CloudZero’s Customizable Cost Tracking with Business Insight
What do you like best about the product?
What I like best about CloudZero is the flexibility it gives me to build my own views and reports. In my experience, being able to customize dashboards based on what I actually want to track — whether it’s by workload, environment, or customer — makes a big difference.
I don’t have to rely on rigid, predefined reports. I can tailor the cost tracking to match our business needs and present the data in a way that makes sense for leadership and engineering teams. That level of customization has been the most valuable part for me.
What do you dislike about the product?
One thing I didn’t like about CloudZero was the limited ability to view detailed usage metrics directly from the regular Explorer dashboard. In my experience, whenever I needed deeper or more granular information, I had to create a separate Analytics dashboard.
While the analytics capability is powerful, having to build a new dashboard each time I wanted detailed insight felt cumbersome and time-consuming. It would be much more efficient if more detailed usage metrics were accessible directly within the standard Explorer view.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
CloudZero is solving the problem of connecting cloud spend to business outcomes. Instead of just seeing AWS costs by service, we can understand costs by customer, product, or workload.
That benefits us by giving better visibility into what’s driving spend, improving forecasting, and enabling more informed decisions around optimization and pricing.
Quick API and One-View Resource Visibility
What do you like best about the product?
Allows me to view all resources in one view.
API is quick and allows me to do multiple group bys.
What do you dislike about the product?
Does not all me to do multiple group bys in the UI.
Not that its cloudzeros fault, but costs are delayed
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Cost budgeting and allocations to custom dimensions as well as daily cost visualization.
All Cloud Platforms in Centralized location
What do you like best about the product?
Combining all platforms into one, helping our several cloud providers be brought into one.
What do you dislike about the product?
To heavy AWS specific. AWS is trending down, especially support. Need to have more azure recommendations that work with utilization reports.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We have about 30 azure subscriptions, several amazon accounts, gcp and instead of having to login to each it solves it by giving me a centralized platform. When savings are recommended we still need to go in and validate it since its not 100% accurate but gets us in the right direction.
Actionable Cloud Cost Visibility with Near Real-Time Insights and Strong Unit Economics
What do you like best about the product?
What I value most about CloudZero is its ability to provide clear, actionable visibility into cloud costs by directly linking spend to the underlying business drivers.
By attributing costs to teams, services, features, and customers, it enables meaningful collaboration between Finance and Engineering and supports informed decision-making.
The near real-time insights and strong unit economics capabilities help organizations proactively manage cloud spend, reduce waste, and align infrastructure investments with business outcomes.
What do you dislike about the product?
One area of improvement for CloudZero is the learning curve for new users, particularly for stakeholders who are less familiar with cloud architectures or FinOps concepts.
While the platform is powerful, fully leveraging its advanced features requires an upfront investment in enablement and ongoing governance. Additionally, some organizations may find that achieving the most granular insights depends on a certain level of data hygiene and integration effort, which can take time to mature.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
CloudZero addresses the lack of transparency and accountability in cloud spending by connecting infrastructure costs to the services, teams, and business outcomes that generate them. Instead of treating cloud spend as a fixed or opaque overhead, it enables detailed cost attribution and unit economics, which allows Finance and Engineering to make data-driven decisions together.
This has benefited us by improving cost ownership, reducing unplanned spend, and enabling proactive cost optimization rather than reactive cost control. It also strengthens forecasting accuracy and supports margin protection by making the financial impact of technical decisions visible early and in near real time.
Flexible Budgets and Clear Spend Visibility
What do you like best about the product?
Budgets: the ability to create them and the flexibility in how they can be set. Also, the unit and metric stream finally gives us visibility into our spending and where the money goes.
What do you dislike about the product?
Notifications aren’t granular enough. For example, for a given budget I receive anomalies, weekly updates, monthly updates, and budget alerts all in the same channel. I’d like to be able to choose which notifications I’m interested in and route them to different channels (for instance, I want to be notified about an anomaly, but not necessarily about a weekly update).
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I have more visibility into our spending so we can identify savings opportunities and see a direct impact. Team also have a better understanding when costs change and what the root cause is.
Effortless Setup and Comprehensive Cloud Spend Monitoring
What do you like best about the product?
I like CloudZero for its ease of use and the onboarding process. They made sure we understood the product and tailored it to our needs. The initial setup was easy.
What do you dislike about the product?
I'd like to see more integrations in the future
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use CloudZero for monitoring cloud spend. It solves the problem of lack of cost visibility by department, project, or team.
Granular Cloud Cost Visibility with Actionable Unit-Economics Insights
What do you like best about the product?
