The global cloud industry to expand from $1,091.4 billion in 2024 to $1,256.8 billion by 2025. The greater magnitude of the market makes 60% of companies focus on cloud cost optimization in 2024. Although the growing demand highlights the significance of cloud cost management tools in companies’ daily operations, selecting the right tool that aligns with your business needs is not an easy task.
Explore top 15+ cloud cost management tools to optimize cloud cost of your company, as well as benefits and AI-based cloud cost optimization opportunities:
| Tools | Service Models | Deployment | Cloud Brands | Free Trial | Free Version |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch is a cloud monitoring service that provides comprehensive visibility into AWS resources and cloud service, enabling cost analysis and optimization. By analyzing cost data and tracking usage, it helps users identify cost-saving opportunities, automate cost allocation, and control cloud spend. With features like machine learning-driven insights, CloudWatch supports cloud management and enables engineering teams to allocate costs effectively while optimizing resource usage.
- Distinct feature: Machine learning-driven insights for cost analysis and optimization, particularly in AWS environments.
- Why important: Helps automatically detect cost anomalies, optimizing cloud resource usage without requiring manual intervention.
IBM Cloudability
Source: IBM
IBM Cloudability, powered by Apptio, offers a cloud cost management solution designed to optimize IT investments and improve alignment with business priorities. Automating cost allocation and providing cost visibility across cloud environments helps organizations analyze cost data, reduce cloud spend, and identify cost-saving opportunities. With integrated tools for budgeting, forecasting, and billing, Cloudability empowers teams to manage cloud costs and allocate resources strategically.
- Distinct Feature: Integrated tools for budgeting, forecasting, and billing management.
- Why Important: Provides a full lifecycle of cloud cost management, including budget management and advanced forecasting, aligned with business priorities.
Azure Cost Management + Billing
Source: Microsoft
Azure Cost Management + Billing provides a set of tools to analyze, monitor, and optimize your cloud costs while simplifying billing account and subscription management. With features like cost analysis, budgeting, and anomaly detection, it helps organizations to improve financial oversight and resource allocation. Users can also organize subscriptions, configure payments, and access detailed invoices, ensuring transparency and control over cloud expenditures.
- Distinct Feature: Integrated cost analysis, budgeting, and anomaly detection for Azure resources.
- Why Important: Simplifies cost management for Azure environments with built-in billing tools and detailed insights for cost optimization.
CAST AI
Source: CAST AI
CAST AI automates cloud cost optimization by using processes like autoscaling, instance selection, and bin packing to align resources with workload needs. It analyzes Kubernetes clusters and provides actionable insights for reducing costs while maintaining performance. Features like real-time resource adjustments and container live migration support efficient and secure operations.
- Distinct Feature: Cloud cost optimization through autoscaling, instance selection, and bin packing for Kubernetes clusters.
- Why Important: Helps reduce costs by optimizing containerized workloads, offering real-time resource adjustments and live migration.
CloudBolt
CloudBolt’s Augmented FinOps introduces AI-driven insights, full lifecycle automation, and unified cloud management to address the challenges of traditional financial operations in the cloud. Integrating cost observability, proactive anomaly detection, and seamless orchestration across public and private clouds helps organizations reduce inefficiencies and improve financial decision-making.
CloudCheckr
CloudCheckr, part of Spot by NetApp, is a cloud management platform tailored for enterprises and managed service providers to enhance cost efficiency, resource utilization, and governance. It offers detailed visibility into cloud spend, actionable insights for cost optimization, and tools for tracking resource efficiency while improving security and compliance. By unifying these capabilities, CloudCheckr supports informed decision-making and effective management of cloud environments.
- Distinct Feature: Enhanced cost visibility and compliance reporting.
- Why Important: Helps enterprises and managed service providers enhance governance while providing detailed cloud spend analytics and security features.
CloudHealth by VMware
CloudHealth by VMware helps organizations manage and optimize their multi-cloud operations. The platform offers visibility into cloud spending, enabling teams to make informed decisions and proactively manage costs. It also supports the optimization of cloud resources and simplifies the complexity of multi-cloud environments, helping organizations improve efficiency and gain better control over their cloud usage.
CloudZero
CloudZero provides visibility into cloud spend by helping organizations allocate and optimize costs across various dimensions, from Kubernetes usage to shared costs. It uses data normalization and AI-driven anomaly detection to highlight potential savings opportunities, enabling more informed decision-making for cost-conscious engineering. The platform’s budgeting and analytics features support sustainable scaling by offering detailed insights into cloud usage at any level.
Datadog Cloud Cost Management
Datadog Cloud Cost Management, one of the cloud cost management tools, integrates cloud cost and performance data, allowing teams to efficiently manage their cloud expenses. By automatically providing resource optimization recommendations and cost allocation across services and teams, it helps organizations identify savings opportunities and reduce waste. This unified approach enables both engineers and FinOps teams to make informed decisions, optimize resources, and track cost changes in real-time.
