high-performing environment.

Source: Microsoft

Notable Commercial Cloud Cost Management Tools

Finout

Finout is an enterprise-grade FinOps solution that helps companies easily allocate, manage, and reduce their cloud spending across their entire infrastructure. Finout’s solution provides the entire organization with complete visibility and context for cloud costs, helping them save money, work smarter, and innovate more profitably — all that without adding code or an agent.

Finout is widely considered to have the most robust cost allocation and shared cost reallocation solution, and can support the needs of large enterprises out-of-the-box.

YotaScale

YotaScale offers a platform for cloud cost management, focusing on insights and automation to optimize cloud spending. It provides granular attribution of costs in real time across multi-cloud environments including AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Features

Granular cost attribution: YotaScale allocates cloud expenses to the appropriate teams, projects, or services. This capability ensures accurate budgeting and fosters accountability among teams regarding their cloud resource usage.
Automated anomaly detection: The platform offers robust monitoring tools that automatically identify unusual spending patterns or spikes in cloud usage. By promptly alerting users to these anomalies, YotaScale helps prevent budget overruns.
Optimization recommendations: YotaScale provides actionable insights based on analytics of usage patterns and existing configurations. These recommendations guide users on rightsizing resources or terminating unnecessary instances, leading to significant cost savings without compromising performance.
Forecasting and budget management: The platform uses predictive analytics to forecast future cloud spending based on historical data. Users can set up custom budget alerts to manage expenditures proactively and avoid surprises in billing cycles.

Limitations (shared by users on G2)

Learning curve: New users may need to spend significant efforts to familiarize themselves with the platform.
Integration complexity: While YotaScale supports multiple clouds, integrating it across diverse environments might require additional setup efforts.
Customization limitations: Some users find the customization options for reports and dashboards insufficiently flexible.
Pricing transparency: Potential users could find it challenging to understand the pricing structure without engaging directly with sales representatives.

Source: YotaScale

Flexera One

Flexera One is an IT management solution that helps organizations manage and optimize their cloud expenditures across multiple cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. With tools for visibility, optimization, and governance, it enables organizations to reduce costs while improving resource efficiency.

Features

Cloud cost management: Offers a suite of tools for monitoring, managing, and optimizing cloud spend. It provides deep insights into cloud usage and expenses, helping organizations identify wasteful spending and optimize resource allocation.
Real-time visibility and reporting: Provides visibility into cloud usage and costs with detailed reporting capabilities. Users can track expenses across different clouds, services, departments, or projects.
Optimization recommendations: Leveraging advanced analytics, identifies opportunities for cost savings by recommending resource adjustments such as resizing instances or eliminating underutilized services.
Governance and compliance: Supports governance frameworks with policy-based automation to ensure compliance with organizational standards and industry regulations. This includes managing access controls, enforcing security policies, and automating compliance checks.

Limitations (shared by users on G2)

Complexity in setup and configuration: Some users may find the initial setup and configuration of Flexera One challenging due to the complexity of the system, which covers multiple aspects of IT asset management.
Cost visibility across multiple clouds: Gaining a unified view of costs across different platforms may require additional integration efforts.
Customization constraints: Users looking for highly customized dashboards or reports might encounter limitations in tailoring the platform’s default options.
Learning curve for advanced features: The range of features offered by Flexera One might result in a steeper learning curve for users unfamiliar with complex IT asset management solutions.

Source: Flexera

Densify

Densify is a cloud cost management tool that uses machine learning and analytics to optimize cloud resources for cost and performance. It provides insights into cloud usage, enabling organizations to make informed decisions on resource allocation and spending. By analyzing workload patterns, Densify identifies the most efficient instance types and sizes for compute and database instances.

Features

Cloud compute and database instance optimization: Uses machine learning algorithms to analyze workload patterns and automatically recommend the optimal size and family for compute and database instances. This helps in reducing application performance issues due to underallocation of resources while avoiding overallocation.
Optimization of auto scaling groups (ASGs): Evaluates the utilization and scaling behavior of ASGs, offering recommendations for their optimal configuration. This includes identifying whether scaling groups are elastic or constrained by current configurations.
Top-down capacity visibility across cloud infrastructure: Aggregates analysis of thousands of entities into a unified view across all cloud environments. Users can compare efficiency ratings, savings potential, risks, and other KPIs across accounts or business units.
Reporting: Generates detailed Impact Analysis and Recommendation Reports that provide clear articulation of every optimization recommendation including predicted utilization, effort level required for implementation, and cost impact. These reports can be used in ITSM change tickets or integrated into business workflows through APIs.

