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Cloud spending is forecasted to exceed $600 billion this year, with 82% of IT professionals citing high cost as their top cloud challenge. Cloud cost management is more crucial than ever as business leaders face pressure to control costs. Yet, the challenges of evolving cloud usage, complex pricing, and lack of visibility mean that optimizing your cloud spend can become a full-time job.
The good news is that automation is now more advanced than ever, and there are now tools available on the market to help you with everything from monitoring to rightsizing to autoscaling.
Here are the 25 best cloud cost management tools to choose in 2025, and how your organization can use them to reduce your cloud spending with less manual effort.
What is cloud cost management?
Benefits of cloud cost management
Cloud cost management has major benefits, including:
- Accurate realtime budgeting. Forecast and plan your cloud spending with more reliability and less manual effort.
- Data-driven business decisions. Determine which features, products and teams are actually profitable. And when organizations are confident in their cloud spend ROI, it becomes faster and easier to accelerate future investments.
- Strategic planning: Tracking cost data and understanding usage help organizations shape their overall cloud, product, and pricing strategy, with a direct impact on profitability.
- Scalability: Optimizing your cloud infrastructure as you go makes it easier to scale tools and practices as your organization grows.
- Visibility for engineers and finance. Cloud cost management helps to identify inefficiencies and optimize resources. It also helps align engineering and finance on strategic goals.
- Faster innovation. Automation tools enable engineers to tackle optimization tasks more quickly and easily, so they can focus more of their time on building and innovating.
- Cost savings. The bottom line is that most organizations are wasting a large portion of their cloud spend; cutting these costs provides essentially free resources that can be reinvested back into the business.
How to choose the right cloud management tool
Key factors to consider when it comes to choosing the right tool include:
- Cost Allocation. A robust cloud cost management tool should allow you to analyze your unified cloud costs and third-party tool costs. A key feature is to break down costs by app, feature, team or customer, enabling clear allocation and control over resources.
- Automated Tagging. An automated tagging feature can help assign costs to specific teams, projects, or business units with less manual effort, ensuring accurate tracking and accountability.
- Budgeting and Alerts. Track cloud spending and set clear budgets and cost targets to align with your goals and avoid unexpected expenses. Slack, JIRA and email integrations can be useful here.
- Cost Visibility & Insights. Generally you’ll need insights down to the container level if you’re using Kubernetes, with actionable insights into how well you are doing, areas of potential savings, and smarter resource allocation.
- Kubernetes and EKS features. In 2025 most teams rely on Kubernetes; the cloud management tool you select should have features for optimization at every level, including for container, nodes and pricing efficiency.
- Automation tools. From rightsizing containers to eliminating idle resources to purchasing Savings Plans, automation tools can save significant time.
- Ease of Use and User Interface. Opt for a user-friendly interface that simplifies navigation, reporting, and adoption across teams.
- Support and Documentation. Ensure comprehensive support and comprehensive documentation are available to troubleshoot issues effectively.
- Security and Compliance Verify that the tool meets industry security standards and compliance requirements such as SOC2, safeguarding your data and operations.
Top 25 cloud cost management tools
1. nOps
nOps is an all-in-one AWS cost optimization platform that helps users reduce their costs by up to 60% on autopilot. nOps makes it easy to allocate your AWS costs and get complete visibility into spending. It also intelligently manages all your compute and pricing discounts automatically so you get optimal performance and costs.
nOps was built to make it simple and easy for engineers to take action with dead simple integrations and time-saving automations. It manages $2 billion in AWS spend for its customers and was recently named #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category. Features include:
- Compute Copilot: automatically optimizes your compute resources end-to-end, reducing waste at the container, node and pricing level with visibility down to the pod or container level
- Business Contexts: understand 100% of your AWS costs with dashboards, reports, container cost allocation, budgets & cost tracking, and more
- Commitment Management: automatic life-cycle management of your AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans with the industry’s only 100% utilization guarantee
- nOps Essentials: automate time-consuming cloud optimization tasks like pausing idle resources, scheduling resources, optimizing storage, etc.