- Distinct Feature: Integrates cloud cost data with performance metrics for real-time optimization.
- Why Important: Allows teams to correlate cost and performance data, offering actionable insights for both resource optimization and cost reduction.
Densify
Densify provides detailed insights into container health and node performance, helping teams identify risks, waste, and optimization opportunities. By offering AI-driven recommendations, it helps platform owners improve resource utilization and prevent costly mistakes. Its integration with cloud billing data enables cost transparency, while automation tools streamline performance optimization and risk mitigation.
- Distinct Feature: AI-driven container health and node performance insights.
- Why Important: Enables organizations to identify performance risks and waste by providing detailed, AI-powered recommendations to optimize resource utilization.
Finout
Finout provides a structured approach to cloud cost management by consolidating data from various cloud services, offering deep insights into resource-level spending. It uses tools like Virtual Tagging to allocate costs accurately to teams or projects, making cost attribution clear and manageable.
- Distinct Feature: Virtual Tagging for precise allocation of costs to teams or projects.
- Why Important: Facilitates accurate cost attribution across teams or projects, offering deeper insights into resource spending, essential for team-specific budget management.
Flexera One
Flexera One is a cloud-based solution that integrates IT Asset Management (ITAM) and FinOps processes, offering visibility across hardware, software, SaaS, and cloud environments. It helps organizations optimize costs, ensure compliance, and improve security while delivering insights into usage and spending to support vendor negotiations. By bridging traditional ITAM and FinOps silos, Flexera One enables better decision-making and cost optimization across hybrid IT estates, aligning technology investments with business value.
- Distinct Feature: Integration of IT Asset Management (ITAM) with cloud cost management.
- Why Important: Bridges traditional IT asset management with cloud cost management, ensuring organizations can optimize their technology investments across both hardware and cloud resources.
Harness Cost Management
Harness Cost Management offers a robust solution for managing cloud costs across multi-cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes. It focuses on automating cost optimization and governance, using AI to detect idle resources and prevent unexpected cost spikes. The platform enables precise cost attribution, simplifying chargeback and showback, while offering intelligent recommendations for optimizing resource usage and ensuring compliance.
IBM Turbonomic
IBM Turbonomic uses AI-powered automation to optimize cloud costs while focusing application performance across various environments, including public, private, and hybrid clouds. The platform continuously assesses and adjusts compute, storage, and database configurations, enabling smarter decisions for cost management. By automatically optimizing resources, including reserved instances and Kubernetes workloads, it helps maintain performance without overspending.
Infracost
Infracost integrates directly into your development workflow, providing quick cloud cost estimates as you write infrastructure code. It allows teams to review cost impacts alongside code quality and security, ensuring that engineers catch costly mistakes early. With proactive cost policies and integration into CI/CD systems, Infracost helps maintain budget control while enforcing best practices and tagging standards.
PUMP
Pump leverages group buying and AI to help startups access cloud savings previously reserved for large companies. By joining a collective, businesses can benefit from bulk discounts and automated AWS savings, with AI working to optimize costs. The platform offers a seamless experience with minimal permissions, ensuring security while maximizing cost efficiency.
Cloud cost management tools, also known as cloud financial management (CFM) solutions, help collect, organize, and analyze cloud cost data from various providers, such as AWS, Google Cloud, and others. These tools use algorithms, machine learning, and statistical models to provide actionable cost insights through dashboards and reports. They enable businesses to monitor cloud resource usage, identify cost anomalies, and implement strategies for optimizing cloud spend across multi-cloud environments.
Source: Cloud Cost Governance
The Visibility, Insights, and Actions (VIA) framework is a structured approach to assess cloud cost management tools and align them with organizational needs.
Visibility
Effective CCM starts with comprehensive visibility into the cloud environment. This includes:
- Viewing costs at service, tag, and hierarchical levels.
- Analyzing trends to predict spending.
- Monitoring costs by accounts, regions, projects, and resources.
- Providing unified visibility for multi-cloud environments and specific insights into container/microservice usage.
Insights
Insights drive optimization and cost control through:
- Unit economics and resource utilization analysis.
- Budgeting, forecasting, and real-time alerts for cost anomalies.
- Identifying waste, such as idle resources, and receiving actionable recommendations for optimization.
- Customizable dashboards and anomaly detection for targeted cost management.
Actions
Informed actions help streamline cost management and maximize efficiency by:
- Automating tasks like stopping idle resources, scaling usage, and tagging for cost attribution.
- Integrating with tools like Jira, ServiceNow, Slack, and Teams for collaboration and accountability.
- Utilizing advanced features like Kubernetes bin packing and spot instance management for further optimization.
