Many companies are switching to the cloud due to the numerous benefits cloud infrastructure offers, such as increased agility, flexibility, scalability, and efficient management of customer’s expectations. While it has revolutionized how organizations operate, it brings challenges, specifically with the growing cloud cost.

Failing to optimize various facets impacting cloud costs, like compute resources and storage, can lead to unnecessary payments for underutilized resources and other financial repercussions. This is when cloud cost management tools can come to your rescue. These tools pinpoint areas of excessive spending, curtail unnecessary expenses, and ensure prudent management of cloud costs.

In this post, we have listed 24 cloud cost management tools that help in different aspects of cloud cost management.

Introduction to Cloud Cost Management

Cloud cost management, or cloud cost optimization, involves maximizing an organization's cloud investments while ensuring cost-effectiveness. This is achieved through monitoring, analyzing, and controlling cloud-related expenses, enhancing overall financial efficiency via different cloud cost management strategies. This helps businesses make informed resource allocation and scaling decisions by optimizing their cloud investments and preventing budgetary surprises.

To minimize their cloud cost, most organizations prioritize efficiently allocating and optimizing compute resources like virtual machines, servers, and containers. But what they often overlook is the cost associated with storage. 

It should be noted that most cloud providers charge for the storage provisioned, which means you might end up paying for storage you are not using. A study by Virtana reported that 94% of the respondents said their storage cost is increasing, and 54% confirmed their storage spend is growing faster than overall cloud costs.

The reason behind the growing storage cost is overprovisioning, which organizations opt for when they choose resources larger than what they need to run the workloads. 

There are two reasons for companies going the overprovisioning route:

• Capacity management and right-sizing cloud storage is a resource-intensive and complicated process. This can lead to a significant downtime in the operation, impacting the financial standing and also causing reputational damage. 
• Furthermore, monitoring and managing storage usage requires a profound understanding of the technologies unavailable with the cloud service providers. For instance, you might need a system that can enable expansion and shrinkage of the disk without any downtime regardless of the number of times you want it. This leaves the organization with the safest and most feasible choice of overprovisioning the resources.

While many cloud cost management tools are available in the market, they primarily focus on the compute resources. To ensure you are getting the most out of your cloud service, you need tools to optimize compute resources as well as storage because:

• Focusing on compute resources will allow you to identify and work on a significant portion of cloud spending. This way, you can optimize resource usage and reduce costs.
• Focusing on cloud storage will ensure that you avoid unnecessary costs associated with uncontrolled growth in data volume.

Moreover, to keep the cloud cost in check, it is essential to have complete visibility over the resource allocation and storage usage. Hence, you need cloud cost management tools that offer comprehensive visibility into the cloud infrastructure.

Understanding this, we bring a comprehensive blog on the challenges businesses face when managing their cloud cost and the key features you should look for in cloud cost management tools. 

We have also listed 24 best cloud cost management software for the same, consisting of tools that will help enhance visibility into your cloud cost infrastructure and assist in optimizing storage and compute resources.

Key Features of Cloud Cost Management Tools

As known, different categories of cloud cost management tools for varying business needs are available in the market. For instance, small-sized businesses use native cloud cost optimization tools that provide them with a superficial overview and don’t dive much into other details. But, as businesses scale and their dependency on the cloud increases, they need third-party cloud cost management tools that provide granular-level data of compute resources and storage.

For holistic cloud cost optimization, you need to have the following three tools:

• FinOps tools for visibility and reporting purposes over your cloud costs 
• A tool to optimize the cost of compute resources 
• A tool to optimize your cloud storage

Keeping this in mind, we have discussed the below features that you must take into consideration while choosing a cloud cost management tool.

Compute Resources

Focusing on compute resource management is essential as it contributes significantly to the cloud cost. Through effective resource management of computational units, you ensure lower costs alongside superior performance in accordance with your allocated cloud budget.

• Resource tagging: Resource tagging and labeling support organizations to tag and label cloud resources for cost allocation, and chargeback management.
• Cost optimization: Recommends cost optimizations based on cloud usage patterns, including rightsizing resources, reserving instances, or using spot instances.
• Resource lifecycle management: End-to-end lifecycle management of all resources. Manage every aspect from provisioning to scale-out/in, ensuring resources are utilized optimally throughout their lifecycle. It's not just about setting up; it's about sustaining efficiency.
• Alerts and notifications: Sends customizable alerts & notifications on any relevant cost event, e.g., exceeding the budget or experiencing an unexpected cost surge.
• Integration and API support: Integrates with cloud provider API and other tools, enabling smooth data exchange and automating the process for cost optimization.