- AWS MAP Tracker: maximizes MAP funding, automatically tags resources, and tracks credits for efficient cloud migration
- Well-Architected Framework Review: automates WAFR assessment & report for optimal cloud architecture
You can book a demo to find out how nOps can help you start saving today.
nOps vs Cloudability vs CloudHealth vs CloudZero vs ProsperOps vs Cast.ai
| Feature | nOps | Apptio Cloudability | CloudHealth | CloudZero | ProsperOps | Cast.ai |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visibility & Cloud Management | ||||||
| Cost Allocation & Budgeting | Allocate 100% of unified AWS and Kubernetes costs to specific products, teams, cost centers, etc. Comprehensive automated budgeting and cost-tracking features. | Provides some cost allocation and reporting but is primarily geared toward high-level cloud financial management. | Mature tool for cost allocation features, primarily in the enterprise or multi-cloud space. Integrates costs across cloud providers including AWS, GCP and Microsoft Azure. | Robust cost allocation features. Focuses on cost-to-business-value alignment, breaking down spend by unit economics (e.g., cost per customer or app). | – | Primarily designed for Kubernetes cost optimization, providing cost insights for containerized workloads. Not a complete cloud cost visibility tool. |
| Reports & Dashboards | Offers both customized and default reports & dashboards to help you quickly identify the most common drivers of spend and most valuable opportunities to optimize. You can filter by any finance or engineering concept down to the container or node level. | Provides financial reports and dashboards, geared towards tracking budgets and forecasting for FinOps. | Highly customizable, policy-driven reports for multi-cloud environments, with support for cost segmentation by tags, accounts, and policies, making it ideal for complex reporting needs in large organizations | Business-focused reports showing cloud costs per business unit; helpful for cost-value analysis. Includes library of pre-built dashboards. | – | Offers Kubernetes-centric reports, with insights into containerized workload costs and optimization suggestion |
| Commitment Management | ||||||
| Management of Reserved Instances & Savings Plans | Full automatic lifecycle management of your Reserved Instance and Savings Plans. Includes 100% utilization guarantee. | Includes only recommendations for Reserved Instance & Savings Plan purchases. | Includes commitment management, but no 100% utilization guarantee. | – | Includes commitment management, but no 100% utilization guarantee. | – |
| Spot Management | ||||||
| Real-time workload Management | Manages workloads from intelligent instance selection to real-time workload reconsideration. Integrates with your AWS-native EKS/ECS/ASGs. | – | – | – | – | Manages workloads in real time, providing instance selection and scaling for container performance. However, it is a proprietary autoscaler limited to Kubernetes and does not cover ECS/ASGs. |
| Spot market awareness | nOps Machine Learning continuously monitors Spot market pricing and termination data, proactively moving workloads onto a diverse set of optimal instances to maximize availability & savings. | – | – | – | – | Actively monitors the Spot market for Kubernetes clusters, automatically rebalancing workloads based on Spot pricing and availability. |
| Commitment awareness | Aware of all of your organization-wide Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments and ensures that you never waste prepaid commitments. | – | – | – | – | Limited to Kubernetes environments; requires manual commitment uploads and lacks broad integration with ECS, ASGs, and non-Kubernetes AWS resources, making it effective only for containerized workloads rather than full cloud-wide commitment management. |
| Cloud optimization | ||||||
| Resource Rightsizing | nOps Rightsizing integrates with Datadog and CloudWatch for data-backed rightsizing recommendations for EC2, ASGs, etc. You can apply recommendations with one click. | Offers basic rightsizing recommendations but not one-click apply. | – | – | – | – |
| Storage Optimization | Integrates with Git and Terraform to streamline the process of identifying and fixing code related to storage optimization. | – | – | – | – | – |
| Resource Scheduling | Recommends resources to automatically turn off during idle hours, using ML to learn your usage patterns. | Provides scheduling options, though limited to pre-set schedules rather than ML-based usage patterns. | – | – | – | – |
| Advanced EKS Features | ||||||
| Support for Native Autoscalers | Fully compatible with Cluster Autoscaler or Karpenter. No proprietary systems or vendor lock-in. | – | – | – | – | Uses a proprietary autoscaler tailored for Kubernetes. It doesn’t integrate directly with Cluster Autoscaler or Karpenter. |
| EKS Visibility | Full EKS visibility — including node monitoring, container rightsizing, workload troubleshooting, and binpacking — all in one tool. | – | – | – | – | Provides extensive EKS visibility for Kubernetes clusters, including node monitoring, pod optimization, and workload insights. |
| Container Rightsizing | Continuously monitors detailed historical data for automated container rightsizing. You can choose from options like maximal savings, maximal availability, or a balanced approach. | – | – | – | – | Offers real-time container rightsizing, monitoring CPU and memory usage to provide recommendations specifically for Kubernetes pods. |
2. AWS CloudWatch
CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is widely used in the cloud industry for its seamless integration with over 70 highly popular AWS services.
