10 Best Cloud Cost Management Tools to Cut Your Cloud Bill in 2025

Cloud spending is expected to increase by 28% this year. What’s truly troubling is that up to 40% of this spending will simply go to waste for most organizations. In our previous blog, we discussed how AI – now an imperative for operational efficiency and competitiveness –  is going to further escalate cloud costs. But there’s only so much money companies can splurge before their budgets tap out.

As funds run dry, critical projects and initiatives will be delayed – or worse, abandoned – costing companies both business and long-term leverage. It’s happening right now, as most decision makers have already had to pause or postpone at least one AI project due to unsustainable costs. It's never been more important to tackle cloud costs head-on.  

With challenges like hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, departmental silos, visibility gaps, and lack of governance, cloud cost management and FinOps need support from advanced tooling.

In this article, we’ll discuss all the key features you should be looking for in a cloud cost management solution or FinOps tools. We’ll also compare the top tools that help businesses save millions annually, so be sure to read through before making your final pick!

What is Cloud Cost Management?

Cloud cost management is all about monitoring, understanding, optimizing, and controlling cloud spend through strategies like tracking resource utilization, setting budget thresholds, identifying waste and eliminating unnecessary or redundant expenses. The idea is to minimize cloud costs and maximize ROI. In order to achieve that, you need capabilities like:

• end-to-end, granular cost visibility
• cloud spend analysis
• predictive analytics and usage forecasting
• budget enforcement
• continuous cost governance.

It’s important to note that cloud cost management is not just a financial but an operational concern. Cost optimization strategies must always be in line with business and operational needs. For instance, as much as we talk about removing unused or redundant resources, eliminating all idle instances in a sweeping move could remove critical DR (Disaster Recovery) environments that are sitting idle for a reason.

That’s why strategic optimizations and FinOps principles are the way to go instead of pure cost reductions. We’ve discussed those in great detail here, but the bottom line is that effective cost management requires:

• Close collaboration among different teams and departments, including DevOps, architects, cloud engineers, product management, and finance
• Deep cost and usage visibility
• AI-powered, data-driven decision-making
• Financial accountability across individuals and their teams.

All of the above ensure that cloud cost reduction does not come at the expense of business goals and growth.

Benefits of Cloud Cost Management

1. Cost Savings: Although the benefits of effective cloud cost management go beyond superficial savings, cost reduction and budget control are still perhaps the biggest drivers and motivation behind cloud cost management.
2. Value Realization: Once you get past the constant chase to curb budget overruns, that’s when you start realizing the value of the cloud as a true enabler for business growth and innovation.
3. Resource Optimization: Proper cost management identifies poorly configured resources and underutilized servers, allowing you to minimize waste and fully utilize the resources you’re paying for.
4. Sustainable Innovation: Tracking and analyzing cost and usage data can help organizations choose projects and initiatives strategically based on available resources and budget. This ensures they won’t have to delay or cancel initiatives due to financial roadblocks.

What to Look for in a Cloud Cost Management Solution?

Given how indispensable cost management and FinOps tools have become, many cloud providers have developed their own native solutions, while also expanding support and integration with third-party platforms. With so many options, you must fully understand your requirements – such as company size and budget – as well as your unique cost control challenges, like multi-cloud cost visibility, cross-team collaboration, before choosing a solution.

1. Cloud Provider Coverage: What matters most is that the tool provides full coverage for your cloud environment and architecture. If you're working with multiple cloud providers or have an on-premises component, choose platforms that support hybrid and/or multi-cloud environments.

2. Real-time Cost Visibility: Prefer tools with real-time data and analytical capabilities for proactive cost control instead of retrospective analysis. You want to see and control costs as they happen and not after they have already exceeded your budget.

3. Data Aggregation: The tool must consolidate and centrally display data from all cloud providers, cloud accounts, regions, and services to provide a unified view of the cloud costs.

4. Cost Allocation and Tagging: You should be able to allocate and enforce acceptable budget limits for projects, teams, and business units. The tool must enable granular tracking and accountability – key prerequisites for FinOps.

5. Actionable Recommendations: Choose a tool that’s more than a visual display of data. In the age of AI and ML, your cost management tool must be able to provide actionable insights and recommendations in real-time to cut waste and optimize cloud costs.

6. Real-time Cost Comparisons: An important cost management feature is to be able to see and compare pricing across different instance types (on-demand, reserved, and spot), regions, and even cloud providers before deployment.

7. AI and Predictive Analytics: The tool you pick should be able to leverage AI-powered predictive analytics to forecast future cloud spend based on historical data. It should identify and alert you of usage and cost anomalies as they occur. This will help you react proactively and strategize precisely.

