VMware CloudHealth: Solution Overview, Pros/Cons & Alternatives

What Is VMware CloudHealth? 

CloudHealth, once a pioneer in cloud cost management and governance, established its reputation by helping enterprises streamline and optimize their cloud spending. However, after being acquired by VMware in 2018 and later absorbed into Broadcom’s portfolio, the platform faced an uphill battle to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving FinOps landscape. 

As cloud environments grow more complex and innovation accelerates, CloudHealth’s legacy approach risks falling behind newer, more agile solutions that offer deeper insights, automation, and cross-cloud capabilities.

CloudHealth consolidates data from AWS, Azure, and GCP, providing a central view to manage cloud resources. It offers insights to track usage, enforce policies, and identify savings. However, its rigid pricing, limited support for modern services like Kubernetes, and weak showback and chargeback models create challenges for scaling enterprises. These gaps make cost allocation and accountability harder, leaving CloudHealth struggling to meet the demands of today’s complex cloud environments.

What Does the Broadcom Acquisition Mean for the Future of CloudHealth?

Broadcom’s acquisition of CloudHealth in 2018 triggered internal restructuring, leading to potential service delays and disruptions. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and enterprises reliant on timely updates, particularly for GCP and Azure assets, face challenges with slower updates and increased troubleshooting, impacting operational efficiency.

Broadcom’s new Advantage Partner Program introduces stricter requirements, including a $50,000 monthly revenue minimum, making it harder for smaller MSPs to maintain partnerships. The selective nature of the program, along with limited pricing transparency, has caused uncertainty among customers regarding future costs and contract terms.

Key Features of VMware CloudHealth: Strengths and Limitations 

CloudHealth offers a range of features to help organizations manage and optimize their cloud environments. Here’s an overview of CloudHealth’s key capabilities:

Key strengths of the CloudHealth solution include:

• Unified multi-cloud view: Centralized tracking of AWS, Azure, and GCP costs, streamlining multi-cloud management and reducing tool sprawl.
• Cost optimization: Identifies savings through rightsizing, idle resource detection, and budget alerts, enhancing cloud cost control.
• Governance and automation: Enforces policies and automates actions to keep cloud spending in check, driving accountability across teams.
• Built for traditional architectures: Ideal for organizations with straightforward cloud environments, offering easy cost tracking and reporting.
• Reports and dashboards: Provides clear, customizable insights into cloud performance and spending for better visibility and communication.

Key limitations of CloudHealth include:

• Automation gaps: Lags in real-time automation and predictive analytics.
• Kubernetes tracking: Limited support for granular Kubernetes cost tracking and modern containerized workloads.
• Chargeback weaknesses: Basic chargeback and showback capabilities that struggle to meet the needs of large, dynamic environments.
• Rigid pricing: The solution does not provide much flexibility in its pricing model, making scaling costly and complex, and requiring long term commitments.

Why Consider Alternatives to CloudHealth?

Here are a few reasons many organizations are considering alternatives to CloudHealth:

1. Usability concerns: The interface can be slow and unintuitive, making it difficult for users to build complex, multidimensional reports and extract actionable insights quickly.
2. Limited Kubernetes visibility: CloudHealth offers minimal insight into Kubernetes environments, lacking detailed cost breakdowns for utilized, idle, and unallocated resources—critical for managing containerized workloads.
3. Narrow focus of savings recommendations: Cost optimization suggestions focus heavily on database and compute services, often missing opportunities in storage, networking, and container resources.
4. Rigid alerting mechanism: Alerting relies on static, manually set thresholds, leading to frequent false positives or missed spikes in usage, unlike more adaptive, automated systems in modern FinOps tools.
5. Limited business context integration: The platform does not track unit costs over time, making it difficult to align cloud spending with business growth, product usage, or revenue drivers—key for advanced FinOps maturity.
6. Scalability and complexity: As cloud environments grow, CloudHealth’s capabilities may struggle to scale, limiting its effectiveness for enterprises managing large, dynamic, multi-cloud ecosystems.
7. Customization constraints: Users report limited flexibility in tailoring reports and workflows to fit specific organizational needs, reducing the platform’s adaptability for complex use cases.

CloudHealth Pricing 

VMware does not make CloudHealth pricing publicly available. The following information is based on the solution offered on the AWS Marketplace. CloudHealth uses a subscription-based pricing model, offering contracts with durations of 12, 24, and 36 months. 

There are three tiers based on annual spending on AWS. For example, for organizations spending up to $150,000 per annum on AWS, pricing is: 

• $45,000 for a 12-month contract
• $90,000 for a 24-month contract
• $118,800 for a 36-month contract

Any spending beyond the contracted monthly limit incurs overage fees of $0.03 per AWS spending dollar.

