Optimizing cloud costs is a growing concern for businesses. The challenge here is that most teams don’t have the time or expertise necessary to support better cloud spending. As a result, 50% of companies list enabling automation and empowering engineers to take action as their highest priorities, according to the 2024 State of FinOps Report.
Many businesses are turning to FinOps tools to help them achieve both of these key priorities. Not only can these tools help them improve efficiency when managing cloud costs and provisioning resources, but they also limit the amount of manual intervention needed to take advantage of savings opportunities.
But with so many FinOps tools available today, how do you determine which ones will make a real impact on your business? Below, we’ll cover the eight best FinOps software currently on the market, along with their top features and use cases. Read on!
What Are FinOps Tools?
FinOps tools, or FinOps software, are solutions designed to help organizations manage and optimize their cloud costs by providing visibility, control, and automation. These tools empower cross-functional teams to track, allocate, and optimize cloud spending in real time, aligning financial accountability with cloud usage. By facilitating budgeting, forecasting, and continuous improvement, FinOps tools support businesses in maximizing the business value of their cloud investments while keeping costs under control.
Some of these tools are natively available for use through your cloud provider, while others are third-party offerings. Native FinOps tools are designed by cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to seamlessly work within their own cloud infrastructures. However, third-party tools often offer additional features or capabilities that increase the value of cloud optimization initiatives.
What Are the Benefits of Using FinOps Software?
Building an efficient operational framework in the cloud requires collaboration and accountability. Business teams need to be constantly aware of the impact their choices have on the speed, cost, and reliability of their cloud architecture.
FinOps software helps to facilitate these requirements while offering a variety of additional benefits businesses can take advantage of, including:
- Enhanced cost visibility: FinOps software makes it easier to identify critical cost drivers across your entire cloud ecosystem by categorizing your cloud spending and providing access to real-time usage trends. They help with the transparency and clarity with which an organization can view and track its cloud usage to identify the What, Why, Where, and By Whom.
- Improved resource optimization: FinOps tools take the guesswork out of resource optimization in the cloud. By monitoring usage patterns in real time, some types of these tools can automatically right-size instances, autoscaling or balancing loads as needed.
- Increased financial accountability: IT and engineering teams often have their own priorities when operating in the cloud. FinOps software helps keep everyone accountable for the decisions they make by increasing financial awareness and providing more budget ownership.
- Streamlined cloud governance: FinOps tools allow businesses to add automated mechanisms that support their cloud policy and governance needs. Using pre-established rules and associated triggers, FinOps tools can streamline variables like cloud spend and resource provisioning, while maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements.
- Facilitated cross-functional collaboration: FinOps tools give all employees more financial visibility and control when working on cloud projects. This allows for more collaboration when making important resource allocation trade-offs and more informed decisions on where and when new investments should be made.
Key Features Found in Different FinOps Tools
Though FinOps tools come in different shapes and sizes, the range of functionalities found across different FinOps tools include:
Cost monitoring and visibility
FinOps tools provide real-time insights into your company’s cloud spend across different services, projects, teams, and regions—and present all of this data via customizable reports and dashboards. FinOps tools make it easy for companies to track their expenditures, identify trends, and understand the distribution of costs. This transparency and cost visibility helps companies improve their decision-making and resource allocation, and discover new opportunities for cost optimization.
Optimization recommendations
By analyzing usage patterns, resource configurations, and historical data, FinOps tools can offer actionable suggestions for improving cost efficiency. From recommendations for right-sizing instances to recommendations for when to use Reserved Instances over On-Demand pricing models, FinOps tools provide helpful guidance on optimizing your cloud resources, configurations, and workloads for better business value.
Unit metrics
Unit metrics involve breaking down cloud costs into easy-to-understand KPIs, such as cost per user, cost per transaction, or cost per application. With the right FinOps software, you can define and monitor these unit metrics for a much more granular picture of your cloud spend.
Breaking cloud spend down into unit metrics also allows companies to align cloud spending with business goals. For example, a SaaS company might choose to analyze cost-per-user to assess its app’s cost-effectiveness and identify high-cost users.
Amortization tracking
Not all cloud investments have a clear value proposition. So it’s important to accurately track associated interest rates or residual value from assets like Reserved Instances or long-term contracts to make sure they’re providing adequate returns on investment.