Storage

Concentrating on cloud storage is crucial to reduce overall cloud expense and to ensure that as your data and workload enhances, the storage is able to handle the increased demand without any significant impact to the performance. By implementing effective storage management practices, you can significantly reduce costs, bolster the reliability of your cloud-based applications/services, and streamline operational efficiency.

• Storage optimization recommendations: Embrace automation to optimize resources in block storage, like AWS's EBS, Azure Disks and GCP Persistent Volumes. Focus on tasks such as resizing volumes and eliminating redundant or obsolete snapshots.
• Rightsizing recommendations: Rightsize storage volume based on actual usage patterns. This ensures you're not overpaying for storage space you don't need. It should expand and shrink volume as per requirements without causing any downtime.
• Scalability: Adapt to your storage needs, no matter how small or large your infrastructure becomes. Scalability ensures your storage resources grow in tandem with your requirements.
• User access control: Implement role-based access control so only authorized users can view or edit storage cost-related data or settings.
• Security and compliance: You can utilize the features to monitor and manage cloud resource usage to ensure compliance with security policy and norms, cutting down on security expenses.

Visibility & Reporting

For proactive and efficient cloud cost management, it is essential to have clear visibility of the cloud infrastructure. This ensures proper planning and management of cloud expenditures so that these resources can be utilized efficiently.

• Multi-cloud support: Enables cross-cloud charge management to aid multi-cloud or hybrid sites control spending.
• Budget management: Enables organizations to plan and track cloud expenses with budget notifications & triggers alarms when the expense reaches close or surpasses budget thresholds.
• Cost allocation: Helps allocate cloud costs to specific departments/teams/projects for accurate attribution.
• Cost analysis by service: Provides spend analysis per individual cloud service and resources. This granular breakdown empowers organizations to prioritize areas within their spending, driving strategic optimization efforts.
• Cost tracking: Tracks cost to the most granular level, permitting companies to track and analyze spending trends over time.
• Resource Allocation: Assign expenses specifically per departments, teams, projects, or cost center for effective tracking of spending as well as support charge-back or showback requests.
• Showback and Charge Back: Display costs to stakeholders, the internal billing team, and the departments.
• Customizable Dashboards: Build a custom dashboard to conveniently view your cloud finances' relevant cost and usage metrics.
• Historical Data Analysis: Historical cost and usage data to track trends and pattern changes over a period for optimized cost management in the long term.
• Anomaly detection: Utilize advanced anomaly detection methods to detect abnormal or surprising cost jumps for timely follow-up and action.

Top Cloud Cost Management Tools

Now that you know the challenges of cloud management, you must understand the significance of cloud cost management and why it is essential to have a cloud cost management software in place. This is why we suggest investing in cloud cost management tools, which will help bring down a lot of costs and ensure that you're utilizing cloud resources efficiently.

But before we dive head first into cloud cost management solutions, it is essential to understand that different aspects of cloud demands a different cloud cost management tool. What might work well for compute resources might not help with storage optimization. Keeping this in mind, we bring our top 24 cloud cost management tools, offering solutions covering various aspects like storage, reserved instances, visibility, and reporting.

Vertical Players- For Storage

Storage optimization is vital in organizations looking forward to controlling costs, minimizing wastage, and ensuring maximum use of their storage resources. Organizations can leverage these tools to make informed financial data-driven decisions toward achieving their cloud management objectives.

1. Lucidity

Optimizing compute resources is common now. However, the one big mistake DevOps teams make is overlooking storage costs, thinking it contributes relatively less to billing than compute resources. 

Companies don't optimize storage costs because, more often than not, they have limited visibility into the storage cost due to a lack of monitoring or cost management tools. This lack of real-time monitoring and automated scaling mechanism required for dynamically adjusting resources as and when needed can result in overprovisioning of the resources. Overlooking storage costs could be a massive problem in the long run when your data volume grows, and you're not optimizing the storage. 

