9 Best Cloud Cost Optimization Tools

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With cloud adoption growing rapidly, organizations are struggling to optimize their cloud spend. Suboptimal usage of cloud resources often leads to bloated bills and unused expenditures. Third-party cloud cost management tools fill this gap.

Equipped with advanced analytics, automation, and real-time insights, these tools improve visibility, reduce costs and waste, and optimize cloud efficiency.

This article discusses the 9 top cloud cost optimization platforms to help you optimize your cloud expenses.

From providing visibility to rightsizing licenses and governance, find out how these tools drive the economical usage of the cloud.

Let us start by understanding the need for cloud cost optimization tools.
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The Need for Cloud Cost Optimization Tools

Managing cloud costs manually is incredibly challenging due to the complexity of cloud billing, frequent changes in resource usage, and the scale of cloud environments.

Without an automated cloud cost optimization tool, gaining full visibility into your cloud spending and identifying optimization opportunities is almost impossible.

These cloud cost intelligence tools are essential for several reasons.

First, they process vast amounts of granular cloud usage and billing data to surface actionable insights into expenditure and waste—a near-impossible task to handle manually.

Second, their sophisticated analytics engines can quickly spot resource waste. You can effortlessly identify idle resources, overprovisioning, and billing anomalies that lead to unnecessary expenses.

Third, cloud cost optimization tools provide specific, data-driven recommendations on optimizing your cloud spend through right-sizing workloads, purchasing reserved instances, eliminating unused resources, and more. They can also forecast your future cloud budgets more accurately using predictive modeling.

Finally, the most advanced tools can even automate the implementation of cost optimization tactics and best practices by enforcing policies and changes. The dynamic nature of the cloud necessitates having an intelligent and automated platform to manage costs effectively.

There are many factors affecting SaaS cost optimization that you can read about here.

Now, let us learn about some of the best cloud cost optimization tools.
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Best Cloud Cost Optimization Tools

1. CloudEagle

CloudEagle is a powerful cloud cost optimization solution that simplifies SaaS procurement, management, and cost optimization processes.

This tool has been designed to help IT, procurement, and finance teams streamline the SaaS buying & renewal process. It also helps team members save significant software spend efficiently.

Medium and large-sized organizations often have multiple apps subscribed to that no longer have usage in the organization. The company often forgets to unsubscribe from such apps and keeps paying subscription costs for the same, leading to higher software spend.

CloudEagle helps identify such apps and optimizes them.

Organizations with multiple teams usually subscribe to more than one app that offers the same features. Often, the software you are paying for separately is available as a feature within an organization's suite of solutions already paid for.
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CloudEagle helps you spot such applications across teams and departments and consolidate user licenses. This way, you can get better pricing from vendors and control costs by standardizing your SaaS app portfolio.

Accurately detect and unsubscribe to duplicate apps, which helps you save a large portion of your SaaS budget.
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CloudEagle is a one-stop solution for all your multi-cloud environments, and SaaS management needs, making it one of the best cloud cost optimization tools. You can also plan your cloud budget effectively using our platform and ensure it aligns with your goals.

With this solution, you can see where exactly your company is overspending within 30 minutes. You start saving money from Day 1, meaning you don’t have to wait for renewal periods.

Here’s how our customer Lob started saving from Day 1. Check out this interesting customer success story.

Key Features:

Cloud cost optimization: You’ll get complete visibility into your cloud apps, including their usage, spend, and vendor data. You can analyze instances of under-utilization, over-utilization, duplications, etc, from a single dashboard and optimize them to save on your cloud costs.

This feature has enabled various companies to save significantly. WeFunder used CloudEagle to cut their SaaS spend by 50%, aiming to reduce costs due to high compliance management tool costs. Despite negotiation challenges, CloudEagle proved transformative, providing a practical solution amid economic uncertainties.

Read the inspiring success story here.

Complete license management: CloudEagle helps in end-to-end license management. Prevent avoidable cloud spend due to unused licenses. The cloud spend optimization solution can automatically deprovision users from licenses for low usage and harvest the licenses for the next user to enhance ROI.

Here’s how you can save on Salesforce licenses →
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Seamless application delivery: This feature is designed to spot unused, underused, and unauthorized SaaS apps. Identifying these apps is necessary as they contribute to increased SaaS spend. CloudEagle’s 300+ integrations enable the app to provide complete visibility.

Vendor recommendation engine: CloudEagle has an AI-powered recommendation engine that provides in-depth vendor research and insights. You can use this to compare features, reviews, and costs among SaaS solutions and make the right purchase decisions.

Contract renewals: Always be prepared in advance for contract renewals. CloudEagle's renewal workflow alerts you 90 days before a vendor contract is supposed to get auto-renewed. This gives you ample time to decide whether to continue using the tool, discontinue, or renegotiate terms.
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Expert vendor negotiation: Our team has well-experienced negotiators who continuously monitor market trends and inform you about pricing benchmarks. You can either take charge of the negotiation based on our advice or allow us to negotiate on your behalf. Outsource procurement to us, save time for your team, and enhance their productivity.