CloudZero delivers incredibly granular, reliable visibility across AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks, making it easy to spot waste and optimize spend. It translates cloud costs into meaningful business and unit‑economics insights while empowering engineers with real‑time, actionable data. Its automation, ML-driven intelligence, and strong FinOps partnership make cost management both effortless and impactful.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes the forecasting isn’t accurate, and the dashboards should be easier to refresh after any change.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
CloudZero is helping us overcome long‑standing gaps in cloud cost transparency by giving us granular, real‑time visibility across AWS, Databricks, and Snowflake. It replaces manual, error‑prone reporting with automated ingestion and normalized cost data, enabling accurate drill‑downs by service, workspace, data domain, and job level, as shown in our FinOps and BCBSWY decks. With this visibility, we can now quickly identify underutilized resources, oversized compute, inefficient storage patterns, and idle Snowflake warehouses—directly driving significant reductions in cloud spend, including the savings demonstrated in the BCBSMA results. CloudZero also strengthens anomaly detection and budget governance, helping us catch issues earlier and improve forecasting accuracy across client environments. Overall, CloudZero enables us to make data‑driven decisions, improve accountability across teams, and deliver clearer, more reliable cost insights to both internal stakeholders and clients.
Real-time tagging compliance dashboards have improved visibility but need stronger optimization features
What is our primary use case?
We conducted a proof of concept with CloudZero that lasted three to four months. Our major focus was examining the tagging compliance report to generate a compliance dashboard, and CloudZero provided good capabilities in this area. During the POC, CloudZero assisted us by building a dashboard and helping us evaluate compliance percentage across different segments, different cloud providers, and different business sectors.
At that time, we examined tagging compliance, but we were also interested in optimization capabilities. CloudZero was deployed in our organization as a POC on the public cloud, and we used Azure and AWS as cloud providers for the POC.
What is most valuable?
CloudZero's best feature is the dashboarding capabilities. The specific capabilities that stood out to me are the dashboard and reporting functionality. CloudZero has positively impacted my organization during the POC, and the dashboarding capabilities are strong.
The dashboarding capabilities benefited my team by providing real-time compliance reports, which I found valuable. There was definitely a return on investment during the POC, particularly with the dashboarding capability and the real-time compliance view of the tagging, which was an excellent feature.
What needs improvement?
I would appreciate CloudZero to have the capability to integrate with more cloud providers. Beyond integration with additional cloud providers, I would prefer CloudZero to introduce enhanced capabilities, especially in cost optimization and Kubernetes support.
I would value CloudZero having the capability to work with metadata, to provide cost reporting dashboards, and to offer workload integrations involving Kubernetes, including pod utilization tracking. I chose a rating of seven because I'm looking for CloudZero to focus more on the optimization side and Kubernetes clustering. CloudZero has strong capabilities in tagging, compliance, and dashboarding, which is valuable, but there are other areas in the FinOps space that CloudZero should definitely prioritize. The improvements I mentioned should be sufficient.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working in my current field for almost the last four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
There were no issues with downtime and reliability during the POC; it performed well.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We only tested CloudZero with a limited cloud account because it was a POC, so I cannot speak to its scalability with larger data sets or multiple cloud accounts.
How are customer service and support?
CloudZero's customer support was very good, and I interacted with their team during the POC.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, we used Excel reporting and Power BI for tagging compliance and cloud cost management, but it was not real-time. We were seeking something that would provide real-time compliance capabilities.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm not aware of the POC pricing, but I believe CloudZero did not charge us during the POC, so I'm uncertain.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate other options before choosing CloudZero.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate CloudZero as a seven on a scale of one to ten. I would rate the customer support a nine on a scale of one to ten. Others looking into using CloudZero should experiment with their data set and develop their use cases to determine whether CloudZero can address their specific needs. My overall review rating for CloudZero is seven.
Centralized multi-cloud cost insights have driven smarter reporting and proactive anomaly control
What is our primary use case?
I have used CloudZero in a multi-cloud fashion, connecting to various public cloud environments in order to observe costs and then generate reports, dashboards, cost anomalies, and everything cloud FinOps related.
I have used CloudZero to generate reports to look at costs within specific cloud accounts, and one way in which it can help is if there's a cost anomaly within a specific cloud account. I have looked at the costs across a period of days to identify when it occurred and for which resources it occurred, which enabled drilling down into exactly why that occurred, driving cost reduction.
The main use case is to build reports, but I have also used it, and my team has used it, to build out dashboards over long periods, looking at maybe Kubernetes cluster insights, setting budgets, and working out shared cost allocation. There are many features within CloudZero that have allowed us to use it in a variety of ways.
What is most valuable?
The best features of CloudZero, in my opinion, are their reporting capabilities, their right-sizing capabilities for compute instances, their asset inventory feature, and their dashboard functionality.
Probably the dashboard feature stands out most because it allows bringing together lots of different widgets to look at lots of different types of costs across different cloud accounts, allowing me to look at many pieces of data within one screen, which is very useful to refer to.