8. Ease-of-Use: All users and teams should be able to use the platform you choose, even if they do not have much technical expertise. Pick a solution with an intuitive dashboard and data visualizations that make it usable for all – engineers, finance, and managers.

9. Security and Compliance: Finally, make sure that the tool complies with universal, regional, and industry-specific regulations, like GDPR, HIPAA, etc.  that are relevant to you. It must also comply with security standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001 to make sure your data and operations remain secure.

10. Cloud Cost Management Tool vs Platform: Cloud cost management goes hand in hand with other aspects of cloud management. Assess your needs to decide if you need a dedicated cost management tool or a comprehensive platform with broader features and capabilities.

The Best Cloud Cost Management Tools

Whether you're a single, hybrid, or multi-cloud setup – an enterprise, SMB, or startup – here’s our comprehensive list of cloud cost management tools and FinOps platforms to suit a diverse range of business needs.

CloudZero

CloudZero is a cloud cost optimization platform that automates the collection, allocation, and analysis of your cloud costs to identify resource wastage and improve unit economics. It focuses on unit cost analytics, so engineering and finance teams can monitor and understand costs in depth – per product, feature, or customer.

Key Features

• Multi-cloud Support: CloudZero can ingest and aggregate cost data from more than one cloud provider. However, not all providers enjoy the same level of support and integration.
• Granular Cost Visibility: It provides granular – unit-level – cost visibility, per customer, product, feature, or team, etc. You can choose the metrics most relevant to your business needs.
• Cost Allocation: Uses metadata, usage patterns, and AI to automatically attribute costs at unit-level even without complicated resource tagging.
• Kubernetes Visibility: CloudZero provides hour-level granularity into Kubernetes despite shared resources.
• Predictive Analytics: Helps forecast future cloud spending based on unit economics and historical data.
• FinOps Support: Provides the granular data needed for cost optimizations, accountability, and governance.  
• Anomaly Detection: Detects cost anomalies and automatically sends alerts via Slack, enabling faster response and guardrails.
• Designated FinOps Account Manager (FAM): Every customer gets a designated FAM that acts as an extension of their internal team.

Limitations

• Integration Limitations: CloudZero lacks native support for most cloud platforms, including GCP. Users can bring data from these providers via alternative ingestion pipelines, but it’s not plug-and-play like AWS and Azure.
• Lack of Automation: It doesn’t automatically implement infrastructure and application changes based on cost recommendations
• Ease-of-Use: Users report running into configuration issues and often complain of a steep learning curve.

Best For

SaaS companies and engineering-driven organizations looking to truly dissect cloud spend and improve unit economics.

IBM Cloudability (Apptio Cloudability)

IBM Cloudability is a cloud financial management platform that focuses on enabling FinOps and governance across multiple cloud environments.

Key Features

• Multi-cloud Support: IBM Cloudability supports multiple cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and IBM Cloud, and centralizes cost visibility and management across all of them.
• Cost Visibility: Allows you to allocate cloud costs to different teams, projects, or departments and provides deep visibility into who is spending what and why.
• Actionable Recommendations: Offers real-time recommendations for rightsizing resources, leveraging commitment-based discounts, and reducing waste based on technical and business requirements.
• Customizable Views and Reporting: Users can customize and configure the display to focus on data that matters most to them. They can choose between pre-built reports or create custom ones to monitor, analyze, and optimize cloud spending.    

Limitations

• Complexity: Cloudability can be difficult to integrate and set up initially. It provides extensive data that is useful but requires more expertise for interpretation.  
• Not the Best for SMBs: It provides complex, multi-dimensional financial analysis, which can be overkill for smaller organizations.  

Best For

Large enterprises with complex cloud infrastructures across multiple cloud platforms that need detailed financial oversight.

emma

emma is a vendor-agnostic comprehensive cloud management platform with advanced cost management and optimization capabilities. emma’s broad set of features and holistic approach allows you to identify and address cost issues like overprovisioning and underutilization directly from the platform’s interface. It also allows you to compare costs across instance types, regions, and cloud providers. As a result, you can save costs from multiple fronts – precise commitments, best-suited environments, optimal utilization, and waste reduction.