The platform provides in-depth monitoring and observability for AWS resources and applications, allowing users to gain insights into performance, resource utilization, and operational health. Its features include customized dashboards, alarms and notifications, automated resource scaling, troubleshooting, debugging, and many more.
While CloudWatch is undoubtedly one of the most widely used tools to manage cloud costs, it may have limitations in some cases. Setting up, configuring, and fully leveraging its capabilities can be complex. And while it can be used to monitor on-premises and other cloud services, its main focus is geared towards AWS.
3. Apptio Cloudability
Apptio Cloudability is a cloud financial management platform that improves visibility and governance across cloud environments. It helps organizations optimize their cloud resources for cost, speed, and quality.
Cloudability provides budgeting, forecasting, and rightsizing features as part of its financial management solution. One major advantage of the tools is its FinOps focus. It helps executives correlate cloud spending to business value and helps Finance teams accurately track and forecast cloud spend for more robust budgeting.
While the tool has many financial and budgeting capabilities, it focuses less on linking cost changes and recommendations to the practical engineering side. Once Cloudability provides recommendations, it still falls to the engineering team to determine which recommendations to accept and how to take action on them.
4. Microsoft Azure Cost Management + Billing
Microsoft Azure Cost Management + Billing is a suite of tools that help organizations monitor, allocate, and optimize the cost of their Microsoft Cloud workloads. The tools are available for free for Azure. However, Microsoft Cost Management has a 1 percent charge on total AWS-managed spend at general availability.
Microsoft Cost Management can be used to report on and analyze cloud costs, as well as monitor costs proactively with budget, anomaly, and scheduled alerts. For monitoring and observability, Microsoft also offers Azure Monitor to provide insights into the operation and performance of your Azure resources.
5. Densify
Densify is used to automatically optimize your Kubernetes resources and automatically configure your cloud instances. The platform is also known as Intel Cost Optimizer powered by Densify, and its license subscription is covered by Intel for qualifying organizations.
One of Densify’s strong points is its use of Machine Learning to perform deep analysis of workload characteristics and cloud provider capabilities, to continuously match cloud applications and services to the right cloud infrastructure. And the platform is flexible — it runs on multiple cloud services and is suitable for multicloud and hybrid cloud architectures.
6. Apache Cloudstack
Apache CloudStack is a versatile open-source cloud computing platform. It offers robust capabilities for managing VMs, as a highly available, highly scalable IaaS platform. One of CloudStack’s main selling points is in the name: it aims to include the entire “stack” of features needed for IaaS, including compute orchestration, Network-as-a-Service, user and account management, a full and open native API, resource accounting, with an easy to use User Interface (UI).
While CloudStack offers a robust feature set to manage cloud costs, it may pose a learning curve for newcomers with resource-intensive setup and maintenance. And, intricate configurations may be required for complex deployments, meaning that your team may have to invest some time to fully utilize CloudStack’s benefits.
