IBM Apptio Costing and Planning

I use Apptio Costing  in two different ways: one, to optimize the costs of cloud tools like AWS , Microsoft Azure , and Google Cloud ; and then alongside, I also use the solution to understand what is really happening, for example, to get alerts from those cloud tools right from Apptio Costing .

I integrate with AWS  and then I integrate with Google Cloud ; Apptio Costing is going to read how we use the cloud and then it is going to let us know exactly the features we do not need anymore and then the features we need more. The features we do not need anymore, we refuse to use them and that saves us more costs.

The best features Apptio Costing offers for me include what we call the user interface, which is really professional, helping our team to get a lot of things from one dashboard, for example, the total spend, and then the visual charts that show how analytics goes, and secondly, I also love the support team; they are really very supportive, responding to technical questions on time and they are available 24/7.

I find the cards more interesting in the user interface; for example, you can see exactly the total amount you always spend, where you always spend more, for example, the Opex, the Capex, so you get more insight to know exactly where you spend more in a visual.

Apptio Costing has impacted us positively by reducing the costs; we have reduced the cost by 31% because we no longer use every feature we find; we only use the features that are more important to our business.

It is over a specific period that I measured that 31% reduction; before using this solution, Apptio Costing, we were using more costs on clouds but using Apptio Costing has helped us to exactly extract what features we need to use and how to, and really that has saved us more costs because we no longer pay for what we do not use.

I think Apptio Costing can be improved in a few areas; the first one is the analysis because it takes a lot of time to automate and ingest what we call the financial and operational projections, and sometimes the given value is invalid, so that one needs more improvement so that the projection analysis is always accurate and that is going to save more people a lot of time and being aware of what the cost is going to be; another thing would be support language, for example, they only offer support in the English language, which sometimes can be hard for non-English speakers.

I think the second would be integration; currently, Apptio Costing supports a few tools like Azure , AWS, and Google Cloud, yet there are other more tools like Digital Ocean , so they can consider adding more cloud tools like Digital Ocean  in the platform or Akamai  in the platform so that they can be able to use it.

I have been using Apptio Costing for three years.

Apptio Costing is very stable, with no downtime.

Apptio Costing is scalable; it grows with you when your product grows and they do not hike prices.

Customer support for Apptio Costing is very awesome and very responsive.

This is our first solution to use because Apptio Costing met what we were looking for; we did not change or look for any other solution to use.

Pricing is okay; the lady that onboarded us was really more helpful in telling us what features we were looking for, so the cost is okay, the pricing is okay, the setup is okay, and the licensing is okay, very affordable, with no long-term commitments.

I have seen a 32% ROI as what we have seen as an increase.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Apptio Costing.

For anyone looking for cloud management, to know exactly what features they need to use and how long it is going to cost them, Apptio Costing is really the right tool, and if you are going into a longer term, they can even offer a discount, so that would be my advice and recommendation. I gave this review a rating of 10.

My main use case for Apptio Costing  is for budget forecasting and cost analysis because it is somewhat complicated in our company, particularly in our database operation area.

Currently, we use Apptio Costing  for cost analysis and budget forecasting in our database operations by leveraging AWS  tags to identify the resources that we own and manage. However, the resources are currently spending across different database accounts, and we extract and transfer the cost data from AWS  Explorer to Apptio. We leverage Apptio Costing to track the overall monthly, daily, and yearly budget against the real cost. We calculate the trending to see if we are going to be on budget or if we will be within budget in the coming months, quarters, or years. If we foresee any risk that the cost will go over budget, we look back and dive into different roles, dimensions, services, or cost types to identify any abnormalities or opportunities for optimization.

Regarding the UI and user experience, in my opinion, some of the features do not appear very professional, easy to use, or flexible.

I believe one of the best features Apptio Costing offers is the trending line.

Apptio Costing has positively impacted our organization by providing us with a consistent view and a centralized place. Having that consistent, centralized view has helped my team and organization by allowing us to control our budget in 2025. We are also trying to calculate and control the cost this year. With the help of Apptio Costing, different teams currently see a very consistent view, and the overall budget in the organization matches exactly the summarized sum amount by different organizations and sub-organizations. Before we used Apptio Costing, the final sum number usually had a very big difference when compared to the sub-organizations' numbers.

I believe Apptio Costing can be improved on the website by providing flexible features that allow us to define variables that we can change directly on the site by creating a widget based on the variable. Whether it is a predefined list or a number, integer, float number, or timing, that would make it easier for us to use. Sometimes we need to change the tag number or view team, or some dimensions, but we want all the widgets on the existing pages to remain unchanged; just the logic should change.

I have been using Apptio Costing for around three years.

Apptio Costing is stable.

I do not consider Apptio Costing's scalability to be a concern for our organization; I do not believe we need that capability on a daily basis.

I do not have experience with customer support, as we resolve problems by ourselves.

We previously used a different solution that was homegrown; we built it ourselves as a customized solution. The reason we migrated to Apptio Costing is that it is out-of-the-box to use and more powerful and flexible.

I do not have specific metrics for a return on investment, but overall, it did help us, so I do not have a concrete number to share.

I do not have experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing; I only use the product.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Apptio Costing; I have no idea what others were considered. The company purchased it, and we use it.

My advice for others looking into using Apptio Costing is that they must have a clear design for identifying resources according to the owner of the cost. Otherwise, even though you have Apptio Costing, it is still very hard to control and calculate the cost. I would rate my overall experience with Apptio Costing as an 8 out of 10.