FinOps software tracks the amortization of these expenses over time, allowing companies to monitor the consumption of prepaid resources and effectively allocate costs over their lifespan. This ensures companies can easily and accurately assess the financial impact of these upfront commitments.
Billing data from multiple cloud service providers
FinOps software can consolidate billing data from numerous cloud service providers into a single platform. This provides companies with a unified view of their cloud costs and simplifies cost management across different cloud platforms.
Anomaly detection
Many FinOps tools offer anomaly detection features to help safeguard against unexpected cost increases. These features allow you to set custom spending thresholds and send automated notifications to alert you anytime you approach your limits.
This allows companies to quickly identify unusual spending patterns so they can investigate the issue and resolve it before it significantly impacts their cloud budgeting.
Showback and chargeback
Cloud spending budgets are often spread across multiple departments and project types based on their consumption needs. However, tracking ownership when using multiple cloud providers and various accounts becomes more complex as a business scales its usage.
FinOps software offers showback and chargeback features, taking the hassle out of calculating proportional consumption and giving companies better control over where savings discounts are applied.
Autonomous rate optimization
Cost avoidance and rate optimization are two critical elements of a sustainable cloud architecture. Cloud computing costs can and should always adapt over time to take advantage of Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and resource-based committed use discounts.
While this is an important process, it’s also time-consuming for internal teams. But FinOps software does all of it autonomously. This ensures that, at any given time, your business is provisioning cloud instances and managing commitments in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible.
8 Best FinOps Tools and Software Solutions
With so many FinOps tools available today, we’ve taken the time to shortlist the eight best software options available to help you start maximizing your cost-saving initiatives as soon as possible:
1. ProsperOps
While many FinOps tools are designed to help provide more visibility into cloud usage or possible savings opportunities, they still require extensive manual intervention to manage. ProsperOps changes this narrative by delivering a completely automated cloud-savings-as-a-service solution.
ProsperOps leverages its autonomous discount management system to help businesses achieve at least a 45% Effective Savings Rate (the industry average is less than 20%). By removing the effort, latency, and risk associated with manually managing rigid, long-term discount instruments, ProsperOps simplifies cloud financial management.
It offers dynamic commitment management, which allows you to adjust your commitments based on actual usage, reducing the risk of overpaying or underutilizing resources. Being a multi-cloud platform, it supports all 3 major CSPs: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Key features
- Intuitive dashboard that provides essential FinOps insights
- Automated, 24/7 cost optimization
- Zero friction i.e., no trade-offs, distractions, or prioritization conflicts with your existing operations
- Multi-cloud support including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure
- Easy to implement and requires no changes to your infrastructure
2. CloudZero
CloudZero is a cloud cost intelligence platform that gives you a clear understanding of your cloud costs. It offers comprehensive, real-time visibility into your cloud costs, allowing for better cost allocation, showback, and an improved ability to discover cost-saving opportunities.
CloudZero helps your teams allocate costs accurately, delivers automated alerts for cost spikes, and offers insights to optimize resource usage. It is designed to put relevant, actionable data in front of engineers, exactly when they need it. This decentralizes cost accountability to the right individuals and helps to minimize overspending risks.
Key features
- Ranks cloud spending for easy navigation and investigation of usage spikes
- Provides detailed reports and customizable dashboards for visualizing and analyzing cost data
- Automates budget tracking and cost anomaly alerts
3. Centilytics
Centilytics provides numerous cloud management, cloud infrastructure, and cloud data solutions to enhance the performance, security, and cost-efficiency of cloud applications.
The platform excels in multi-cloud compatibility, customizable unit metrics, and detailed reporting. This allows for precise cost attribution and complete cloud cost transparency, in addition to helping you analyze and optimize the security and performance of your workloads.
Key features
- In-depth cost analysis, on-demand reports, and personalized alerts provide complete cost visibility
- Enables scheduling and automated backups to reduce manual effort.
- 24/7 performance monitoring
- Customized reports and policy enforcement for cloud governance
- Ensures best practices for security and performance optimization
4. AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is a native cloud service that offers an easy-to-use interface for understanding, visualizing, and managing your AWS costs. The platform provides numerous tools for filtering and grouping usage data to help you make smarter decisions regarding your resource allocation.