Key Features

• Multi-cloud Support: As a cloud-agnostic platform, emma has a strong focus on multi-cloud support. Unlike most multi-cloud cost management platforms, emma covers a wide range of public cloud providers, including hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and GCP as well as small-scale, regional, and niche players like Digital Ocean and Gcore.
• Deep Cost Visibility: Enables real-time cost and usage monitoring and consolidates and visualizes data from all projects, regions, and cloud environments within a single, intuitive dashboard. Users can see costs per user, project, workload, and cloud, depending on their role and needs.
• AI-powered Predictive Analytics: Analyzes historical usage to identify trends and patterns for future spend forecasting. Users can see when resource consumption and costs start to deviate from the forecasted patterns and take proactive action.
• Actionable Recommendations: Tracks usage and recommends rightsizing  and commitment-based opportunities. You can instantly find and compare spot instance pricing across regions and cloud providers for up to 90% cost savings compared to on-demand instances.  
• FinOps Adoption: Users can implement department accountability, showback, and chargeback models for precise cost attribution, and to set budget limits and thresholds for individual projects, teams, and business units for greater control and governance.
• Managed Kubernetes: Allows you to set up your multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure, enabling autoscaling across various cloud providers. You can add markups for spot instances purchases and set price limits for better control even as hundreds of clusters scale dynamically.
• Private Networking Backbone: emma’s network backbone connects different regions and clouds, allowing you to eliminate internet egress costs. Intelligent networking capabilities further reduce data transfer costs through data egress optimization.
• Ease-of-Use: emma’s no-code approach to provisioning, orchestration, and automation and intuitive dashboard makes it easy to use regardless of technical expertise. It’s equally usable for all – engineering, FinOps, finance, procurement, and leadership.

Limitations

• Smaller User Base: The platform is comparatively new with a smaller user base compared to incumbents like CloudZero or Cloudability.
• Limited Automation: While you can automate the provisioning, deployment, and scaling of workloads, some automations like automated instance migration based on AI-powered recommendations are still in the works. Currently, you can implement the recommendations with a few clicks using emma’s own intuitive dashboard.

Best For

‍SMBs and enterprises looking for a unified platform to combine provisioning and cost management across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.

Flexera One

Flexera One is a comprehensive IT asset management platform with built-in cloud cost optimization capabilities, It provides multi-cloud accounting for tracking IT and cloud expenditure across teams and projects.

Key Features

• Multi-cloud Support: Flexera offers wide support for diverse cloud providers and on-prem infrastructure.
• Cost Visibility: Aggregates cost data from all cloud accounts and cloud providers into a single dashboard for easy tracking and analysis. You can dive deep into costs by application, department, or team.
• Actionable Recommendations: Identifies saving potential through optimizations and discounts.
• Automated Optimizations: Provides out-of-box policies to automate the implementation of recommendations.
• FinOps Support: Flexera helps you define FinOps goals and track your progress against internal KPIs.

Limitations

• Limited Support: Users often complain of the lack of technical support and slow speed of response to support requests.
• Complexity: The tool is designed for complex, hybrid cloud deployments. Ongoing management and maintenance requires dedicated IT expertise.
• High Cost: The cost can be a deterrent, particularly for small businesses. For those interested in cost management only, many features will be added baggage.

Best For

Enterprises and service providers looking for overall IT asset management and cost savings.

Densify

Densify is basically a cloud resource optimization platform that allows you to precisely match your workloads to the most efficient cloud resources. By doing so, it allows you to eliminate cloud spend waste and reduce overall costs.

Key Features

• Multi-cloud Support: Supports multi-cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud and provides a unified view of your cloud costs.
• Granular Visibility: Displays cloud usage by application, business unit, or tag.
• Actionable Recommendations: Recommends ideal instance types and resource specifications for your infrastructure based on AI and deep analytics.
• Impact Analysis and Reporting: Provides reports with performance and cost impact of recommended optimizations.
• Kubernetes Optimizations: Analyzes containerized applications and recommends optimal node types and cluster configurations based on utilization.

Limitations

• Lacks Traditional Cost Management: Densify is not a traditional cost management tool. It doesn’t offer typical capabilities like budget tracking, forecasts, or financial dashboards. Instead, it focuses primarily on resource optimization.
• Complexity: It’s more suitable for DevOps and engineers, not for non-technical and finance teams.

Best For

‍DevOps and cloud engineers focused on performance-first cost optimization. Its license subscription is covered by Intel, so it can be a very useful platform for qualifying Intel organizations.

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is an easy-to-use tool that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS cloud costs and usage over time.

Key Features

• Granular Visibility: AWS Cost Explorer supports cost data at resource-level for all AWS services. You can monitor your hourly cost and usage for the past 14 days to determine actual consumption and commit to Savings Plan or Reserved Instances accordingly.
• Data Visualization and Reporting: Displays data through easy-to-digest graphs, tables, and reports. You can customize reports to view cost and usage data based on specific criteria, such as AWS service, region, or tags.
• Predictive Analytics: AWS Cost Explorer can predict future costs and usage based on your historical and current cost and usage patterns.
• Actionable Recommendations: It suggests Reserved Instances and provides recommendations for managing Savings Plans.
• Ease-of-Use: As a native AWS tool, it integrates seamlessly with AWS environments and has a straightforward setup process, even for smaller teams.