No-code procurement workflows: CloudEagle's no-code procurement workflows help enterprises reduce bottlenecks and enable transparency. These workflows also help you save time by streamlining the procurement process.

Automated workflows, customizable intake forms, etc are some of the reasons why procurement teams are choosing CloudEagle for streamlined SaaS buying.

Integration with Slack: Slackbot for procurement enables your users to raise purchase or renewal requests from Slack directly. Stakeholders will be notified, and they can deny or approve the request from Slack. You can also create a private Slack channel for each workflow to collaborate and make the right decisions.
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Shadow IT alerts: You can configure alerts, and they’ll automatically notify you when a new sanctioned application is detected in your system. Prevent shadow IT in its early stages, save on spend, and ensure compliance with the latest regulations.

To discover the benefits CloudEagle can offer your organization, check out this testimonial from Sophie Wang at Wefunder. She explains how CloudEagle helped her team save on SaaS spend through effective negotiations. Sophie highlights their need for detailed SaaS usage data and app tracking, which CloudEagle’s intuitive dashboard and integration capabilities fulfilled. 

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Pricing

CloudEagle has three pricing tiers and a 15-day free trial:

1. Starter - $2000/month

2. Growth - $3000/month

3. Enterprise - $4000/month

Rating: G2: 4.7/5

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2. Densify
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Densify is another cloud cost optimization tool that facilitates teams monitoring and streamlining their cloud resources across many solutions, like Microsoft Aure, AWS, and GCP.

Powered by machine learning, Densify strategically analyzes workload patterns, which helps you realize resource requirements in different areas.

Teams can foresee and prevent poor resource allocation while saving on the SaaS cloud budget.

This cost optimization tool is powered by API-driven workload routing that leverages in-depth capacity analysis, cost ranking, and fit-for-purpose analysis. These detailed analyses help your teams make placement decisions.

The solution also uses patented reservation technology. This technology locks resources in predictive models, preventing other provisioning activities from using them.

Densify notifies and alerts your team if they over-allocate resources to instances. It also alerts when found using an inefficient family of instances in the first place.

Pricing: You can request a demo from their website.

Rating: G2: 4.6/5

3. Lucidity
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Lucidity is a powerful cost optimization tool that has developed a robust feature called 'Live Block Storage Auto-Scaler'. This feature addresses the usually ignored side of cloud expenses - cloud storage costs.

The founders of Lucidity have designed this tool to uncomplicate storage scaling without having an impact on application performance. Lucidity's innovation facilitates seamless autonomous storage adjustment of resources based on your company's or team’s evolving needs.

Ultimately, this leads to substantial cost savings on storage and overall cloud expenses. The groundbreaking tool can also optimize Azure Managed Disk or AWS EBS.

Lucidity offers hassle-free storage scaling and continuous availability. The tool automatically adjusts storage capacity up or down as needed, requiring no manual intervention.

This autonomous provisioning ensures storage demands are met within minutes while avoiding the downtime, performance lags, or disruption that manual adjustments might otherwise cause

Lucidity enables storage capacity to scale without disruptions, meaning zero downtime. This seamless adjustment process preserves business continuity. There is no downtime, lag time, or performance degradation, while Lucidity flexes storage needs up or down.

Pricing: You can learn about their pricing by getting a demo from them.

Rating: G2: 4.4/5

4. Sastrify
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Sastrify is one of the best cloud cost optimization tools for optimizing your spend. This top SaaS spend management solution uses the power of pricing benchmarks to highlight the areas in which you could save money on SaaS.

It is an affordable SaaS spend management and procurement solution that helps you negotiate better costs with a cloud provider.

Sastrify helps you keep track of software invoices and licenses. Moreover, the solution enables your team to locate, oversee, and negotiate as per market prices to get you the best deal.

Companies like Mollie and Pitch already rely on Sastrify for their cost optimization needs.

With Sastrify, you get one single reliable source of truth or your entire SaaS stack to help you spot and leverage cost-saving opportunities.

This solution helps you standardize SaaS purchasing processes with automated intuitive workflows.

The solution gives you a microscopic view of your SaaS usage and spend. This data helps you eliminate what you don't use and pay for the tools that are actually being utilized.

Pricing: The plans start at $2,990 per month and $35,880 per year. You can read a detailed guide on Sastrify pricing here.

Rating: G2: 4.5/5

5. Spot by Netapp
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Formerly known as Spot.io, Spot by NetApp is a cloud optimization tool built to assist your IT team in securely managing tasks in your SaaS apps. The tasks can be related to cloud computing, like deploying and operating apps in the cloud.

The tool helps you unlock the complete potential of your cloud investment by enabling complete visibility and reliable insights. This tool also provides automation features to optimize your cloud infrastructure seamlessly.

Reduce costs and maximize efficiency with Spot. However, Spot lacks real-time pricing details and resource scheduling guidelines.

Their cost reporting tool helps you consolidate and communicate your cloud expenses with various stakeholders, ranging from finance and FinOps to the DevOps team.