Moreover, as mentioned above, implementing a third-party tool would mean significant time, cost, and effort investment, especially from the DevOps team. Additionally, utilizing tools provided by the cloud service providers demands manual intervention and is resource-intensive. Due to this, organizations find it easy to overprovision the resources to ensure uptime. 

Enter Lucidity: a solution that stands apart. Unlike other cloud cost optimization tools, Lucidity doesn't need time investment from your end. While most cloud cost management tools focus on compute resource management, we at Lucidity are dedicated to identifying the root cause and resolving storage usage and management issues.

Lucidity offers the industry’s first Managed Disk Auto-Scaler, resulting in a cost-effective and prompt storage solution that fulfills all your cost optimization and management needs. It is used by multiple Decacorns and Fortune 500 companies.

Central to Lucidity's offering is an innovative NoOps cloud storage solution - a meticulously developed software layer that aims to help organizations resolve the pertinent issue of cloud storage management accompanied by downtime or performance issues. 

But, with Lucidity bringing in automation with a Managed Disk Auto-Scaler, you can dramatically bring down your storage cost by a whopping 70% without having to worry about any performance drop or downtime.

Our study shows approximately 80% of organizations transition from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud using the conventional 'lift and shift' strategy. This creates a considerable amount of unused, underused, or overused storage. Moreover, there are budgetary concerns often leading to overruns and inefficient provisioning. 

​​Traditional methods to scale storage resources always result in either wastage of valuable resources or under-supply, leading to stagnation of systems. However, using our Block Storage Auto-Scaler, you can say goodbye to such problems and get a dynamic, adaptable, and intelligent system for your block storage.

As mentioned before, the cloud storage factor is often overlooked despite contributing to 20-30% of the cloud cost. But considering how ignoring cloud storage can quickly accumulate into unnecessary expenditure, it’s high time we focus on cloud storage management. 

Going the traditional way means tirelessly working towards balancing underprovisioning and overprovisioning, which leads to performance issues and massive downtime. 

With Block Storage Auto-Scaler, Lucidity aims to solve this issue of cloud storage management for enterprises. The smart Auto-Scaler adjusts your live block storage automatically, depending on the workload. Moreover, it can be deployed quickly with just 3 clicks and will reduce the storage cost by upto 70%, leaving no room for any downtime or performance issues.

Further, our Managed Disk Auto-Scaler is easy to implement, and it automates the expansion and shrinkage of the disk within a minute to ensure you never run out of space. With Lucidity, you can tackle these three challenges organizations face when managing storage in an IaaS environment. 

1. Effective capacity management: It ensures that you won't be paying for massive amounts of unutilized disk space by automatically shrinking and expanding it per your requirements. It will help you reduce the amount of provision that is needed, thereby saving 70% on storage costs without downtime or performance issues.
2. Skill set requirements: Thanks to our automated disk optimization, your DevOps team's valuable time is saved. There's no need for manual intervention when expanding or shrinking storage; our system handles it all seamlessly.
3. Minimizing downtime: Shrink and expansion happen seamlessly without causing downtime. Within spike in traffic/workload, Lucidity begins disk expansion to accommodate the workload. Moreover, both the process, shrinkage and expansion take place seamlessly without causing any performance drop.

Why is Lucidity an ideal choice for block storage optimization?

• Focus on storage cost: As mentioned above, unlike other cloud cost management tools available in the market, which focus on compute resources, we at Lucidity focus on effectively managing and optimizing storage costs. 
  Our Lucidity Storage Audit and Managed Disk Auto-Scaler automates the disk expansion and shrinkage process, ensuring you always have enough space to effectively manage the resources and scale with the increase/decrease in demand. We have been able to successfully reduce the cost of the managed disk by 70%. With us, you only pay for what you use.

• Pioneer in Auto-Scaling: Our Managed Disk Auto-Scaler is the first of its kind in the industry - a pioneer. It lets businesses optimize their cloud resources' performance and cost control, eliminating the complexities of resource management. 
  With Lucidity, you can rest assured that your disk will automatically shrink and expand without any buffer or downtime in just 1 minute. 
  Moreover, we guarantee that there will be no impact on the application’s performance during expansion. At Lucidity, we provision as your company scales, and with automation, we ensure you never run out of disk space. 
  Our “Create Policy” feature will allow you to create and manage a policy where you can set desired disk utilization, maximum disk, and the buffer size needed for effective storage management alongside making sure you comply with the organization’s policies.