7. Spot by NetApp
Spot by NetApp (formerly known as Spot.io, which was formerly known as Spotinst) is a CloudOps tool for reliably, securely, and efficiently deploying and operating cloud infrastructure and applications.
Spot.io is able to automate workload management across various cloud providers by constantly analyzing cloud resource usage using machine learning algorithms. Spot helps users identify and leverage cost-saving opportunities for automatic cloud cost control and efficient scaling of workloads.
While Spot’s automation capabilities make it one of the most useful cloud cost management tools, it has some limitations — including a lack of resource scheduling guidelines and real-time pricing detail.
8. Harness
Harness is a CI/CD platform that helps manage cloud costs. It focuses on enhancing cost transparency, optimization, and governance through features such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Feature Flags, Cloud Cost Management, Service Reliability Management, Security Testing Orchestration, and Chaos Engineering.
Harness provides suggestions for optimizing workloads for savings and helps automatically shut down idle cloud resources. However, it lacks some key cloud automation features and cloud cost optimization tools, such as spot instance utilization, autoscaling, and rightsizing.
9. IBM Turbonomic
Turbonomic allows you to continuously automate critical actions in real time to deliver the most efficient use of compute, storage, and network resources to your apps at every layer of the stack. It focuses on helping you avoid overprovisioning resources to your cloud environment and only use what you need for reduced cloud costs.
The solution offers a robust feature set for cloud cost optimization, though some report that the platform can be complex to configure and that pricing can be out of reach for many smaller organizations.
10. CloudHealth
VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth enables users to manage their cloud costs, usage, performance and security through a single interface. Since the platform was acquired by VMWare, the CloudHealth Partner Program leverages the technology to help partners of VMWare manage their cloud costs, improve efficiency and monetize their public cloud businesses.
Some of CloudHealth’s advantages include its comprehensive set tools to manage, analyze, and optimize cloud infrastructure and spending, as well as its multicloud capabilities. However, some find its reporting capabilities to be lacking in customization and granularity.
11. Flexera
Flexera’s mission is to improve visibility, allocation and efficiency of cloud spend at scale. It provides actionable recommendations, budget controls, and cost policies to help your organization avoid surprises and reduce unnecessary cloud spend.
One of its compelling selling points are the automation tools it provides to act on recommendations, making your cloud optimization and governance more scalable and efficient.
The disadvantages of Flexera include its relatively simple dashboards, monitoring, and reporting capabilities. Some find that these features require further development and documentation to reach their full potential.
12. CloudCheckr
CloudCheckr is an end-to-end cloud management platform. It brings visibility and intelligence to help you lower costs, maintain security and compliance, and optimize cloud resources.
One thing that makes CloudCheckr unique is its focus on Spot. It offers many Spot products such as Spot Eco (Cloud Cost Optimization), Spot Ocean (Containers), Spot Elastigroup (Infrastructure) and Spot Portfolio (CloudOps).
Some of the pros include CloudCheckr’s visibility and monitoring tools, its alert systems, and its end-to-end capabilities. On the other hand, some find that it has a steep learning curve for beginners and that some of its cost-reporting capabilities lack complete accuracy.
13. Nutanix Cloud Manager
Nutanix Cloud Manager is a multi-cloud IaaS framework that creates a self-service portal for the consumption of IT resources. With NCM, SysAdmins and Architects can define VMs and applications via simple blueprints and control all aspects of the application lifecycle, such as provisioning, scaling and cleanup. Once created, a blueprint can be published to end users through the Nutanix Marketplace, simplifying the complexity of provisioning.
As a result, it is most suited for teams already using Nutanix Marketplace. Some additional benefits include:
- Unified Management and governance across clouds, hypervisors, and application types
- Single Language for Application Modeling with flexibility to integrate with each team’s tool of choice
- Removes IT bottlenecks by turning specialized operations into push- button automation
- Orchestrate across VMs, containers, and cloud resources to build any application
14. Datadog
Datadog is one of the most popular monitoring and observability tools today, aggregating metrics and events across the full DevOps stack. While it’s not purely a cloud cost management tool, Datadog Cloud Cost Management can help you optimize your cloud spending by delivering the cost data engineers need and with resource-level context like CPU, memory, and requests. This data is easily scoped to their services and applications so that they can take action and spend effectively.