Limitations (shared by users on G2)

Complexity of recommendations: Some users might find it challenging to interpret the detailed recommendations without sufficient technical background.
Integration efforts required: For enterprises using multiple cloud platforms or proprietary systems, integrating Densify’s recommendations into existing workflows may require additional effort.
Overemphasis on cost savings: While optimizing costs is crucial, users need to balance recommendations with performance needs to ensure service quality is not compromised.
Dependence on accurate workload data: The effectiveness of Densify’s recommendations relies heavily on accurate workload data collection; any gaps or inaccuracies in data might lead to suboptimal suggestions.

Source: Densify

Harness Cloud Cost Management

Harness Cloud Cost Management is designed to help organizations manage and optimize their cloud expenditures. Using automation and detailed cost analysis, it allows organizations to gain insights into their cloud spending, identify wastage, and implement cost-saving measures. The platform provides a unified solution for multi-cloud environments.

Features

Cost optimization: Uses AI to analyze usage patterns and identify inefficiencies in cloud spending. It provides actionable recommendations for optimizing resource allocation, such as scaling down over-provisioned services or terminating idle resources.
Visibility into cloud costs: Offers visibility into cloud expenses at the unit level. Users can track spending across different services, departments, or projects with precision.
Automated savings with Cloud AutoStopping: Automatically shuts down inactive resources when they’re not in use and brings them back online when activity resumes.
Governance-as-Code for managing cloud assets: Enforces cost, security, and compliance policies across cloud assets. By integrating AI-powered policy generation with existing workflows, organizations can ensure their cloud environments adhere to best practices while optimizing costs.

Limitations (shared by users on G2)

Complexity of setup for non-technical users: Harness requires a high level of technical expertise and familiarity with cloud environments and is less suitable for non-technical users.
Dependence on accurate configuration for maximum efficiency: The effectiveness of cost-saving recommendations heavily relies on the accurate configuration of the platform’s settings according to specific organizational needs.
Potential overkill for small projects: For smaller projects or companies with minimal cloud infrastructure, Harness might introduce more overhead than necessary.
Adaptation time for existing processes: Integrating Harness Cloud Cost Management into existing financial operations and workflows may require a period of adaptation for teams accustomed to traditional cost management practices.

Source: Harness

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth simplifies financial management, operations, and collaboration across multi-cloud environments. It provides visibility into cost and operational data, making it easier to manage multi-cloud infrastructure, and provides custom reporting and analysis by dynamic business groups. Users can optimize and control cloud spend through improved resource utilization, tailored recommendations, governance policies, and automated actions.

Features:

Resource and organization management: Dynamically allocates assets to business groups for greater control over user access. This facilitates viewing and analyzing cloud environments to drive accountability for cost and usage.
Reporting and dashboards: Filters out-of-the-box reports to correlate datasets against business objectives. Supports custom dashboards for detailed granular analysis.
Budget management: Lets users configure budgets to visualize expected costs versus actual spend. Alerts stakeholders proactively when costs are forecasted to exceed budgets.
Forecasting: Uses machine learning for accurate projection of cloud costs considering periodicity, seasonality, infrastructure changes, and application lifecycle.

Limitations (shared by users on G2)

Complex setup process: The initial setup can be complex and time consuming.
Learning curve for advanced features: New users may find it challenging to navigate through advanced features without proper guidance or training.
Customization restrictions: There are limitations on the ability to customize reporting formats or dashboards.
Integration with existing tools: Integrating VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth with existing tools or workflows within an organization may require additional effort or adaptation time.

Source: VMWare

Apptio Cloudability

Apptio Cloudability is a cloud cost management and optimization platform that provides visibility into cloud spending across multiple providers. It provides IT, finance, and operational teams with the tools they need to monitor spend, optimize resources, and improve efficiency. By aggregating and analyzing spending data, Cloudability helps organizations allocate costs accurately and reduce waste.