• Reduced cost: The cloud-first block storage solution from Lucidity changes the way businesses manage their cloud storage costs. It lets businesses see return on investment (ROI) with as little as 50GB of storage.
  With Lucidity, you can be assured that there will be a 70% savings in block storage costs due to Auto-Scaler, intelligent auto-tiering, deduplication, and compression.
  You can check how much you can save with our free ROI Calculator, which will help you understand how much you can save using Lucidity.

• Click on the cloud vendor you are working with- Azure/AWS.

• Add your monthly/yearly spending, disk utilization, growth rate, and voila! We will provide you with what your infrastructure will look like post-lucidity installation.

• Automation on the go: We automate capacity planning for comprehensive multi-cloud storage management which means you don’t have to worry about running out of space when there is a spike in storage demand.
  Conducting capacity planning traditionally would mean relying on 4 manual touch points, which would involve 3 external tools and the efforts of the DevOps team in managing storage disk. Moreover, shrinking a 1TB disk would require a minimum of 4 hours of downtime. This is not the case with Lucidity. 
  Our Managed Disk Auto-Scaler automates the expansion and eliminates the possibility of any downtime or latency within 1 minute of the spike in traffic/workload.

• Ease of implementation: Our Managed Disk-Auto-Scaler is designed for the DevOps team to ensure no hitch in the onboarding process.  Moreover, onboarding Lucidity is just a three-click process, after which you can leave the worry of block storage management to us.

In case of any issue, you can access Lucidity's support system 24/7 via email and chat, providing flexibility and convenience.

How Does Lucidity Work?

We begin with hosting the agent, which can be done in three ways:

• Lucidity-hosted: The agent is installed within your environment, and the Auto-Scaler engine resides with Lucidity’s servers. The agent reads and collects the storage metrics and sends them to the Auto-Scaler engine, which, depending upon the algorithm, sends a command of expansion or shrinkage to the agent.
• Self-hosted: We can deploy the entire Auto-Scaler engine and the agent on your server.
• Private Link: Azure and AWS have this feature where they provide a private link for the resource allocation data to travel to the servers. This is solely dedicated to you.

Audit

We begin the process by conducting a comprehensive storage audit, which we offer as a free service.  Consider the case of Royal Sundaram, a general insurance company, that struggled with highly inflated storage costs. They were looking for a way to track the storage metrics while keeping DevOps efforts to a minimum and without investing in any third-party monitoring tool. This is where we came to their rescue. 

Our Lucidity Storage Audit will provide a detailed report about the current storage inefficiency, highlighting the areas where you can save money, identify where the waste is coming from, and the risky zones. We provide you with a  comprehensive audit report in just 1 week, giving you visibility into:

• Overall disk spend: Know how much your present disk spend is, what areas you can optimize cost, and how you can reduce your overall cost by 70%.
• Disk wastage: Find out what leads to idle resources and over-provisioning and how to eliminate them.
• Disk downtime risk: Avoid the possibility of risk of financial or reputation damage by identifying the downtime before it happens.

Our audit for Royal Sundaram found out that they were overspending on Azure for as much as 71% due to underutilized or over-provisioned resources, and their disk utilization was a mere 12%. 

We also found that 7% of their resources were idle or unused because some were either not attached to a VM or some were attached to a paused VM.

How have we helped SpartanNash minimize spending and boost disk utilization?

SpartanNash, a food distributor and grocery store retailer, found themselves spending excessively, unable to find the root cause of their financial drain. Their soaring storage costs were a consequence of overprovisioned resources, yet the root cause remained elusive. Seeking a remedy, they turned to us.

With our one-click audit, discovered that: their overprovisioning had inflated storage costs by a staggering 77%, and their disk utilization languished at a mere 17%. Furthermore, critical alert systems, vital for preventing significant downtime, had been overlooked.

Our one-click and in-depth audit and analysis helped SpartanNash avoid downtime and maximize its disk utilization to 75-80% simultaneously.

If you are looking for an efficient way to optimize your cloud storage cost, Lucidity is your one-stop solution. We offer a seamless solution to streamline your cloud storage costs. Our fully automated, one-click approach requires zero effort on your part.