Notable CloudHealth Alternatives 

1. Finout

Finout has emerged as a formidable competitor to CloudHealth in the realm of cloud cost management, offering a robust suite of tools tailored to the complex needs of enterprises. Unlike CloudHealth, which has been a longstanding player under VMware’s umbrella, Finout distinguishes itself with its patented Instant Virtual Tagging solution. This innovative feature allows businesses to allocate 100% of their cloud spend instantly, even for untagged resources, across multiple cloud providers and services. By eliminating the dependency on manual tagging, Finout provides a seamless and accurate cost allocation process, enabling enterprises to gain granular visibility into their spending patterns. This capability is particularly valuable for large organizations managing sprawling multi-cloud environments, where traditional tagging methods often fall short due to inconsistencies or oversight.

In addition to its tagging prowess, Finout excels with robust financial planning and forecasting tools, advanced anomaly detection alerts, and intuitive dashboarding, making it a feature-rich parity for enterprise use cases. Its financial planning capabilities leverage historical data to deliver precise forecasts, empowering FinOps teams to set budgets, track commitments, and optimize long-term spending strategies—all within a single platform. The advanced alerts system proactively monitors for cost anomalies, notifying users in real-time via integrations like Slack or email, ensuring swift action to mitigate unexpected spikes. Coupled with customizable dashboards, Finout provides enterprises with actionable insights tailored to diverse stakeholders, from finance to engineering, fostering a collaborative approach to cloud cost governance. This comprehensive feature set positions Finout as a strong alternative to CloudHealth, particularly for businesses seeking scalability, precision, and operational efficiency in their FinOps practices.

Source: Finout

2. IBM Turbonomic

IBM Turbonomic is a cloud management platform to optimize the performance and cost of hybrid IT environments, including public, private, and multi-cloud infrastructures. The platform enables more efficient use of compute, storage, and network resources.

Key features include:

• Continuous optimization: Automates real-time optimization for cloud and on-premises resources, reducing waste and over-provisioning.
• AI-powered insights: Uses artificial intelligence to identify performance bottlenecks and suggest actionable improvements.
• Cloud cost efficiency: Ensures cost savings through proactive resource management and eliminates unnecessary expenditures.
• Kubernetes optimization: Improves the performance and cost-efficiency of Kubernetes environments with tailored recommendations.
• FinOps automation: Automates financial operations processes, such as resource allocation and budget tracking.

Source: IBM

3. Apptio Cloudability

Apptio Cloudability is a FinOps platform to help organizations gain visibility into cloud costs, optimize cloud spend, and align cloud usage with business objectives. By offering advanced analytics and automation, Cloudability enables cross-functional collaboration among finance, IT, and DevOps teams.

Key features include:

• Comprehensive cost visibility: Provides detailed insights into multi-cloud environments, including containerized applications.
• Cloud waste reduction: Identifies underutilized resources and automates optimization actions without compromising performance.
• Anomaly detection: Utilizes AI-driven algorithms to detect unusual spending patterns and alert stakeholders in real-time.
• Commitment-based discounts: Helps maximize savings by automating and optimizing the use of reserved instances, savings plans, and other commitment-based discount programs.
• Unit cost analytics: Tracks key business metrics, such as cost per transaction or customer profitability.

Learn more in our detailed guide to CloudHealth vs Cloudability 

Source: Apptio

4. CloudCheckr

CloudCheckr, part of Spot by NetApp, is a cloud management platform tailored to enterprise organizations and managed service providers (MSPs). It focuses on cost optimization, resource efficiency, security, and governance.

Key features include:

• Detailed cost visibility: Provides insights into current and historical cloud expenditures, offering a view of which services and resources are driving costs and consumption.
• Cost optimization: Identifies opportunities to optimize cloud spend by up to 30%, including recommendations for right-sizing and instance rebalancing.
• Resource efficiency: Tracks long-term usage trends, uncovers underutilized resources, and offers actionable recommendations to eliminate waste.
• Chargeback and showback: Ensures cost accountability by accurately allocating cloud costs to business units, teams, or projects.
• Security and compliance: Improves security by detecting misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, some of which can be resolved through automated self-healing actions.

Source: CloudCheckr

5. Yotascale 

Yotascale is a cloud cost management platform to provide cost visibility, resource allocation, and actionable optimization across multi-cloud and containerized environments. Its alerts and automation tools help teams to manage cloud spending without requiring extensive manual intervention.

Key features include:

• Granular cost visibility: Offers real-time, role-based insights into cloud spend, allowing teams to track usage by project, team, or individual engineer.
• Cost allocation: Automatically tags and normalizes resources across cloud providers to ensure accurate cost attribution, improving accountability.
• Optimization and anomaly detection: Delivers actionable recommendations for right-sizing workloads and detects cost anomalies in real-time.
• Budgeting and forecasting: Provides ML-driven predictions and budget alerts to help organizations plan cloud expenses and optimize savings.

Source: Yotascale

Related content: Read our guide to CloudHealth competitors

Conclusion

Cloud management platforms are essential for organizations looking to optimize their cloud usage, control costs, and simplify operations in increasingly complex multi-cloud environments. By leveraging features like cost management, governance, and automation, these tools empower businesses to align cloud investments with strategic goals while reducing inefficiencies and maintaining scalability.