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Understanding your cloud costs has become increasingly complex, particularly within high-growth, cloud-native containerized environments. And finding the right cost optimization platform can be challenging, because each solution has a different set of features, advantages and suitable use cases.
CloudZero has emerged as a powerful solution for getting detailed visibility and insights into your cloud costs – in this article, we’ll deconstruct all of the industry-leading cost management currently available on the market, so you can evaluate the tool that might be right for your organization’s requirements.
What Is CloudZero?
CloudZero is a cloud cost management platform that provides organizations with comprehensive visibility into their cloud spending. By ingesting data from AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, and SaaS services like Snowflake, it allows businesses to organize and analyze cloud costs across all the services they consume. Additionally, it offers detailed allocation of Kubernetes costs at an hourly granularity, integrating with overall cloud spend analysis.
CloudZero enables expense allocation even with messy or imperfect tags, allowing you to get visibility and control more quickly. Companies can categorize spending by relevant dimensions such as cost per customer or product, turning billing data into actionable business insights.
With AI-powered anomaly detection, CloudZero automatically alerts teams to unusual spending patterns. Supported by designated FinOps Account Managers, CloudZero helps organizations manage costs, drive business insights, and foster a culture of cost-aware engineering.
Is CloudZero right for your team?
According to the FinOps Foundation, there are three steps to achieving cloud cost optimization.
- Inform: The first step in the FinOps journey is to achieve full visibility into cloud spending, ensuring that all stakeholders have access to detailed and accurate cost data.
- Optimize: With clear information in hand, organizations can identify inefficiencies and implement cost-saving measures to optimize their cloud usage and expenditures.
- Operate: Finally, they establish processes and controls to continuously manage and govern cloud costs, aligning ongoing operations with business objectives and budgets.
CloudZero is a solid tool for getting visibility into your cloud spend. However, it’s primarily focused on step one: inform. For steps two and three, other tools are needed.
Top CloudZero Alternatives
Let’s discuss all the current market-leading alternatives to CloudZero and explain the pros and cons of each tool — what they can help with, and what they can’t.
#1. nOps
nOps is a fully automated platform that monitors and optimizes your Kubernetes and AWS costs. It offers an all-in-one set of solutions, including cost visibility, showbacks, instance selection, autoscaling, commitment management, Spot instance use, rightsizing, resource scheduling, and elimination of idle cloud resources.
In addition to the visibility features offered by CloudZero (cost allocation, Kubernetes visibility down to the container level, insights into waste and hidden fees, reports, budgeting, etc.), nOps helps with:
Automation of Time-Consuming Cost Optimization Tasks
Because your cloud usage is dynamic, continual optimization is key to saving. nOps one-click automates all the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that burn hours of engineering time – from scheduling resources to eliminating idle EC2 to optimizing storage.
Cost-Optimized Provisioning
In 2024, there’s no reason for engineers to still manually choose instance types. nOps automatically manages your workloads from instance selection to autoscaling, integrating with your ASGs, EKS (Cluster Autoscaler or Karpenter), ECS, and Batch. As your workload scales, the nOps engine ensures you’re always on the right amount of the best-performing instances at the lowest cost.
It’s very complex to choose pricing plans and implement Spot instances manually; for AI, it’s a breeze. nOps monitors your dynamic environment in real time to ensure you’re always on the optimal blend of Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot for reliability and savings.
Risk-Free Commitment Management
Maximize your commitment utilization and minimize your risk. nOps guarantees 100% utilization of commitments or we will credit you for unused commitments in a month.
To find out more about using nOps to understand your cloud spend and get better performance at lower costs, you can book a demo.
#2: CloudHealth
CloudHealth is a multi-cloud management platform tailored for enterprises seeking to optimize and govern complex cloud environments. By aggregating data from cloud providers and on-premises infrastructures, it provides businesses with a unified view of their cloud costs, usage, and performance across all services they consume. The platform offers robust resource and organization management features, along with customizable reporting and dashboards that deliver actionable insights into spending patterns and resource utilization.
CloudHealth has a strong emphasis on cloud governance and automation, making it particularly suited for larger organizations with intricate cloud setups. It enables enterprises to implement policies for cost allocation and chargeback, ensuring accountability across different departments and teams. It also offers others features such as anomaly detection, commitment recommendation tools, migration planning, and GreenOps initiatives for sustainability that many enterprise customers can benefit from.
#3. Datadog Cloud Cost Management
Datadog Cloud Cost Management offers a comprehensive approach to monitoring your cloud environments. Designed to integrate with its existing suite of observability tools, Datadog cost management provides a unified platform for both performance metrics and cost analysis.
One of the key features of Datadog Cloud Cost Management is its ability to provide detailed insights into resource allocation and utilization. It does this by correlating cost data with operational metrics, such as CPU and memory usage, helping teams identify inefficiencies and optimize spending. For example, Datadog can highlight underutilized cloud resources that could be downscaled to save costs or pinpoint areas where performance improvements could lead to cost reductions.
One consideration is that Datadog is commonly considered to be potentially expensive. The pricing model, which is based on per-host and per-service metrics, can quickly scale up as an organization’s infrastructure grows. And, like many of the visibility tools on this list, it does not include automated cost optimization tools for realizing cost savings.
