10 Azure Cost Management Tools for 2024

In the cloud, costs change frequently and can be unpredictable. When you perform updates, add a new resource, or have a spike in demand— costs change.

You would probably expect a number in the Azure bill at the end of the month, but surprises do come, especially if you are not fully aware of the hired Azure infrastructure, its attributes, and the behavior of your workloads.

In this guide, we will go through the ten best Azure cost management tools to help you understand (at a deep level) the costs for every Azure resource and service you have ever hired. These tools will give you broader visibility, automation, and FinOps intelligence; so that you can optimize costs and improve the performance of your workload.

Here is our list of the best network monitoring tools:

Azure Cost Management It is Microsoft’s native set of tools (cost analysis, billing, alerts, and budget control) provided for free for all Azure users.
Serverless360 A set of tools designed for and developed explicitly for Microsoft Azure. It extracts the precise data needed for efficient monitoring, management, and cost reduction.
NetApp Spot A cloud automation and cost optimization platform. It uses ML, predictive analytics, and automation to scale and provide recommendations.
Vmware CloudHealth A SaaS that collects Azure services and infrastructure data and consolidates it on a central platform.
nOps Azure Cost Optimization A SaaS-based cloud management solution for Azure. nOps is empowered by ML and AI to analyze cloud resources and help reduce waste.
Apptio Cloudability A cloud cost management and optimization platform that allows you to create budgets, see forecasts, and monitor all your Azure cloud spending.
Nebula OneView Cloud Expense Management An all-in-one cloud management platform that provides full visibility into your Azure cloud utilization and costs.
myCloudDoctor Cloud Cost Management A company that focuses on cloud transition services. They offer quite solid capabilities for cost optimization and forecasts.
CloudZero A cost intelligence SaaS that detects cost anomalies and underutilized resources. It provides full visibility with rich context.
Densify A cloud and container management and scale optimization platform. It provides automated resource control and cost optimization.

Azure Cost Management

Azure cost management is a practice carried out by FinOps (Financial Operations), engineering, or financial teams that involve planning and controlling the costs associated with running a business using the Azure cloud. To help manage Azure costs easier, these teams can leverage Azure cost management software to automatically collect metrics, and analyze, optimize and report on the utilization of Azure resources.

Azure provides its own set of tools for management known as Azure Cost Management + billing software. This set of tools is hosted in Azure and delivered for free to its users.

Why Would You Need Anything Outside Azure Cost Management?

Azure Cost Management is sometimes seen as an extension to the account details and billing that needs to be delivered by Azure to its paying users. And although this cost management solution works to some degree and is free for Azure users, it has its limitations.

Fortunately, there are third-party tools that were explicitly designed for cloud cost management. These third-party tools can help Azure users get better visibility of their cloud spending. Most of these tools rely on analytics empowered with ML (Machine Learning) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to provide recommendations, insights, and alerts. With these capabilities, these tools can even learn from spending behaviors and predict future spending. Additionally, these Azure cost management tools provide different visualizations to help understand the costs for every single Azure resource from a different angle and with an abundant context.

The Best Azure Cost Management Tools

Some of the criteria we used to come up with the best Azure cost management tools list were based on Azure Marketplace's review, reputation, and time in business.

1. Azure Cost Management

Azure Cost Management is Microsoft’s native set of SaaS-based tools provided for free for its Azure users. This set comes with robust utilities, including cost analysis, billing, alerts, and budget control— all designed to allocate and optimize all your cloud workload expenses. Although Azure Cost Management is hosted in Microsoft Azure cloud and is typically used for Azure, it can also be used with AWS cloud (for an additional fee).

Key Features:

Integrate with Azure Advisor and Microsoft Power BI
Free for Azure users
Get ongoing reports and insights on cloud costs
Create and set budget alerts

With Azure Cost Management, you can keep track of all your Azure cloud spending from a single and unified view. You can also allocate budgets and costs to improve accountability and overall visibility of all expenses. In addition, you can also predict costs using Azure’s powerful cost forecast.

To start using Azure Cost Management, open your Azure portal and find the tool using the top search bar. You’ll need to give Azure Cost Management access to your billing account or subscription. Azure does not charge anything if you are using this tool to monitor Azure resources but does charge 1% for monitoring AWS.

