Best Azure cost optimization tools

When you compare two Azure cost optimisation tools, their feature pages often appear strikingly similar. Whether it’s about rightsizing, idle resource detection, commitment management, or anomaly alerts, significant differences only emerge when you put them to the test:

• A tool that identifies idle resources but fails to specify which team or product they belong to.
• Rightsizing recommendations based on just a few days of CPU usage, neglecting any end-of-month spikes.
• Multi-cloud platforms that excel in optimising AWS but regard Azure’s billing structure and tagging logic as secondary.

With predictions for cloud spending reaching $723 billion in 2025, it’s evident that many resources are being allocated to tools that might not perform effectively. To manage these costs efficiently, it’s essential to select the right optimisation tool. We’ve evaluated 12 options and compiled this guide to assist you in making an informed choice.

A quick note: Our product, Turbo360, appears on this list. We develop Azure cost optimisation and monitoring tools, giving us firsthand insight into this domain. However, we have strived to keep this review impartial. Each tool is assessed on the same criteria, and we’ve highlighted limitations where applicable, including those of our own product.

TL;DR: Our Top Picks at a Glance

What Does Azure Cost Optimisation Actually Mean?

Azure cost optimisation involves a continual review of how cloud resources are utilised, enabling you to make adjustments that reduce unnecessary expenditures. It’s not merely about slashing budgets but ensuring that every resource you’re funding serves a genuine purpose, is appropriately sized, and is in the right tier.

This isn’t a one-off cleanup exercise. Since Azure operates on a consumption-based pricing model, your costs will fluctuate whenever workloads change, services are added, or if resources are scaled up without being scaled back down.

What Problems Do These Tools Solve?

Cloud overspending isn’t typically the result of carelessness; it often stems from the complexity of cloud environments. As things grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of what’s running, who’s responsible for it, and whether it remains necessary.

Cost optimisation tools address several issues:

• Identifying idle and orphaned resources like unattached disks, forgotten test environments, or VMs that haven’t been productive in weeks.
• Providing rightsizing recommendations that highlight when a resource is over-provisioned and suggestions for how to scale down.
• Offering insights on reserved instances and savings plans to help you determine when to commit to discounts instead of paying on demand.
• Implementing scheduling and automation to shut down non-production resources outside of business hours.
• Detecting anomalies that alert you to unusual cost spikes before they escalate into significant invoices.

The situation is becoming more complicated with the addition of AI workloads. Training and model experimentation can lead to unpredictable spikes in compute and storage, which traditional cost monitoring may not adequately address.

As pointed out by Gartner’s Sid Nag, the expansion of cloud use cases across hybrid and multicloud setups introduces even more services and cost variables for teams to manage.

Azure Cost Optimisation vs. Azure Cost Management: What’s the Difference?

Azure cost management allows you to see where your money is going. It includes dashboards, reports, and trend analyses. Cost optimisation, on the other hand, is what you do with that data—whether resizing a VM, deleting an unused disk, or committing to a savings plan. Both elements are essential, but this guide focuses strictly on optimisation tools.

What to Look for in an Azure Cost Optimisation Tool

Before diving into our tool recommendations, let’s explore the criteria that are vital for an effective Azure Cost Optimisation tool.

• Rightsizing Recommendations: Does the tool consider actual CPU, memory, and usage trends over time, or does it just flag any resource that falls beneath a certain threshold? The best recommendations analyse sustained usage patterns and suggest precise sizing adjustments.
• Idle and Orphaned Resource Detection: Some resources, like unattached disks or forgotten snapshots, can remain inactive for months and still incur costs. An effective tool identifies these early and ranks them based on potential savings.
• Reserved Instance and Savings Plan Management: Committing to reservations can slash compute costs by up to 72%, but only if existing commitments are being utilised. Seek a tool that monitors underused RIs and Savings Plans, identifies coverage gaps, and offers recommendations for adjustments.
• Automated Scheduling: Non-production workloads running continuously contribute significantly to avoidable costs. A tool that automatically pauses development and staging environments during non-business hours can save you monthly.
• Business Context in Recommendations: Insights about VM usage may tell you it’s operating at 12% CPU, but that information is of little value without knowing the team that uses it or the product it supports. Choose tools that link cost data back to teams, products, or clients to make it actionable.
• Azure-Native Depth: Azure has specific billing models, reservation protocols, and tagging hierarchies. Multi-cloud tools often generalise across different providers, potentially missing out on Azure-specific features. For teams primarily using Azure, a dedicated tool will provide more relevant recommendations than adaptations meant for AWS.
• Action vs. Advice: While some tools provide reports, only certain ones take action by shutting down resources, purging unused storage, or changing access tiers. This distinction is crucial depending on the manual workload your team can handle.