With CloudZero being a FinOps tool, it allows looking at cloud costs from a variety of vendors from many different cloud accounts. Within our organization, it has been beneficial because we are able to take costs from loads of different cloud endpoints and then make those costs more efficient, effectively helping us to reduce the costs that we spend, which is great for the business.
I don't know how much money specifically we have saved, but CloudZero has definitely helped us with cost savings the more we use it, and it allows for better data visibility, which is invaluable in the modern workplace, especially in highly technical and tech-driven companies such as ours.
What needs improvement?
In terms of improvements for CloudZero, I felt there could be potential improvements in their budget section. I have used other tools before where the budget feature is a little easier to use in terms of the UI. I also found updating their business mappings quite difficult. When I first started using the tool, one of the first things demonstrated was a YAML config file that was thousands of lines long, which had to be updated and pushed for changes to occur within CloudZero. I would like a feature where you could update elements directly through the UI, as I understand they plan to bring that into the tool at a future date, since using that long YAML file can be very difficult and lead to errors.
Although CloudZero's reporting feature is very good, I feel I have used tools that have more feature-rich qualities for their reporting features than CloudZero, which could be something valuable considering their reporting feature is also popular.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used CloudZero for around several months, maybe just under a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
CloudZero is very stable. I did not notice any issues with technical instability, and I can see that it scales with a large number of cloud accounts, which is impressive.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
CloudZero's scalability is good. It can definitely scale to hundreds and hundreds of cloud accounts, and I imagine it can scale into the thousands as well. I have no complaints there.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support from CloudZero is great. We have interacted with a few individuals from the company and have no complaints. They were brilliant, and I really enjoyed working with them.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have used various FinOps tools within the organization, primarily the native public cloud tools. Within AWS, GCP, and Azure, they have their own FinOps tools, which were good, but since they are specific to the clouds, we had to use numerous tools at once rather than a single tool like CloudZero, which acts as a one-stop shop for aggregating all of that data.
How was the initial setup?
I thought the cost for CloudZero was reasonable for the tool, and the CloudZero team was interested in making it a reasonable cost as well, in terms of what we were looking for. The setup was quite seamless with them because we would meet regularly, and their initial support was very good. I definitely enjoyed that phase.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate other options at the same time. We were more focused on whether to continue using the cloud-native tools within the public clouds or look for a multi-cloud tool like CloudZero. Between the two, using a multi-cloud tool has definitely provided many benefits that the cloud-native tools did not.
What other advice do I have?
I rate CloudZero as nine out of ten. It is a very strong tool, and I definitely enjoy using it. I can see how it can drive cost savings and benefits for all of their customers, but there are areas for improvement just as with any tool, though there are not any standout limitations to using it, making it very strong.
I chose nine out of ten because there are some areas for improvement with CloudZero. They are very minor, and there is nothing that breaks functionality or usage. The main reason is that long YAML config file which requires thousands of lines of coding and editing, and if that were not the case, it might be a ten out of ten if I could edit directly through the UI.
I do not think there are any improvements needed for CloudZero that I have not already mentioned. It is largely just the YAML file related section and a couple of other minor improvements, but nothing large or glaring. It is a very good tool.
I cannot share specific business metrics due to data sensitivity, but I can definitely say that CloudZero can save cloud costs. It is feature-rich in terms of reporting and dashboards, and its cost anomaly aspect can help if costs ever skyrocket. I would highly recommend it to other companies looking to make their cloud costs more efficient or reduce them.
I would recommend others to use CloudZero because it is a brilliant tool, and to engage their support staff throughout the setup journey, as they are definitely experts and very helpful.
CloudZero is a great tool. I have definitely enjoyed using it and have seen business benefits from it, so I am very happy with the tool. I rate this review as nine out of ten.
Saves Time with Accurate Cost Allocation, Setup Simplicity
What do you like best about the product?
I find CloudZero incredibly useful for coast analysis as it allows monitoring every step effectively and facilitates the creation of budgets efficiently. I really appreciate how it enables proper budgeting and economic optimization, offering a precisely detailed cost allocation. The main benefit for me is the significant amount of time I save using it, which is a crucial advantage. Its integration with other tools like AWS native service, Datalog for monitoring, and Slack for alerts further enhances its usability and functionality. Additionally, the setup was straightforward, which made transitioning from AWS Cost Explorer to CloudZero an easy choice. The product outperforms AWS in management, prompting my suggestion to the team to make the switch. All these factors contribute to my high likelihood of recommending it to others, which I rated as a 9 out of 10.
What do you dislike about the product?
I find the cost formation rules in CloudZero to be complex and challenging to understand, particularly for users with less experience, which could require more time to comprehend and utilize effectively.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use CloudZero for detailed cost analysis and budget creation, which ensures economic optimization and saves me significant time. The precise cost allocation is invaluable to my team.