It provides interactive charts, customizable reports, and insights into cost and usage trends over time. Cost Explorer also supports budgeting, forecasting, and offers recommendations for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, helping users optimize costs based on historical data and usage patterns.
While AWS Cost Explorer is designed specifically for AWS customers, it doesn’t feature the same level of automation as other popular FinOps tools. Users can only access 12 months of history, which can be limiting if you want to generate more accurate long-term forecasts.
Key features
- Offers granular insights into AWS cost and usage trends
- Cost allocation tags for easy allocation and attribution of AWS costs
- Provides cost and usage forecasts based on historical data
- Suggests optimal discount plans like Reserved Instances and Savings Plans to save costs
- Enables users to create detailed, tailored cost reports which can be filtered across various data points
- Identifies unusual cost patterns for quick intervention
5. Densify
Densify is a cloud and container resource management platform that uses predictive analytics and machine learning to optimize your cloud infrastructure. The platform helps you automatically figure out the Kubernetes resources needed to lower your costs and maximize performance.
Densify uses AI-driven analytics to identify the right configuration, size, type, and family for your scale groups and public cloud instances. This is ideal for any business wanting to free up its teams from selecting appropriate resources manually and instead automatically align provisioning to meet application requirements.
Key features
- Provides analysis and IT cost optimization for container environments, including Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift
- Helps you quickly identify savings opportunities, OOM risks, and memory limit issues
- Lets you visualize CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk I/O utilization metrics for your commitment plans
- Simulated resource configurations for determining optimal scaling parameters
6. Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a native tool that gives users personalized recommendations based on their cloud configurations. This eliminates the guesswork when optimizing Azure deployments and helps to improve the availability, performance, and security of cloud resources.
The tool also creates a range of recommendations based on current consumption trends. It can suggest when to apply Azure Reservations and Savings Plans to accounts, where to remove idle resources, how to manage the deallocation of virtual machines (VMs), and more.
Users can access their suggestions using a personalized dashboard and receive step-by-step instructions to help them execute each recommendation.
Key features
- Offers tailored advice on improving cloud resource performance, availability, and security based on your Azure setup
- Provides actionable recommendations to improve system resilience and security posture
- Gives access to recommendations via a custom dashboard, complete with step-by-step instructions for easy implementation
7. Google Cloud Recommender
Google Cloud Recommender provides actionable insights to help users optimize their cloud resources and reduce costs. It analyzes cloud usage and suggests improvements, such as rightsizing VMs, reducing unused resources, and enhancing security configurations. Recommendations are tailored to align with best practices, helping users manage their cloud environment more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Key features
- Suggests adjustments to underutilized resources to save costs
- Provides advice for improving security configurations
- Recommends optimal resource sizes to prevent over-provisioning
- Allows users to filter recommendations based on specific needs
- Enables integration with other tools to apply recommendations programmatically
8. CloudHealth by VMware
CloudHealth is a financial optimization solution for cloud users designed to improve both resource and organization management. With a FinOps framework incorporated into its design, CloudHealth helps businesses implement a structured cloud strategy using core FinOps principles.
With CloudHealth, you can view and analyze your cloud environment to drive accountability for cost and usage. Whether you’re managing data centers or planning a migration to the public cloud, the platform empowers you to make sense of your cloud data with rich visibility and custom reporting for managing your multi-cloud environment. You can optimize and control your cloud spend with tailored recommendations, governance policies, and automated actions.
Key features
- AI-powered budget management and forecasting tools
- Architecture planning recommendations for businesses migrating to cloud environments
- Multi-cloud visibility and interactive dashboards to help take advantage of savings opportunities
Reduce Your Cloud Costs With ProsperOps Today
To manage your cloud spending effectively and streamline, you need the right level of visibility and automation. FinOps tools deliver on these requirements, helping you maximize your cost avoidance and rate optimization efforts — ensuring you’re never leaving money on the table.
ProsperOps enables hands-free cloud cost optimization that’s easy to implement and helps you achieve significant savings. With ProsperOps, you get completely automated cost optimization 24/7 — with zero technical trade-offs, friction across your cloud ecosystem, or ongoing effort for your FinOps teams.
See for yourself why ProsperOps is a leader in autonomous discount management in the cloud. Sign up for a free ProsperOps demo today!