We’ve evaluated each tool based on the criteria covered above. Below are our top picks.

1. Turbo360

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What It Does

Turbo360 integrates with all your Azure tenants and subscriptions, aggregates billing data, and assigns costs according to your organisation’s structure (whether by team, product, customer, etc.).

It rightsizes VMs based on CPU and memory trends analysed over several weeks, identifies idle resources before they inflate your bill, and monitors the use of your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.

Additionally, it can autonomously shut down development and staging environments after business hours and execute automated processes for tasks like purging obsolete storage blobs.

Strengths

• Comprehensive Azure cost management in a single platform
• Continuous idle resource identification
• Monitoring of RI and Savings Plan utilisation
• Automated after-hours shutdown
• Cost allocation based on team, product, or customer
• Budget governance with automated enforcement

Best for: Teams managing complex Azure environments wanting comprehensive cost optimisation and monitoring.

What to Watch Out For: It’s Azure-specific; therefore, if you have workloads on AWS or GCP, you’ll need additional tools for those environments.

What Customers Say: “We appreciate the valuable insights from the product and how effectively it helps us resolve platform issues. Creating dashboards from system data is quick and gives us a clear understanding of operations.”

2. Ternary

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What It Does

Ternary consolidates billing data from all three major cloud providers into a single dashboard. It rightsizes compute, databases, storage, and Kubernetes, flags idle resources, and manages commitment-based discounts like RIs and Savings Plans.

Its recommendations are directly linked to Jira, making it easy for engineering teams to incorporate them into their regular workflow. However, it does not take automated actions on your infrastructure, meaning there’s no auto-shutdown or auto-rightsizing capability.

Strengths

• Multi-cloud feature equivalence
• Integration with Jira for task management
• Can be used as SaaS or self-hosted
• Strong economic reporting
• AI-driven anomaly detection

Best for: Multi-cloud teams (AWS, Azure, GCP) requiring a unified FinOps platform with strong reporting and Jira integrations.

What to Watch Out For: Since Ternary doesn’t automate optimisation processes, your team will still be responsible for execution. Consider this if you prefer a hands-free approach.

What Customers Say: “Ternary’s platform is user-friendly, easy to set up, and remarkably intuitive. We seldom see issues with member dashboards, and signing up is a breeze.”

3. Umbrella (formerly Anodot Cost)

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What It Does

Umbrella is an AI-powered cost management platform that gathers billing data from all three major clouds (along with Kubernetes and SaaS tools). It features a waste detection component that automatically identifies and ranks wasted resources by potential savings impact, scanning for idle resources, orphaned volumes, outdated snapshots, and underutilised databases.

It also captures RI and Storage Plan usage to determine the most beneficial discount combinations based on actual usage.

Strengths

• Adaptive machine learning-powered forecasting
• CostGPT for on-demand cost queries
• Prioritised waste detection ranking
• 18-24 months of data retention at any level of granularity
• Multi-cloud + Kubernetes visibility

Best for: Multi-cloud FinOps teams seeking to forecast and detect waste across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

What to Watch Out For: There is no automatic execution; you’ll receive CLI instructions for changes instead of direct action. Users have also noted that limited role permissions can cause confusion in larger teams.

What Customers Say: “It provides real-time visibility into cloud costs, usage, and performance, enabling organisations to identify and eliminate cost anomalies as they occur.”

4. Holori

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What It Does

Holori serves as a FinOps platform tailored for the AI era, consolidating costs from AWS, Azure, and GCP within a single interactive dashboard. Notably, it features a diagram view that visually maps your entire infrastructure.

It also simulates potential cost implications of moving workloads to a different provider, and its virtual tags assist teams in managing poorly organised native tags by labelling resources in bulk.

Strengths

• Custom alerts via Slack, Teams, and email
• Shared cost policies for breaking down expenses across teams
• Reusable dashboard templates per department
• Budget monitoring with alerts for thresholds
• Weekly automated cost reports

Best for: Multi-cloud teams seeking both infrastructure visualisation and cost management.

What to Watch Out For: As your setup expands, the diagram can become challenging to interpret. Users have also pointed out occasional sluggishness with extensive data sets, and some features are still listed as under development.

What Customers Say: “Before Holori, tracking our cloud costs by customer was complex. Now, it’s straightforward, and we can monitor shared costs effectively.”

