Top 10 Finops Tools
FinOps tools enable organizations to automate the management of all financial aspects of their cloud infrastructure. Discover more with Control Plane.
The benefits of cloud computing come with a price – the costs of “renting” computing and storage resources from cloud service providers (CSPs). The infrastructure expenses of a cloud-native business migrating to the cloud can spiral out of control, especially considering how easy it is to create virtual machines and spin up servers with a single line of code.
With cloud user spending estimated to reach almost $600 billion by the end of 2023, how will businesses break the cycle of rising costs while scaling their applications freely? By leveraging FinOps – a new framework and category of cloud management tools specifically designed to monitor and analyze cloud spending.
This article takes you through the features of FinOps, and the top 10 FinOps tools you can integrate into your cloud system to see significant cost savings.
What is a FinOps tool?
FinOps, short for Financial Operations, is a set of practices and processes that address cloud cost management. In a FinOps culture, DevOps, IT, Finance, and business teams come together and share the responsibility of managing cloud spending across the entire company. Teams are also aligned on all cloud cost decisions, and each plays a role in driving costs down and forecasting expenditures adequately.
FinOps tools enable organizations to automate the management of all financial aspects of their cloud infrastructure. The ultimate goal of FinOps tools is to help businesses get positive returns on their investments in the cloud, and they do so by making it easier to monitor, analyze, and optimize cloud expenses across divisions and departments. Whether you are still planning your cloud migration strategy or fully immersed in the cloud infrastructure world – FinOps tools are crucial to give you the complete picture of your spending and ensure no hidden costs.
Key features to look for in FinOps tools
Cost tracking, reporting, and analytics
First and foremost, you want to know how much you’re spending. To do so, you need tools that give you easy access to data and insights that help you reduce and justify cloud costs.
Multi-cloud support
Unless your infrastructure relies on a single CSP, you will likely need a multi-cloud solution for cost and performance optimization as you scale. Control Plane enables you to manage and optimize your cloud expenses across AWS, Azure, and GCP without compromising performance.
Automation
Since FinOps is the financial aspect of DevOps, it relies heavily on automation throughout the SSDLC to deliver value. This means automated scaling up and down (if possibly to zero) and balancing performance and costs efficiently.
Cost allocation, budgeting, and forecasting
The ultimate goal of FinOps tools is to help stakeholders make the most of their cloud budgets and plan them accordingly. Moreover, automated cost allocation and anomaly detection minimize the manual intervention necessary to manage the financial aspect of cloud infrastructure.
Top 10 FinOps Tools in 2023
1. CloudCheckr
CloudCheckr is a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) that combines cloud visibility and intelligence to help businesses lower costs and optimize public cloud resources. One of the more exciting features of CloudCheckr is its offering for service providers, which aims to increase their cloud resale margins.
Best for enterprises that govern complex multi-purpose public cloud infrastructure and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that resell cloud services.
Price: Subscription starting at $500.00 / Month.
“As a DevOps engineer who was part of the implementation team in my company, my overall experience has been semi-OK. The implementation was easy, but CloudCheckr reports were pretty slow for our accounts.”
2. Control Plane
Control Plane is not your classic FinOps tool but a fault-resistant cost-effective multi-cloud-native platform. With Control Plane, you can mix and match services from any CSP combination and leverage AI-enhanced cross-cloud cost optimization to run a lean, cost-effective infrastructure without compromising performance.
You can scale up and down on resources and only pay for your actual computing use, billed by millicores. Its cloud repatriation feature enables you to move your workloads from the cloud to on-prem while still using AWS, GCP, and Azure services. Altogether, you could see a more than 70% reduction in cloud computing costs.
Additionally, Control Plane also bridges the gap between software development and FinOps, enabling developers to easily manage and optimize cloud infrastructure with tools they already know and trust.
Best for DevOps and FinOps pros at cost-conscious cloud-native organizations.
Price: Pay as you go for CPU, RAM, and Egress, with no contracts, minimums, or lock-ins.
“We’ve reduced our AWS spend by 75% using Control Plane. We spend less on computing because we can scale to zero with Capacity AI, but the big savings is that with Control Plane, many of the extras we had to pay for in AWS are built in for free.”
3. CloudZero
Dubbing itself a Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform, CloudZero offers pre-configured analytics dashboards showing you where your cloud expenses go in near-real-time. CloudZero ingests cloud data from CSPs like AWS, Azure, and GCP and platforms like New Relic, MongoDB, Databricks, and Snowflake. The data is then displayed in tag-based dashboards that help stakeholders discover cloud spending trends and spot irregularities.
Best for: Cloud-native startups and SMBs.