Features:

Cost visibility: Offers insights into every aspect of cloud spending, enabling organizations to understand where their money is going.
Optimization recommendations: Provides actionable recommendations for reducing costs without compromising performance. These may include suggestions for rightsizing instances, selecting more cost-effective service options, or eliminating unused resources.
Budget management and forecasting: Allows organizations to set budgets for their cloud spend and track actual expenses against these targets in real-time. Offers forecasting capabilities to predict future spending based on historical data.
Customizable reporting: Users can create custom reports tailored to their specific needs. These reports can break down costs by department, project, or any other dimension relevant to the organization’s structure.

Limitations (shared by users on G2)

Complexity for smaller organizations: The platform’s features may be overkill for smaller companies and may be difficult for them to manage effectively.
Integration efforts required: Integrating Cloudability with existing financial systems or processes requires significant effort.
Learning curve: New users might experience a steep learning curve and require a significant time investment to become familiar with the platform.
Pricing structure: The platform is expensive and might not be suitable for smaller enterprises or startups looking for basic cost management capabilities.

Source: Apptio

Datadog Cloud Cost Management

Datadog Cloud Cost Management integrates cost data directly into the engineering workspace, providing actionable insights into cloud expenses. It breaks down costs by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud services, offering visibility into spending patterns and enabling teams to allocate budgets. With its emphasis on collaboration between FinOps and engineering teams, Datadog encourages proactive cost management within the same platform.

Features:

Granular cost allocation: Offers detailed breakdowns of cloud costs across different services and providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This enables precise tracking of expenditures and helps in identifying high-cost areas that may require optimization.
Real-time anomaly detection: Uses algorithms to monitor for unusual spending patterns or spikes in cloud usage. By alerting teams to these anomalies as they occur, it helps prevent budget overruns.
Optimization recommendations: Provides suggestions for reducing costs without impacting performance. Recommendations might include resizing instances or eliminating underutilized resources.
Collaborative cost management: Promotes cooperation between FinOps professionals and engineers by integrating cost data into the same platform used for operational monitoring.

Limitations (shared by users on G2)

Learning curve: Given its integration with operational monitoring tools, new users need time to understand how to navigate and utilize all aspects of the platform.
Complexity for smaller teams: Smaller organizations or teams might find the platform more extensive than needed for their simpler infrastructure needs.
Integration efforts required: While Datadog integrates seamlessly with major cloud providers, custom integrations or configurations may be necessary for specific use cases or environments.
Cost consideration: Pricing can be high for smaller businesses or those with limited budgets.

Source: Datadog

Zesty

Zesty is an AI-driven technology that auto-scales cloud resources based on real-time application needs. It ensures that cloud environments are optimized for efficiency and cost without requiring manual intervention. It aims to improve cloud efficiency, support DevOps productivity, and reduce cloud costs.

Features:

AI-driven resource scaling: Uses machine learning algorithms to analyze application demands in real time and automatically adjust cloud resources accordingly. This ensures optimal performance without overprovisioning or waste.
Cost reduction with zero human input: By automating the scaling process, minimizes the need for manual oversight of cloud infrastructure tasks.
Enhanced DevOps productivity: Zesty can handle resource management, reducing workload for DevOps teams and boosting productivity.
Flexibility and scalability without cost concerns: Organizations using Zesty can enjoy the full benefits of cloud scalability and flexibility without worrying about escalating costs. The platform guarantees that resources are precisely aligned with actual needs at all times.

Limitations (shared by users on G2)

Suited to dynamic environments: While Zesty excels in dynamic scaling, organizations with highly stable workloads might not fully utilize its capabilities.
Learning curve for advanced features: Users require time to familiarize themselves with the platform’s advanced features and best practices for optimization.
Integration considerations: Companies with complex or custom IT environments may need to assess how well Zesty integrates with their existing systems and workflows.
Pricing model suitability: The platform is expensive and might not be suitable for smaller organizations.

Source: Zesty

Conclusion

Cloud cost management tools are essential for organizations seeking to optimize their cloud expenditure and enhance financial accountability. These tools provide crucial visibility into spending patterns, identify inefficiencies, and offer actionable recommendations to reduce waste. By leveraging features such as real-time monitoring, forecasting, and automation, organizations can make informed decisions that align with their operational goals and budgets. Effective cloud cost management enables businesses to maintain competitive advantage by ensuring that cloud resources are used efficiently and cost-effectively.

Learn more about Finout