Datadog also helps you drill down into your AWS or Azure bill, helping you to allocate your cloud costs and make better cost decisions with confidence. Recently, Datadog and nOps have partnered together to make it even easier for engineers to take action on rightsizing recommendations.
15. Zesty
Zesty is an automated cloud cost optimization solution. It uses an AI model that has been trained using both actual and simulated cloud resource consumption data, in order to forecast the precise cloud resources required by an application in real-time, including aspects such as CPU cores and storage.
Zesty leverages these predictions to execute various automated actions, such as resizing, scaling up or down, modifying storage volumes, and procuring or offloading public cloud instances based on the insights provided by the model. So far, the tool only covers EC2 instances.
16. CloudZero
CloudZero as a cloud cost management software delves deep and breaks down expenditures so you can know where, when, and also how your cloud spends its money. With features such as automated tagging and Slack alerts, it helps you to track and attribute cloud costs to teams, customers, unit cost KPIs, and product features.
The platform enables you to obtain real-time cost monitoring for Kubernetes and Snowflake costs across public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud systems. And, it offers coaching support to help inform your cost optimization strategy.
17. Xosphere
Xosphere is a Spot instance orchestration platform that uses ML to learn your usage patterns and pick the most optimal AWS Spot instances for your workloads. It integrates natively with Amazon Auto Scaling Groups and monitors the instances within each group.
When Spot instance capacity is available at a favorable price, Instance Orchestrator will replace On-Demand instances with Spot instances. On the other hand, when Spot instance capacity is no longer available at a favorable price, it will switch back to On-Demand to ensure your application remains available. XOSphere helps you to switch between Spot and On-Demand to take advantage of Spot prices without a lot of manual effort.
18. ProsperOps
ProsperOps is an automated optimization service that manages purchase commitments on AWS and GCP. The service monitors usage of your resources and automatically adjusts discount instruments.
For example, it manages AWS Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments on your behalf, analyzing your usage to purchase and sell commitments as needed to maximize savings outcomes while preserving sufficient flexibility.
While ProsperOps does not manage your Spot instances (in contrast to tools such as Spot by NetApp or Xosphere), its algorithms are Spot-aware.
19. Kubecost
Kubecost (like Cast.ai) provides real-time cost monitoring and optimization for Kubernetes, offering insights into how resources are being utilized and where savings can be made.
It integrates directly into your Kubernetes environment in AWS, GCP, Azure or on-prem, delivering detailed reports on costs by namespace, deployment, or other common Kubernetes concepts, enabling teams to understand the financial impact of their Kubernetes workloads.
Kubecost also offers features such as cost allocation, spend efficiency, and budget alerts that help organizations to implement cost-saving measures.
20. CloudAdmin
21. Yotascale
Yotascale offers a cloud cost management solution specifically engineered for dynamic and complex multicloud environments. It provides granular insights into cloud spend, attributed down to the team, application, and resource levels.
Among other features, the platform’s key features include automated cost allocation, rightsizing recommendations, cost anomaly detection, as well as cloud budgeting reconciliation and forecasting. Recently, it announced Yota AI Assist, a Gen-AI assistant to help you more easily understand your cloud costs.
22. Ternary
Ternary is a FinOps-driven platform for organizations seeking to maximize the business value of their cloud investments. Ternary emphasizes FinOps principles such as collaboration across finance, engineering, and operations teams to build a proactive, cost-conscious culture. With roots in Google Cloud Platform, Ternary now supports all major cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Alibaba Cloud.
Its features include real-time budget tracking, anomaly detection, and granular cost allocation. Available as both SaaS and self-hosted solutions, Ternary offers flexibility for companies with varying compliance needs.