Price: Available on demand, some free tools are offered.
“The search engine is very powerful; you can understand exactly where you spend your money on AWS. Creating your dashboard is impossible; you have to work with the customer success team.”
4. Harness CCM
Harness’ Cloud Cost Management is a CI/CD module that supports all three major cloud providers and their managed Kubernetes clusters and helps FinOps teams visualize and manage cloud costs. The critical feature of Harness CCM is Cloud AutoStopping – a platform function to manage cloud resource idle time without custom scripts or manual engineering effort.
Best for large enterprises already employing Harness as their CI/CD platform.
Price: Free up to $250K cloud spend, premium plans starting at 2.25% of Annual Cloud Spend.
Customer review:
“During the first 30 days with Harness CCM, we saw a noticeable change in our cloud spend, with six-figure annualized savings.”
5. Apptio Cloudability
Cloudability monitors and analyzes all cloud expenses across the organization. It aggregates expenditures into reports, offers budget alerts and recommendations via SMS and email, and provides APIs for connecting cloud billing and usage data to any business or financial system.
Best for FinOps teams as SaaS enterprises.
Price: Available upon request with a free trial offered.
“Provides good insights into cloud costs, but it is difficult to customize the views to what I want to see.”
6. Densi.fy
Densify is not exclusively a FinOps tool but a cloud optimization and control product. It aims to balance infrastructure supply and application demand to maximize efficiency and lower expenses. This tool employs proprietary algorithms to optimize Kubernetes container requests and limits, node configurations, and scaling. In addition, it can automatically select the configuration, size, type, and family for your public cloud instances and scale groups.
Best for cloud engineering teams at large enterprises.
Price: Available upon request with a free trial offered.
“Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution.”
7. AWS Cost Explorer
If you’re a fan of convoluted UIs and Amazon services, this is the FinOps tool. AWS Cost Explorer is a free tool by Amazon that aims to help you visualize and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
It’s worth noting that Cost Explorer updates your cost data once every 24 hours, so it is not as useful for real or near-real-time cost optimization. However, its historical cost and usage logs can help forecast your future AWS resource costs.
Best for businesses working exclusively with AWS.
Price: Free.
“The implementation and data integration with AWS takes time to get all the information set up in the tool. It can take up to two weeks. We had three people deploy and maintain the solution.”
8. Microsoft Azure Cost Management
Much like Amazon’s FinOps tool, Microsoft offers its suite of tools to help organizations monitor, allocate, and optimize the cost of their Microsoft Cloud workloads.
Microsoft offers a wide range of tools for optimizing your costs, including Azure savings plans, Azure reservations, and Azure Hybrid that can help you reduce costs by using on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses or RedHat and SUSE Linux subscriptions on Azure.
Best for businesses working exclusively with Azure and Microsoft Cloud.
Price: Pay-as-you-go.
“If you are new to cloud computing, you will be overwhelmed with this solution. Just navigating the platform, you will find different services and options that will necessarily require training and specific documentation.”
9. VMware Aria Cost (formerly CloudHealth)
VMWare offers its suite of tools for financial management and cross-organizational collaboration across your multi-cloud environment. Critical features of Aria Cost include resource & organization management, budget management & forecasting, cost allocation, resource utilization, commitment-based discount management, and migration planning.
Best for enterprises migrating to the cloud.
Price: Available upon request with a free trial offered.
“This tool worked well in analyzing and providing opportunities to improve cloud infrastructure costs by providing insights into management decisions. The only drawback is generating custom reporting is hard, and licensing could have been better in terms of costs.”
10. CloudAdmin
CloudAdmin helps organizations of all sizes identify areas of overspending in their cloud infrastructure. This FinOps tool offers customized savings recommendations for purchasing reserved instances, helps eliminate server waste, and lets you select the reserved instances you want to buy from AWS before paying directly.
Best for businesses looking to cut AWS costs.
Price: Available upon request with a free trial offered.
Customer review:
“CloudAdmin has been able to help communicate for everyone on the team, especially new team members. If my boss needs a report on savings over a certain time pending page makes it easy to show him exactly how much has been saved.”
Lower cloud costs and better performance with Control Plane
Slashing cloud infrastructure costs requires adopting FinOps as a culture and function. Only then can you choose the tools to help you increase cloud ROIs. However, in choosing your solution, consider how it fits into your tech stack and what added value it offers.
Control Plane’s added benefits are the unique ability to seamlessly transport workloads between cloud service providers, hybrid cloud configurations, and on-prem resources, all with a single API, ultra-low latency, and unbreakable 99.999% availability. Want to know more about how you can rise above the clouds while cutting costs? Sign up now.