2. Turbo360 (formerly Serverless360)

Serverless360 has been rebranded to Turbo360. This rebranding maintains the same core features and functionalities but introduces enhanced capabilities for monitoring, managing, and optimizing Azure resources. Turbo360 continues to offer tools for cost management, business activity monitoring, and Azure documentation, building on the robust platform initially developed under the Serverless360 name.

Key Features:

Governance and auditing
Monitoring and management
Simplified granular user access
Powerful cost management
Predict Azure invoices

Turbo360 is a professional set of cloud-based tools explicitly developed to work with Microsoft Azure. These tools help you understand how your Azure services and infrastructure fit together, ensuring you get the most value out of your cloud investment.

Turbo360 is the single platform needed to monitor and manage most Azure resources. It is one of the best Azure cost management tools because it is designed specifically for Azure, integrates seamlessly, and extracts the precise data needed to reduce monthly costs.

Turbo360 offers different plans: Business Application (starting at $150/month), BAM (starting at $300/month), and Azure Documenter (starting at $50/month). A 15-day free trial is also available for users to explore the platform's features.

3. Spot by NetApp

Spot is a cloud automation and cost optimization suite of tools designed for CloudOps teams. It optimizes all your cloud infrastructure to ensure performance, utilization, and availability at lower costs. Spot also uses machine learning, predictive analytics, and automation capabilities to provide insights and advanced scaling.

Key Features:

Analyze and control your Azure costs
Leverage Azure Spot VMs
Advanced Kubernetes Infrastructure management
Optimize utilization of Azure reservations

The Spot suite of tools includes the Cloud Analyzer, Elastigroup, Ocean, and Eco. The Cloud Analyzer is the tool that provides free insights into Azure’s (AWS and GCP as well) cloud infrastructure utilization and costs. It can collect data across all workloads, services, regions, and Azure accounts and provide collective insights.

You can find Spot in Azure’s Marketplace. There is no free trial available for Azure (only for AWS), but they do offer a free live demo given by a NetApp solutions architect.

4. CloudHealth by Vmware

Vmware’s CloudHealth is a cloud management platform that enables you to visualize, optimize and govern all your cloud environments. The CloudHealth service collects all cloud-based services and infrastructure data and consolidates it on a single “central” platform. This central platform then provides you with analysis, insights, and reports on cost, utilization, security, and performance.

Key Features:

Automate daily cloud operations
Control and optimize your cloud spending
Improve cloud security and compliance
Manage and forecast budgets
Cost allocation and chargeback

CloudHealth can be integrated with all major cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure. It can be configured to gather data from different sources, including accounts, within your cloud environment. The data is then stored and processed as time-series metrics which can be analyzed, visualized, and alerted upon.

The price for CloudHealth is not officially listed on the site, so if you want to know how much you’ll pay for this product, you’ll have to reach a Vmware representative and request a quote. Fortunately, Vmware offers a 14-day free trial of CloudHealth.

5. nOps Azure Cost Optimization

nOps (Azure Cost Optimization) is a cloud management SaaS solution for AWS and Microsoft Azure. The solution is referred to by the nOps company as an “ML-powered FinOps team” because it enables “automatic” cloud financial operation and management. nOps uses ML and AI capabilities to automatically analyze cloud resources, detect any waste, optimize it, and help reduce overall cloud spending.

Key Features:

Run workloads on spot instances
Automatically manage reservations
Track the use of spot and reserved instances
Get granular insights and recommendations
Get Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) metrics

nOps is one of the best Azure cost management tools simply because it is very efficient in identifying underutilized and wasted resources and providing insights and recommendations. It can also help you view all your cloud costs from a single pane of glass and optimize them by prioritizing resources, tracking utilization, and getting planning recommendations.

You can schedule a demo to see the product in action, or you can also sign up to nOps for a 30-day free trial and get your hands-on experience with the product.

6. Apptio Cloudability

Cloudability by Apptio is a cloud cost management and optimization platform. With Cloudability, financial operations (FinOps) teams, IT finance, and business leaders can monitor, manage, allocate, and optimize Azure cloud resources from a single “central” console.

Key Features:

Use Cloudability TotalCost to capture all cloud program spending
Predict and stay on budget with Budget & Forecast
Automate and track cloud cost optimization
Maximize costs by determining Reservations and Reserved Instances
Rightsize resources to match your exact needs

Apptio Cloudability is one of the best Azure cost management tools because it allows you to set up budgets and forecasts and monitor all Azure cloud spending. With Cloudability, you’ll get immediate alerts about cost anomalies and opportunities so that you can act upon them. In addition, Cloudability also comes with advanced data analytics for correlating cloud spend metrics with business value.