Limitations

• Limited Coverage: AWS Cost Explorer is tailored for simpler, AWS-specific analysis, focusing on usage patterns and cost efficiency within AWS services.
• Basic Capabilities: It lacks the comprehensiveness of third-party tools.

Best For

For organizations primarily looking to develop an understanding of their AWS-specific costs, it’s a great no-cost starting point.

Azure Cost Management + Billing

Microsoft Cost Management + Billing is a suite of tools that helps you analyze, monitor, and optimize your Microsoft Cloud costs in addition to managing your billing account and subscriptions.

Key Features

• Cost Visibility: Provides detailed insights into your Azure spending, allowing you to view costs by resource, service, region, department, and subscription. You can use these insights for cost reduction strategies, such as right-sizing VMs, using Reserved Instances, and eliminating underutilized resources.
• Cost Alerts: You can allocate budgets and receive alerts when approaching limits. The tool uses AI to detect unusual spikes in spending and alerts you in time.
• Cost-effectiveness: The entire suite of tools is available for free for Azure users and charges a nominal 1 percent for AWS-managed spend.

Limitations

• Limited Coverage: It only supports Azure and some AWS accounts via integration.
• Basic Capabilities: Lacks deep optimization capabilities. It needs to integrate with other Azure tools, such as Azure Advisor for personalized recommendations and Azure Resource Manager for managing resources comprehensively.

Best For

‍Organizations running primarily in Azure with limited extension into AWS.

CloudCheckr

Previously owned by NetApp and recently acquired by Flexera, CloudCheckr is a complete FinOps solution for public cloud environments with governance, security, and compliance capabilities. It’s primarily designed to support large enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs).

Key Features

• Deep Cost Visibility: Provides deep visibility into current and historical cloud usage and spend, per cost center, business unit, product line, project, team, or other entities.  
• Actionable Recommendations: Identifies and provides recommendations for rightsizing and commitment-based purchases.

Limitations

• Recent Acquisition: Flexera acquired NetApp’s CloudCheckr and Spot recently in 2025, which may lead to changes in the product roadmap and support.
• Outdated Documentation: Onboarding is reportedly difficult due to outdated and non-intuitive guides.
• Poor UX & UI Experience: Users have complained about non-intuitive navigation and UX.

Best For

Large organizations in regulated industries that need combined cost and compliance oversight and have dedicated platform engineers and FinOps teams.

VMware Tanzu CloudHealth

It’s a multi-cloud management platform that helps organizations optimize and reduce their cloud costs as well. VMware’s CloudHealth Partner Program also uses the platform to help VMware partners manage their cloud costs.  

Key Features

• Multi-Cloud Support: It supports various cloud providers, including all hyperscalers, as well as hybrid cloud environments.
• Granular Cost Visibility: Provides detailed visibility into resource usage across all projects. It allows you to create your own logical groups; for example, by users, functions, or business units.
• Data Visualization and Reporting: Provides simple reports and dashboards to help users make sense of complex information.
• Predictive Analytics: Uses ML-powered analytics for accurate cost projections based on complex factors, such as seasonality, infrastructure changes and application lifecycle. The platform alerts stakeholders when cost centers are forecasted to exceed budgets.

Limitations

• Complicated Setup: The setup process can be different for different cloud environments. In addition, the platform requires complex and accurate tagging for insights and recommendations.  
• Perspective Limitations: CloudHealth’s customizable views called “Perspectives” can only handle a few hundred objects. Very large enterprises with thousands of objects will find this cap to be limiting.
  

Best For

‍Multi-cloud enterprises with access to cloud expertise.

Morpheus Cloud Cost Optimization

Morpheus Cloud Cost Optimization is a cloud FinOps tool particularly designed for hybrid environments.

Key Features

• Hybrid and Multi-cloud Support: Morpheus supports cost management across multiple clouds, both public and private, as well as private infrastructure. It provides a unified view of cloud expenditure across these diverse environments.
• Granular Cost Visibility: Provides detailed cost data that you can filter by cloud, region, tag, instance type, and more.
• Actionable Recommendations: In addition to rightsizing and commitment, the platform can also compare pricing across clouds to recommend where workloads should be provisioned.
• FinOps Support: Budgets can be assigned to accounts, clouds, tenants, and users, then configured for different time periods by month, quarter, or year.

Limitations

• Not User-friendly: Some users complain of a less intuitive interface and usability issues. The platform can be complex to learn and adapt to.

Best For

‍Hybrid cloud teams managing private clouds, on-premises infrastructure, and public cloud together.

We hope this guide helps you navigate the crowded space of cloud cost management tools and choose the right solution for your organization.

Still not sure what fits best? Talk to one of our cloud architects for expert insights tailored to your infrastructure. Or, request a personalized demo of the emma platform to uncover hidden savings and optimization opportunities.