- Leveraging training and support resources to enhance usability and adoption.
By using the VIA framework, organizations can effectively manage cloud costs, maximize return on investment, and ensure cost efficiency throughout their cloud lifecycle.
1. Cost savings through optimization
By identifying idle resources, underutilized services, and opportunities like reserved instances or savings plans, these tools help optimize cloud costs, ensuring efficient use of cloud investments.
2. Improved visibility and allocation
Cloud cost management solutions enhance cost transparency by offering detailed breakdowns of expenditures across departments, projects, and teams. This empowers engineering teams to understand and control their cloud budget effectively.
3. Enhanced planning and forecasting
With historical data analysis and real-time monitoring, organizations can accurately predict future cloud costs and allocate resources strategically, aligning with business objectives.
4. Scalability and efficiency
Cost management tools streamline cloud infrastructure to support future growth, enabling organizations to scale efficiently in response to evolving needs.
Key features of cloud cost management tools
Cost breakdown
Granular visibility into cloud costs by categorizing expenses by resource, project, or department helps identify high-spending areas and optimize resource use.
Cost anomaly detection
AI-driven tools monitor usage patterns to detect and alert on irregular spending, such as unexpected spikes, enabling quick corrective action and reducing waste.
Cost estimation and forecasting
Predictive analytics project future costs based on historical data, aiding in budgeting for reserved instances, savings plans, and scaling needs.
Cloud Deployment Models
Cloud services are delivered through three main deployment models, each offering unique benefits:
- Public Cloud: Provided by third-party vendors, public clouds offer cost-effectiveness, scalability, and high reliability, accessible to the general public or industry groups.
- Private Cloud: Dedicated to a single organization, private clouds provide enhanced security, customization, and performance through exclusive resources.
- Hybrid Cloud: Combining public and private infrastructures, hybrid clouds offer flexibility, enabling organizations to balance sensitive data storage with scalable public cloud resources and support legacy systems.
Key components of cloud computing
Cloud computing is based on three primary service models, each catering to different needs:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Offers virtualized computing resources, such as virtual machines and storage, giving users full control over operating systems and applications without needing physical hardware.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): Provides a platform for application development and management, including tools for testing and scaling, simplifying the development process by handling infrastructure complexities.
- Software as a Service (SaaS): Delivers software applications online, enabling access from multiple devices without requiring installation or maintenance, enhancing convenience and reducing operational overhead.
AI-based cloud cost management: revolutionizing cost control
AI cloud cost management tools utilize advanced capabilities like predictive analysis, anomaly detection, and automation to optimize cloud costs and maximize savings. Unlike traditional methods relying heavily on human input and static policies, AI operates on real-time data to dynamically manage cloud infrastructure, enabling cost savings and enhanced cloud cost optimization.
Key capabilities of AI in cloud cost management
- Predictive analysis for cost optimization AI leverages historical data to forecast future resource needs, enabling organizations to plan their cloud infrastructure accordingly. For example, an e-commerce SME can analyze patterns to anticipate high traffic during a sales promotion. AI ensures optimal resource allocation during such peaks, minimizing costs while maintaining performance. This approach reduces cloud spend and prevents disruptions in cloud computing services.
- Cost anomaly detection AI continuously monitors usage patterns and cost data to detect anomalies like unexpected surges in storage costs caused by misconfigurations. By addressing such issues early, AI minimizes waste and prevents overspending, reinforcing effective cloud cost management strategies.
- Automation for resource management Traditional resource scaling relied on fixed schedules, often leading to inefficiencies. AI dynamically adjusts resources, such as scaling down during low-traffic periods or powering off idle cloud infrastructure, ensuring cost optimization without compromising performance. For multi-cloud cost management, this automation is critical in reducing associated costs across diverse platforms.
- Detailed cost allocation and transparency AI-based tools improve cost allocation by categorizing expenses across projects, teams, or departments, making inefficiencies visible. For example, an organization can identify excessive resource use in one department and take corrective action. Enhanced transparency supports better cost management and waste reduction efforts.
- Actionable recommendations and policy enforcement AI systems provide cost optimization recommendations and enforce predefined policies, such as shutting down unnecessary environments during non-peak hours. These automated systems ensure adherence to budget constraints and enhance cloud management tasks.
Challenges addressed by AI in cloud cost management
- Resource overheads AI identifies inactive or underutilized resources, reallocating or deactivating them as needed to minimize costs. For example, reserved instances and savings plans are optimized based on usage patterns.
- Fluctuating costs Predictive analysis allows organizations to anticipate cost variations, such as a spike in storage due to a misconfiguration, and resolve them proactively.
- Multi-cloud complexity Managing resources across multiple cloud providers is simplified by AI’s ability to integrate platforms, offering a unified view of costs and optimizing resource allocation.