23. Vega Cloud
Similarly to Ternary, Vega Cloud is a platform designed on the principles of FinOps to help organizations align financial accountability with cloud operations across multi-cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Vega Cloud is based on the FinOps principles of “Inform, Optimize, Operate”. Vega Inform provides detailed cost visibility with reporting, budgeting, and forecasting tools. Vega Optimize builds on this by generating prioritized recommendations based on specific business objectives. Vega Operate automates corrective actions to implement these recommendations, reducing manual intervention. According to Vega Cloud, companies using the platform can save 22% on average.
24. Infracost
Infracost integrates FinOps principles directly into engineering workflows, helping teams “Shift FinOps Left” by addressing cloud costs and best practices before deployment. It provides detailed cost estimates for code changes during pull requests, enabling engineers to understand the financial impact of their decisions in real-time. Infracost also enforces tagging policies and checks code against best practices, such as migrating GP2 to GP3 volumes, during reviews.
The platform automates cost governance by comparing changes to budgets and initiating approval workflows if cost thresholds are exceeded. With support for enterprise pricing models and integrations with GitHub, GitLab, and Jira, Infracost simplifies the process of aligning engineering efforts with FinOps goals while maintaining a focus on proactive cost management.
25. Kion
Kion is a cloud governance platform (billed as “CloudOps”) designed to help organizations control cloud costs through effective budgeting and enforcement mechanisms. It allows teams to set and track budgets across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, with tools for cost allocation and budget management. .
It also includes standard features for rightsizing, eliminating idle resources, managing commitments, and other resource management strategies.
In addition, Kion supports the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS), an open-source standard designed to normalize cost and usage billing data across cloud providers. This enables aggregation of data across AWS, Azure, GCP and other cloud platforms.
Which of these cloud cost management tools is best for you?
At nOps, our mission is to make it easy for engineers to take action with dead simple integrations tailored to their preferred tools and services. nOps is helping teams save 50% or more on cloud spend.
nOps Compute Copilot automatically selects and schedules the optimal compute resource at the most cost-effective price in real-time. It offers a seamless one-click integration with cloud services, maximizing your savings with zero engineering effort.
We charge a fraction of the savings, and only make money if you save. That means nOps fits any team size, clientele base, and allocated budget.
Book a demo call to start saving more today!
FAQ
Cloud cost optimization is the process of reducing your cloud resource expenditure, without compromising performance and capacity requirements. Cloud cost control involves analyzing cloud usage patterns, identifying unnecessary expenses, and implementing cost-saving strategies to achieve maximum efficiency and value from cloud resources.
Some ways to optimize cloud costs include monitoring usage, identifying unutilized resources, rightsizing instances, and forecasting cloud usage with cloud cost optimization tools. Cloud cost management tools can help optimize cloud costs with significantly less manual effort on your part.
Cloud cost management or cloud spend management is the process of monitoring and managing your cloud resources to minimize expenses and maximize the value of your cloud resources. Cloud spend management involves tracking cloud resource usage, setting budgets, and taking practical engineering steps to implement cost-saving initiatives.
Some of the benefits of cloud cost management include an increase in cost savings, predictability, scalability, visibility and security. Cloud cost management can be accomplished through a cloud cost optimization service or tool.
Cloud cost management tools help organizations monitor, analyze, and optimize their cloud spending. They provide insights into cloud resource usage, allocate costs to specific teams or projects, generate recommendations, and help engineers act on these recommendations. Cloud cost optimization tools are more hands-on than a cloud cost optimization service, typically meaning that they are less expensive and offer you more control.
As cloud costs skyrocket and cloud infrastructure becomes more complex, any institution with a significant cloud presence needs cloud cost management software or a cloud cost optimization service to optimize their cloud resource usage. That includes startups, small- to medium-sized companies, and large enterprises.
Some typical features of cloud spend management software include tools for cloud cost visibility, cost allocation, budgeting and forecasting, reporting, resource tagging, showbacks and chargebacks, rightsizing, node management, and autoscaling.