2. MinIO

MinIO is a cutting-edge cloud storage solution built specifically for Kubernetes, enabling organizations to manage and store data across various environments effectively. It offers an S3-compatible infrastructure that can be utilized in public clouds, private clouds, on-premises settings, and edge computing locations. 

It handles diverse workloads like ML/AI, analytics, backup, and archival operations from one unified platform. With MinIO, organizations can reduce their expenditures on data storage because it is deployed on commodity hardware and manages large datasets efficiently.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.8/5

3. Granica

Granica is an AI intelligence platform with a tool called Chronicle, which provides complete visibility and analytics into how data is accessed. With a focus on access, Chronicle offers deep data visibility to Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage customers. It aims to reduce the money spent on storing and accessing data while ensuring privacy is not compromised.

Horizontal Players- For Visibility and Reporting

By providing visibility and reporting, a cloud cost management tool allows companies to effectively manage cloud costs and improve resource usage, leading to better decision-making on facts. The function supports cost control, budget management, allocations, and improvements toward an organization's financial wellness in the cloud setup.

4. Anodot

Anodot is a cloud cost management solution for companies looking to excel in accurately tracking and optimizing cloud costs. This cloud cost management tool lets users visualize, monitor, and optimize cloud usage and costs. With its capacity to efficiently track expenditures across various clouds, a sophisticated dashboard featuring infographics, and intricate workload cost analysis, Anodot is a tool for effectively managing cloud spending. It offers usage and cost-related data on a single screen for various providers-  AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. 

By uncovering costly workloads and enabling strategic adjustments, Anodot allows organizations to make informed decisions based on data that improve cost-effectiveness while upholding optimal performance levels.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.5/5

5. Harness

Harness is a software delivery platform that offers a cloud cost management software for its optimized cost and process capability. he tool provides actionable insights into Kubernetes costs, such as workload, utilized clusters, and idle and unallocated resources. This hybrid clouds tool provides cost visibility for AWS, Azure, and GCP in a single dashboard. It lets you track usage data- be it utilized, idle, or unallocated resources, by the hour. 

The tool further implements cloud autostopping, which uses AI and ML to manage the idle time of the cloud resources so that cloud spending decreases substantially. It also offers ML-based forecasting to help determine whether or not the current spending habits align with the business’s budget. It eliminates manual tagging by offering a cost-effective app, service, and infrastructure transparency. Harness also performs root cause analysis and combines it with anomaly detection to find what is causing the unexpected cloud spending. 

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.5/5

6. nOps

nOps, an entirely automated AWS cloud management tool, claims to reduce Amazon Web Services cost by a staggering 50%. It aims at managing and running a cost-optimized AWS environment. Besides, it also offers enhanced visibility into pricing and automation to strengthen the engineer’s ability to track, analyze, and optimize complex AWS infrastructure. It has an advanced mechanism for finding and shutting idle resources to save on cloud bills. It even adapts to changes in infrastructure by automatically buying and selling RIs (Reserved Instances).

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.8/5

7. Cloudability by Apptio

Cloudability is the cloud cost management software for companies seeking financial insight and control over their cloud spend. It lets them view live cloud spend in multiple public clouds. (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP).

It offers user-specific performance and resource utilization recommendations and can map spending across the department's cloud without manual help. It even gives users a fair idea about the project spending based on the contract, usage trend, and predicted growth.

Furthermore, Cloudability can deliver prescriptive advice and long-range forecasts to show them how to prepare for expansion and resource necessities ahead of time.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.0/5

8. CloudHealth

CloudHealth is focused on finance teams and offers a wide range of specialized features, complete functionalities, and governance capabilities explicitly designed for CFOs to empower them in their role. It also provides accessible custom reporting features for deep cost analysis, usage, and asset data. It gives tailored actionable recommendations to improve cloud resource utilization and gain cost savings. Besides, it also offers a commitment-based discount management to reduce operational costs. 