5. Spot by NetApp (Acquired by Flexera)

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What It Does

Spot integrates CloudCheckr’s cost management platform with NetApp’s professional services. Their experts will set up the tool for you, scan your infrastructure, and collaborate with your team to review recommendations.

They also assist in resolving any issues found, covering aspects of cost, security, and compliance.

Strengths

• Expert-led installation and configuration
• Combined analysis of cost, security, and compliance
• Flexible engagement options (one-time, monthly, quarterly)
• Mandatory tagging for effective cost segregation
• A unified dashboard for comprehensive infrastructure oversight

Best for: Teams requiring professional assistance alongside their cost optimisation tools.

What to Watch Out For: Instance availability may vary based on cloud provider and region, so strategies around spot pricing can fluctuate. Additionally, remediation is limited to two days per engagement, with any extended service incurring further costs.

What Customers Say: “Spot allows us to enforce mandatory tags on all resources, facilitating quick cost segregation.”

6. Kubex

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What It Does

If oversized VMs and containers are your primary cost concerns, Kubex is worth considering. It employs machine learning across your cloud environments (Azure, AWS, GCP) to analyse workload performance over weeks.

Then, it provides recommendations on which instance types and families to transition to. Your engineers can integrate it with Terraform or Azure Resource Manager, automatically selecting the right sizes during deployments.

Strengths

• Compatibility and effort scoring for each change
• Integration with CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) pipelines
• K8s rightsizing at the container level
• Agentic AI with support for MCP interfaces
• Generates impact reports for stakeholder approval

Best for: Engineering teams focused on compute and Kubernetes rightsizing with CI/CD integration.

What to Watch Out For: Network costs are not addressed. Also, managing numerous accounts can be cumbersome, as there aren’t saved filter presets, requiring manual re-selection of groups each time.

What Customers Say: “Kubex has provided us with clarity and control over our cloud resource optimisation, giving us a distinct advantage.”

7. ProsperOps

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What It Does

ProsperOps autonomously manages your Reserved Instance and Savings Plan portfolio. It continuously adjusts your commitment coverage based on changing usage patterns, ensuring you’re consistently obtaining optimal discounts without over-committing.

The platform also includes a resource scheduler that shuts down non-production environments (such as EC2 and RDS) according to a set timetable and synchronises with the discount engine.

Strengths

• Completely autonomous discount management
• Scheduler syncs with commitment coverage
• Tracks effective savings and potential risks
• Multi-cloud capability (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• It pays for itself through generated savings

Best for: FinOps teams seeking automated commitment management across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

What to Watch Out For: Pricing lacks transparency upfront, making it tricky to estimate costs. Additionally, advanced customisation and detailed reporting options are limited.

What Customers Say: “Setting up ProsperOps is quite straightforward, and we’ve enjoyed monthly savings with zero ongoing management on our end.”

8. Sedai

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What It Does

Sedai focuses on safety in its optimisation approach. Leveraging patented reinforcement learning, it optimises your cloud gradually, avoiding abrupt changes. You can initiate in Copilot mode, where you approve each adjustment, before transitioning to Autopilot once you have gained trust.

It continuously rightsizes workloads based on actual application behaviour, optimises clusters so you’re not paying for idle nodes, and provides cost attribution to identify who is responsible for spending.

Strengths

• Eight US patents for safe autonomous actions
• Progression from Copilot to Autopilot modes
• Cluster optimisation after rightsizing
• Updates IaC without exceeding guardrails
• Used by reputable firms like Palo Alto Networks, Experian, and HP

Best for: Engineering teams that seek autonomous cloud optimisation but are cautious about the risks involved with production.

What to Watch Out For: Configuring it within production environments isn’t straightforward, and assistance from Sedai’s team is usually required for initial deployment.

What Customers Say: “Sedai’s continuous cost optimisation has helped maximise our return on investment in cloud services.”

9. nOps

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What It Does

nOps automates the acquisition and management of your Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Compute Usage Discounts. It employs adaptive laddering, committing to small, incremental purchases rather than large blocks.

It recalibrates optimal coverage every hour, which is advantageous for businesses experiencing spiky or seasonal workloads. You also benefit from multi-cloud cost visibility, dashboards, and anomaly detection capabilities.

Strengths

• Adaptive laddering allows for flexible commitments
• Hourly coverage recalculations
• FinOps AI agent for cost-related queries
• Integrates with various tools including Slack, Jira, Datadog, and Snowflake
• Pays for itself based on the percentage of savings

Best for: Primarily AWS-focused teams seeking automated commitment management, with some support for Azure and GCP.