#4. AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is Amazon’s native cost management tool designed specifically for monitoring and analyzing AWS expenditures. It provides a user-friendly interface that allows you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. With pre-configured views and customizable reports, Cost Explorer helps you identify AWS spending trends, detect anomalies, and forecast future costs based on historical data.
One of the key strengths of AWS Cost Explorer is its deep integration with other AWS services. It offers detailed insights into your AWS resource utilization, enabling you to drill down into specific services, accounts, tags, and usage types. You can filter costs by various dimensions such as service, region, or linked account, and group them by tags to allocate expenses accurately. This granular level of detail is particularly useful for teams that are heavily invested in the AWS ecosystem and want to leverage built-in tools for cost management without additional installations or integrations.
However, while AWS Cost Explorer is effective for AWS-specific cost analysis, it has limitations when it comes to multi-cloud environments or integrating costs from third-party services. Unlike third-party cost management platforms that aggregate data from multiple cloud providers and SaaS services, Cost Explorer focuses solely on AWS resources. Additionally, advanced features like automated cost optimization, rightsizing recommendations for non-AWS resources, and detailed Kubernetes cost allocation might require supplementary tools or services. Its tagging-based cost allocation system means that organizations need to maintain consistent and comprehensive tagging strategies to get the most accurate insights.
#5. Flexera
Flexera is a comprehensive cloud management platform designed to help enterprises optimize costs, manage resources, and ensure governance across multi-cloud environments. By integrating data from major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as on-premises infrastructures, Flexera offers a unified view of an organization’s entire IT ecosystem. The platform provides detailed insights into cloud usage, expenditure, and performance, enabling businesses to make informed decisions about resource allocation and cost optimization.
One of Flexera’s distinguishing features is its robust license management and compliance capabilities. It helps organizations track software licenses across cloud and on-premises environments, ensuring that they remain compliant while avoiding unnecessary licensing costs. Additionally, Flexera offers advanced governance tools that allow enterprises to set policies for resource usage, cloud security, and compliance, which are particularly beneficial for organizations operating in highly regulated industries.
#6. Apptio Cloudability
Apptio Cloudability is primarily tailored for Finance and FinOps teams, offering robust tools for cost monitoring, allocating, and evaluating public cloud expenditures. The platform is adept at helping teams control cloud spending through budgeting and forecasting features. Users can set budgets for specific contexts and receive alerts if spending approaches or exceeds these thresholds.
Cloudability also offers anomaly detection capabilities, which notify users of cost spikes based on predefined thresholds, and for its ability to generate rightsizing recommendations based on the last 10 to 30 days of data usage. These features assist in creating consistent budgets and baselines for future forecasting.
In terms of automation, Cloudability offers some functionalities like scheduling daily cleanups of disconnected EBS volumes and automating the scaling of Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) or the management of EC2 and RDS instances during low utilization periods.
However, these features are somewhat limited compared to other platforms, potentially restricting its effectiveness in automated optimization scenarios. And, the platform is often considered to be potentially expensive, with fees increasing quickly as usage scales.
#7. Finout
Finout is a cloud management platform that positions itself as the “Swiss Army Knife” of cloud observability tools, emphasizing its versatility and comprehensive coverage across multiple cloud platforms. You can use it to manage and allocate across multiple cloud providers in one unified platform.
One key benefit of the tool is visibility into your Kubernetes clusters. It integrates with your Prometheus DB using its open-source cronjob or with your Datadog account API to provide access to your Kubernetes cluster metrics. Finout offers Kubernetes insights like cost per pod, deployment, namespace, cron job, StatefulSet, and cluster, with dashboards and reporting tools.
Finout also offers an anomaly detection system, which actively monitors spending patterns and immediately alerts teams to unusual activity.
Finding The Right CloudZero Alternative For Cloud Cost Optimization
While CloudZero provides robust tools for cost visibility and analysis within complex cloud environments, its also has limitations.
Cloud visibility is absolutely key, but it’s just the first step in your cloud optimization journey. You’ll need another tool to help automate manual and time-consuming cost optimization efforts, such as workload management, commitment management, cleaning up idle resources, rightsizing, scheduling, etc.
While various CloudZero alternatives cover some of these functions, a comprehensive cloud optimization platform like nOps covers them all.
The all-in-one nOps suite of cloud cost optimization feature set includes:
- Cost allocation: Allocate 100% of your AWS bill down to the container level with automated tagging, showbacks, chargebacks
- Compute Copilot: intelligent workload provisioner that continuously manages, scales, and optimizes your AWS compute for the lowest cost and most stability
- Commitment management: automatic life-cycle management of your EC2/RDS/EKS commitments with risk-free guarantee
- Storage migration: One-Click EBS volume migration
- Rightsizing: rightsize EC2 instances and Auto Scaling Groups
- Resource scheduling: automatically schedule and pause idle resources
- Well Architected Review: automate and streamline your AWS Well-Architected Review, FTR, SOC2, HIPAA or CIS audit
nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $1.5 billion in cloud spend for our customers.
At nOps, we make it easy for engineers to optimize, so they can focus on building and innovating. Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!