You’ll need to contact them if you want to know more about Apptio Cloudability pricing and plans. Register to start a free trial of Apptio Cloudability.

7. Nebula OneView Cloud Expense Management

OneView Cloud Expense Management by Nebula is an all-in-one cloud management platform that offers full visibility into your cloud utilization and costs. It works on all the major cloud providers (including Azure), along with different accounts and environments. And when it comes to Azure cost management, OneView allows you to keep track and forecast all your Azure cloud spending.

Key Features:

Use budget tracking and forecasts to predict cloud costs
Automate Azure cost allocation
Seamless integration with service request systems
Integrate to SAP for automated cost allocation

OneView Cloud Expense Management also provides advanced analytics to help you optimize your Azure cloud environment and keep you informed of any changes. To enhance that cloud visibility, OneView provides you with a live dashboard and reporting, along with tagging and cost allocation. This platform also integrates with service providers and business apps to collect data automatically.

Nebula OneView comes in three plans: Essential, Optimized, and High Performance. To get the price for each of those plans or a customized demo, contact the Nebula team.

8. myCloudDoor Cloud Cost Management

myCloudDoor (as the name implies) is a company that specializes in cloud transition services. They help companies migrate and adopt the cloud easier via transition advisory tools, migration projects, Managed Cloud Services (McaaS), and other cloud solutions.

Key Features:

SAP on Azure Advanced Specialization
Automated tools for billing, alerting, and allocation
Full visibility into Azure cloud costs
Forecast Azure costs based on spending trends
Compare Azure bills to a defined budget

myCloudDoor is one of the best Azure cost management tools simply because they have a quite solid integration to Azure. Plus, myCloudDoor is hosted in the Azure cloud and can be accessed via Azure Marketplace. In addition, they are also part of the Top5 Partners for Azure Stack and are focused on providing outstanding Microsoft expertise (SAP and Azure certified) and tailored solutions. Their solutions allow Azure resources management, ongoing cost optimization, and consumption forecasts.

Unfortunately, they don’t offer a free trial. Contact myCloudDoor experts if you are interested in learning more about their product.

9. CloudZero

CloudZero is a SaaS-based cloud cost intelligence (ML-powered) platform. It provides full visibility by detecting cost anomalies and underutilized resources (with the proper context) in real-time and showing them on a single dashboard. With this information, financial cloud operations (FinOps) and engineering leaders can make informed decisions and optimize cloud costs correctly.

Key Features:

Code-driven cost allocation
Fully automated cost anomaly tracking and alerting
Get granular and context-rich intelligence
Align your Azure costs to your business
Full cost visibility (cost per customer, COGS, and unit costs)

CloudZero allows these teams to organize their Azure cloud spending and improve it. For instance, they can see the cloud costs in the context of business. In addition, these teams can improve cost predictability. They receive cost anomaly alerts and trends that help them prevent expensive billing surprises.

To know the price, you’ll need to contact a CloudZero sales representative and request a quote. If you want to test CloudZero’s cost intelligence platform before buying it, you’ll need to register for the demo and qualify to get a 30-day free trial.

10. Densify

Densify is a hybrid cloud and container resource management and scale optimization platform. It helps FinOps, financial, and engineering teams control their cloud spending and also improve the performance of applications. This tool performs automated infrastructure resource control and optimization using predictive ML-powered analytics.

Key Features:

Match app workloads to Azure VMs and containers
Automation via analytics and APIs
ML-based analytics to optimize consumption
Infrastructure optimization recommendations

Densify collects data from your Azure environment and optimizes consumption. It collects metrics from applications (memory, CPU, network, etc.), Azure infrastructure attributes (price, technical limits, etc.), or custom-built tags or policies and feeds them into an “optimization engine.” This engine, in turn, uses ML and AI to provide purchase, instance, and scale optimizations.

Request and start a free demo and learn how Densify can optimize your Azure resources. You can also request a free trial to get your hands on the product.

Final Words

In this post, we went through the ten best Azure cost management tools. Although some companies could do well with Microsoft’s native set of free tools (Azure Cost Management), the tool becomes limited as they grow and their environments become more complex. Tools like Turbo360, Spot, or Vmware CloudHealth are SaaS-based tools that provide more robust capabilities. They include automation, intelligence, richer context, and better visualizations (not to mention that they work for other clouds).