What to Watch Out For: Some advanced reporting features are add-ons, and without them, reports may seem somewhat limited.

What Customers Say: “nOps are very transparent and genuinely committed to helping you save money. The integration process is straightforward and the dashboard is quite helpful.”

10. Lucidity

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What It Does

Lucidity is specifically focused on storage, addressing the common issue where organisations often pay for nearly three times the block storage they actually utilise. It operates across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Lumen examines every disk in your environment, assessing them against actual IOPS, throughput, and latency data, and determines which should be downgraded to a more economical tier. It can also identify four types of idle disks: unattached, reserved, unmounted, and zero-I/O.

Its AutoScaler feature takes this further by autonomously adjusting volumes in real-time based on actual usage, ensuring zero downtime.

Strengths

• Autonomous block storage scaling
• Detection of four categories of idle disks
• Conversational AI for storage-related queries
• Free self-assessment tool
• Cross-cloud flexibility (AWS, Azure, GCP)

Best for: Teams whose primary cost issue is with cloud block storage rather than compute resources.

What to Watch Out For: It’s deliberately narrow in focus; if storage isn’t your main expense, this tool may not be particularly beneficial for other aspects of your cloud bill.

What Customers Say: “Partnering with Lucidity has been positive. Their engineering-oriented team has demonstrated accountability at every turn.”

11. Azure Advisor

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What It Does

Azure Advisor analyses resource usage over time using telemetry data to identify underutilised VMs and opportunities for reservation purchases. Each recommendation includes actionable steps that can be executed via the portal. Moreover, it’s free—an undeniable advantage. However, it has distinct limitations.

It lacks consolidated visibility across multiple subscriptions, doesn’t offer team or product-specific cost allocations, has no anomaly detection capabilities, and requires manual intervention for all recommendations.

Strengths

• Free service integrated into the Azure portal
• Addresses cost, security, performance, and reliability
• Offers actionable recommendations directly within the portal
• No installation is required
• Customised per subscription

Best for: Azure teams with existing infrastructure looking for straightforward cost estimation tools.

What to Watch Out For: It’s challenging to achieve a comprehensive overview of idle resources across multiple subscriptions, and data often comes in disjointed segments. Additionally, no automated action can be taken based on findings; all remediation is manual.

What Customers Say: “Azure Advisor feels like having a dedicated architect continuously reviewing your setup free of charge. It highlights real issues and suggests clear steps for enhancing savings and security.”

12. CloudZero

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What It Does

CloudZero is built around a single concept: cost attribution for everything. It connects your cloud and AI billing data to your business dimensions, allowing you to see specific customer costs, feature expenses, or product line support costs. Its allocation engine effectively manages shared costs, such as Kubernetes clusters and multi-tenant services.

While it covers over 50 cloud and AI providers, CloudZero has limitations in its action capabilities; it excels at intelligence and attribution but does not automatically shut down resources or implement rightsizing changes.

Strengths

• Attribution of cost-per-customer and cost-per-feature
• Self-training anomaly detection capabilities
• Dedicated FinOps Account Manager for support
• Support for over 50 cloud and AI providers
• Custom dimensions for budgeting and reporting

Best for: SaaS companies and engineering teams requiring alignment of cloud expenditures with customer, feature, and product cost tracking.

What to Watch Out For: Obtaining detailed usage metrics often necessitates creating separate Analytics dashboards, as the standard Explorer view might not provide sufficient depth, which can become tedious.

What Customers Say: “CloudZero is highly adaptable, allowing us to incorporate our dimensions and customise views for a comprehensive overview of our environment.”

With thirteen tools on this list, we understand it can be overwhelming. Here’s a simplified approach to help you decide…

Wrapping Up

Based on our experiences, no single tool can be labelled as perfect. As we’ve outlined, some excel in commitment management, others specialise in rightsizing, and a few aim to address the full spectrum.

Your best choice hinges on identifying what specifically leads to financial strain in your Azure environment.

If you’re unsure, that’s a great starting point.

Is it oversized VMs? Idle resources that have been forgotten? Or perhaps unutilised commitments? Choose a tool that directly addresses these concerns from our list.

We developed Turbo360 to reduce the headache of teams using multiple tools to accomplish what should be a singular task. If that resonates with you, give it a try. With a 14-day free trial that doesn’t require a credit card, you can start exploring how much you might be missing out on.