By delivering insight into spend, controlling costs, governing policy, and ensuring compliance, CloudHealth places finance functions in a position of power, giving them direct control over their cloud budgets — securing budget and financial stability while allowing the organization a quick adoption of cloud technology. Moreover, it follows a few governance policies to reduce spending, remediate risks, and simplify configuration. It also offers anomaly cost detection to view suspicious changes in spending by region, account, and service.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.1/5

9. Cast AI

Cast AI stands out as an innovative Kubernetes management and cost optimization approach for reducing cloud bill. By leveraging AI-driven insights, real-time configurative changes, and multi-cloud compatibility, Cast AI enables companies to deploy Kubernetes more easily without complexities around cost considerations that come along the way. Cast AI uses artificial intelligence to monitor Kubernetes clusters in real time. It allows tracking and controlling spending habits across multiple cloud service providers. It also recommends resource and performance optimization based on specific usage.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.8/5

10. CloudZero

This cloud cost optimization tool stands out for its in-depth knowledge of cloud spending. It provides insights on cloud resources cost breakdown & practical tips for reducing expenditures in cloud billing. While traditional approaches generate raw row-and-column data, CloudZero drills below the surface to deliver companies an aggregate view of their cloud expenditures. 

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.5/5

11. Datadog

Being an advanced cloud monitoring tool, Datadog is the tool that moves over & above the core monitoring functionality to offer rich & featureful cloud cost control and optimization capabilities. It offers to track the spending on the cloud, forecasting price trends, flagging cost discrepancies, and providing insights about reducing costs through workload downsizing or resizing for companies aiming at optimum cost efficiency. It even helps get clarity on cloud bills across AWS & Azure. 

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.3/5

12. Kubecost

Designed explicitly for teams using Kubernetes for container orchestration, Kubecost emerges as a powerful solution. As Kubernetes dynamically adapts to handle workloads, this versatile tool tracks costs across major and minor clouds and on-premises environments. Its flexible and customizable cost breakdown feature provides deep insights into cost allocation and monitoring.

Customer Rating

• G2: 5/5

Cloud Native Tools

Cloud-native cost optimization and management tools refer to software aiming to manage and optimize cloud costs while conforming to the ideals of cloud-native computing. These include specialized solutions that suit the challenges and opportunities associated with cloud-native architects. These cloud management tools provides high level information that works when you have low cloud usage. But, as you scale, you need third party-tools for granular level information associated with your cloud resources.

13. AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is an inbuilt, cost-effective cloud cost management platform that facilitates cost visualization and analysis management within the AWS eco-system. It is helpful for users who want to know about their AWS consumption and its charges. It also creates data segments based on AWS services, regions, member accounts, etc. It allows users to analyze their data at varying levels (for example, total costs and usage across all accounts) or to dig deeper into their cost and usage data to identify trends, point out cost drivers, and detect anomalies. 

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.4/5

14. Microsoft Cost Management For Azure

It is a free Azure cost management tool that is available via the Azure portal. Aside from helping with the total cost of the Azure service that is being used, and the charges of the Azure marketplace products, Microsoft Cost Management also helps generate cost data analysis and reports for the Azure cloud at no additional cost. 

It continuously monitors the resources and generates the reports. And, also helps in analyzing previous cloud usage patterns, recognizing expenses trajectory, and foretelling the cost of use in the future. It also shows costs on a daily, monthly, and annual basis, revealing trend lines, abnormalities, and areas for improvement.

Customer Rating

• PeerSpot- 4/5

15. Amazon CloudWatch

A native tool of AWS, Amazon CloudWatch is known for extracting data from more than 70 applications, services, and resources in real-time. It offers in-depth cost reporting and displays all the data for computation in a single dashboard. It can track costs for AWS applications and can also build custom metrics, set budgets, and set cost anomaly alarms. Additionally, it can automate actions for ECS, EKS, and Kubernetes clusters when there are adjustments in costs. It can be seamlessly combined with other AWS cost management tools like AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost and Usage Reports.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.3/5

Vertical Players- For Compute

Cloud cost management tool, which focuses on reserved instances and savings management, is significant in optimizing cloud expenses. This makes it possible for organizations to realize the economic benefits that RIs provide, manage available resources appropriately, and maintain budget and finance objectives in relation to cloud consumption. With an advanced approach to allocating and utilizing reserved instances, companies can minimize their IT expenses greatly without sacrificing output.

16. Spot by NetApp

Spot by NetApp is a NetApp product that allows enterprises to buy and manage cheap, unused computing resources called ‘Spot Instances’ from leading clouds like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The tool uses analytics and machine learning to predict cloud computing resource availability and performance. This platform achieves precision in cost reduction when automatically procuring spot capacity for workloads on behalf of the organization. 