Cloud Billing Engine helps create invoices using policy-based rules, incorporating chargeback and showback to allocate costs to specific cost centers, providing insights into the allocation of your cloud budget.

Pricing: You can request a demo on their website.

Rating: G2: 4.8/5

6. Apptio Cloudability
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Apptio's Cloudability is a comprehensive financial and cloud management platform that enables the monitoring, reporting, and analysis of cloud costs. It encompasses budgeting, forecasting, and rightsizing features.

Additionally, this tool allows users to strategize reserved instances, oversee container costs, identify anomalies, set alerts, and identify potential cost-saving opportunities.

Furthermore, Cloudability seamlessly integrates with and retrieves data from cloud monitoring tools such as PageDuty and DataDog, enhancing its ability to deliver detailed insights into cloud expenditures.

Apptio Cloudability’s spend optimization solution plays a proactive role in SaaS cost optimization by automatically sending right-sizing recommendations for VMs, databases, and volumes directly to engineers.

Moreover, it provides FinOps experts with valuable insights into commitment coverage and opportunities for additional purchases.

Leveraging robust right-sizing capabilities across major cloud services, Apptio Cloudability effectively trims operational expenses. This frees up resources for future investments and fosters innovation.

Pricing: Before subscribing, you can also get a free trial. Book a demo on their website.

Rating: G2: 4.2/5

7. Kubecost
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Kubecost is a revolutionary Kubernetes cost-monitoring platform. The solution also manages costs and provides you with real-time visibility into K8s cluster cost data.

Kubecost can also combine K8 costs with infrastructure and external cloud service cost data. Adding to its capabilities, it breaks down costs based on key Kubernetes concepts such as namespace, service, and deployment, providing a detailed breakdown of your bill.

Additionally, it extends its functionality to encompass multiple clusters, delivering customized cost optimization recommendations that you can selectively apply.

Teams can customize how they see costs. This means that the cloud cost management tool gives a breakdown of costs by different parts of the setup, like departments, applications, or teams.

Real-time, actionable recommendations on cloud spend reduction without having to settle for mediocre performance.

Expense analyses are also available by breaking down costs as per elements, such as deployment, namespace, and service. This enables you to understand your spending patterns.

Pricing: Kubecost is free for individuals and small teams. You need to contact their sales team to get pricing for bigger enterprises.

Rating: G2: 4.8/5

8. AWS CloudWatch
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Powered by AWS, CloudWatch is one of the best cloud cost optimization tools that provide monitoring and observability services. Amazon Web Services is a popular cloud service provider, offering over 70 AWS services.

CloudWatch allows you to collect custom metrics for AWS applications, set budgets and cost anomaly detection, and ultimately automate actions on EKS, ECS, and Kubernetes clusters.

However, this tool comes with its limitations in certain cases. Setting up and configuring AWS CloudWatch can be complex and challenging. Also, though it can be leveraged to monitor other cloud services and on-premise infrastructure, it is mainly focused on monitoring AWS.

Get detailed monitoring and observability insights for AWS resources and applications. You get data on performance, operational health, and resource utilization.

Some other key features include:

• Customized dashboards
• Automated resource scaling
• Alarms and notifications
• Debugging
• Troubleshooting

To get better results and insights, Amazon CloudWatch can be paired with other native services by Amazon, like AWS Cost and Usage Report, AWS Cloud Explorer, and AWS Budgets.

Pricing: Contact sales for pricing

Rating: G2: 4.3/5

9. Microsoft Azure Cost Management + Billing
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Microsoft Azure Cost Management + Billing is a range of tools that facilitate enterprises allocating, monitoring, and optimizing the costs of their workloads on Microsoft Cloud.

The tool can be used to analyze cloud cost reports, create cost savings plans, and proactively monitor cloud budgets, scheduled alerts, and anomalies.

IT and procurement teams can securely monitor cloud resource usage and control software costs across cloud platforms from a single view.

Get access to in-depth financial and operational data related to your SaaS applications. Make informed decisions on cost management and resource utilization with Microsoft Azure Cost Management + Billing.

Pricing: The suite of tools can be used for free on Azure. However, Microsoft Cost Management charges 1% of total AWS-managed spend on general availability.

Rating: G2: 3.2/5
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Conclusion

Through this blog, we have briefly discussed the best cloud optimization tools on the market. However, at the end of the day, the choice depends on the unique requirements of your business.

Before deciding on the one for your business, you need to meticulously evaluate factors like features, scalability, cost allocation, automation abilities, reporting tools, and integration capabilities of all the cloud optimization tools.

CloudEagle stands out because it offers a plethora of features, like cloud cost management, cloud migration, SaaS management, procurement, vendor management, and even SaaS buying services.

CloudEagle's team comprises seasoned SaaS procurement specialists well-versed in the intricacies of negotiations to help you secure the best deals.

Leverage their industry expertise for benefits such as substantial savings and enhanced performance. Schedule a call with us today to explore how we can assist you.

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