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.4/5

17. Virtana

Virtana allows organizations to right-size their cloud resources, preventing instances from being overprovisioned or underpowered. It provides complete visibility into cloud costs across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It also provides financial operations dashboards and reports on multi-cloud costs. Their dashboard focuses on cost versus. usage reports, allowing enterprises to gather information on how effectively they use their cloud assets. 

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.5/5

18. Nutanix

Nutanix goes beyond cloud cost governance and applies it to private cloud setups. It provides customized cost estimates for private installations, considering factors like heating and cooling expenses, hardware costs, and data center rent. By doing so, Nutanix ensures exact cost projections. This customization allows organizations to effortlessly compare deployment options and make well-informed decisions based on accurate cost analysis. 

The tool uses machine learning algorithms to identify any anomaly in the spending pattern and take prompt cost control action. It even allows the creation of reserved instances acquisitions depending on the consumption history.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.3/5

19. CloudAdmin

Using CloudAdmin, organizations can make informed decisions about their cloud resources by tracking cloud usage, suggesting right-sizing servers, or converting them into reserved instances. It provides automated recommendations with easy-to-understand, actionable insights. It also helps set customizable alerts that will be triggered automatically. Additionally, it facilitates budget allocation and cost tracking, ensuring that spending stays within defined limits and alerts personnel when attention is needed.

20. Turbonomic

By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, Turbonomic ensures resources are allocated precisely to meet application demand while minimizing costs. It offers micro-optimization for maximum savings.

With the integration of Grafana-based reporting and persistent data warehousing, organizations can gain deeper insights into their environments and improve performance and efficiency using data-driven decision-making. Cloud application workloads are automatically selected for the right VM instance type based on vCPU, vMem, network, storage, and pricing factors.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.5/5

21. ServiceNow

Managing extensive collections of microservices with ServiceNow is helpful for teams to manage and optimize costs. As a result of its wide range of customer-facing solutions, backend IT operations tools, and integration with AI Ops, it works as a platform for improving operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness. It provides a personalized service catalog to let users submit requests and check their status.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.4/5

22. Flexera One

Flexera One provides comprehensive cost management and optimization tools for organizations operating in multi-cloud environments. It assesses a wide range of parameters like cloud provider, account, region, and more to analyze, forecast, and budget on cloud infrastructure. With its multi-cloud accounting, reporting, optimization suggestions, and automation features, cloud cost management is simplified. It identifies and provides tools to leverage cost-saving opportunities. Besides, its anomaly detection feature helps prevent surprise cost spending.

Customer Rating

• G2: 3.7/5

23. CloudCheckr

NetApp's CloudCheckr is a cloud management tool vital in the Spot constellation. Its cost management and optimization capabilities, along with innovative features like reselling and white-label options, make it a valuable asset for organizations looking to maximize the value of their cloud investments. It provides cost data visualizations to help you understand AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud performance and trends.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.1/5

24. Granulate 

Granulate is an autonomous workload and cost optimization tool suitable for use across various environments, be it cloud-native, multi-cloud, Kubernetes, or AI-powered infrastructure. Granulate optimizes the kernel and runtime resources by understanding the data flow, usage pattern, and processes. It also lets users optimize cost per microservice/container for AKS, ACS, SpotFleet, Amazon ECS, and Amazon EKS.

Customer Rating

• G2: 5/5

Ensure You're Optimizing Cloud Storage 

With so many choices in the market, it is only natural to get overwhelmed. This is why it is essential to be judicious in your search for cloud cost management tools. A robust cloud cost management tool can empower your organization to control costs, optimize cloud spending, and ensure adequate resource allocation, compliance, and security. 

In your search for the right cloud cost management tool, make sure to understand your cloud requirements and accordingly evaluate the category of tool you need. For instance, go for native tools if you’re a small-scale business. While, look for other third-party tools, if you want to optimize your compute resources and storage or need more holistic cloud cost optimization. 

Cloud cost management has revolutionized how businesses manage their spending. The tool mentioned above will reduce your cloud spending and ensure that resources are used efficiently, adherence to budgets, and every cost-saving opportunity can be leveraged to its full potential. Cloud cost control and optimization is the future, and with the tools mentioned above at your disposal, you can rest assured that you will make every cloud penny count. 

So don’t let cloud costs hold your business back anymore!