External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Apptio Costing is one of the best and a game changer in IT financial analysis tools. In my organization, I use it for annual budgeting, monthly forecasting, and capital project tracking. I also use Apptio Costing to manage IT spend requests.
Regarding my main use case, I use Apptio Costing for cost allocation, showback/chargeback, and TCO reporting.
The best features that Apptio Costing offers include data aggregation, flexibility, support communication, dynamic reporting, ease of use, and IT reporting.
Out of those features, planning, budget, and forecasting in Apptio Costing has made the biggest difference for my team, as it helps with annual budgeting, monthly forecasting, and capital project tracking.
Loading actuals from Oracle in Apptio Costing is great.
Apptio Costing has positively impacted my organization by improving forecast accuracy, streamlining the annual budgeting process and saving a lot of time, and capturing a record of Capex spend approvals has also been improved.
My team now works roughly 40 to 65% faster as a result of the time savings from Apptio Costing.
Apptio Costing can be improved with more spend AI insights.
The user interface of Apptio Costing should be more intuitive and easy to navigate for new users.
I have been using Apptio Costing for seven years.
Apptio Costing is stable.
Apptio Costing's scalability is very good because it has continued to grow with my organization.
The customer support for Apptio Costing is very responsive and proactive.
Previously, I was using IBM Cloudability before switching to Apptio Costing.
I have seen a return on investment from Apptio Costing, which includes the acceleration of the planning process. The controlled environment and automation has been great, saving time and cost, while project accounting has been streamlined to reduce errors.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Apptio Costing was that everything was cost-effective and affordable.
Before choosing Apptio Costing, I evaluated IBM Cloudability as one of the options.
I would rate Apptio Costing as nine out of ten.
I give it a nine out of ten because it has delivered cost transparency, especially to my tech spend.
My advice to others looking into using Apptio Costing is that cost transparency and TCO for the product and platform model that I was unable to achieve previously has now been accomplished. Apptio Costing is a wonderful product for TBM implementation, which also needs a few enhancements to meet current industry standards.
Apptio Costing is a great tool for allocating cost to business units and great for transparency, especially in IT spend and IT tech spend.
My main use case for Apptio Costing is planning and cost transparency. I use it for the IT budget for both direct and chargeback, and leverage it for reporting and forecasting IT expenses.
A quick, specific example of how I use Apptio Costing for reporting or forecasting IT expenses is that cost transparency enables visibility to the business on what costs they are incurring.
This visibility is important for my business because it works really well for IT budgeting direct expenses, and cost transparency could provide better reporting with details for all expenses.
Some of the best features Apptio Costing offers are dashboards, insights, TBM, a data model, the ability to evaluate spend, forecasting capabilities, granular modeling, and report building.
Out of those features, I find myself using reporting and forecasting the most day-to-day because it allows for the company to understand the impact of project spend on the overall IT projects to show value.
I would add that budget forecasting reports, data ingestion, and time series data are also important features.
Apptio Costing has impacted my organization positively because everything with Apptio Costing has been positive, and one thing is that it is very easy to use.
I think Apptio Costing could be improved, particularly the user interface.
The UI should be more user-friendly and intuitive, as drilling down into budget line items in planning takes time and multiple clicks.
I think there is room for improvement in Apptio Costing with creating custom report views.
I have been using Apptio Costing for about nine years, even in my previous organization.
Apptio Costing is very stable, and I have not experienced any downtime or lagging.
I would say Apptio Costing is scalable because it has handled my organization's growth efficiently.
The customer support is very responsive and helpful.
I would rate the customer support an eight out of ten.
I previously used a different solution, and some of the alternatives were SAP Cloud ERP and Microsoft Project Server.
I switched from SAP Cloud ERP and Microsoft Project Server to Apptio Costing because planning is very versatile and works in many scenarios due to it being simple and easy to adapt.
My company has a business relationship with the vendor as customers.
A specific outcome or metric resulting from using Apptio Costing is that it has enabled a great relationship between IT, finance, and the business units, giving the business units and the SSUs much better visibility into what their technology costs are, making decisions behind tech investments easier with the budgeting tool Apptio Costing provides.
Before choosing Apptio Costing, I evaluated other options, including the ServiceNow platform.
My advice for others looking into using Apptio Costing is that it is easy to do the recharge we require, which was completely manual before Apptio Costing. Budget creation was in Excel with many issues and bugs, but now it has been streamlined by Apptio Costing, saving a lot of time and reducing error. It is a great tool for IT budgeting and cost transparency, so it is a highly recommendable tool.
Since we started using this tool, we have good reports to see the variances, and the tool has been great because there has been a lot of positive impact on delivering cost transparency or a sub-ledger to our tech spend.
I think Apptio Costing is a great tool for cost optimization as budgets are clear and business units are aware of costs. I am giving this review a rating of nine out of ten.
Apptio Costing has made our lives much easier by allowing us to easily adjust the budget and incorporate changes on the fly, showing management the immediate effect of business changes. This capability has proven to be very useful.
Apptio Costing is deployed in my organization using a public cloud, and I purchased it through the AWS Marketplace.
Some of the best features Apptio Costing offers include supporting frequent updates that add new integrations, features, and tools to further enhance our marketing and capabilities.
Apptio Costing positively impacts my organization as it is a good financial accounting system that was perfectly designed for multi-user LAN environments, with improved integration with financial applications.
Apptio Costing provides IT leaders with operational details tied to the financials, indicating how much we are spending on projects versus what we think we are spending.
Improvements have been seen in procedures, particularly in our forecast system, which improved from almost four weeks to an estimated total of five days. I have seen a return on investment with Apptio Costing, as it provides a seamless way of managing our cloud costs, and having all data organized in one place facilitates significant financial transparency and planning.
The user interface should be improved to be more user-friendly, easy to navigate, and customizable.
Negative
My main use case for Apptio Costing is to bring cost transparency to the forefront and deliver a modern, streamlined way to realize the true value of IT costs and investments by understanding consumption and unit cost and aligning them to business priorities.
It provides a single source of truth for IT costs and helps eliminate guesswork, reduce waste, and guide more informed decisions.
A quick specific example of how I use Apptio Costing in my day-to-day work is that it has helped us improve accountability, optimize resources, and demonstrate the ROI of IT initiatives while aiming to set a solid foundation for IT financial management with deeper insights.
Apptio Costing has positively impacted my organization as this tool has been a true game-changer because the CFO of our organization trusts the budgets as he is able to see the details, avoiding arbitrary cuts to the budget and enabling us to repurpose staff from one department to another with a better handle on our vacancies against the budget.
We have taken on the IT budgets of six newly acquired locations because they know that we have the tools to adapt and can take on this work without issue or hassle, leading to more than doubling the IT budget from over $80 million to $300 million in the time we've had the product.
Apptio Costing enabled us to handle the IT budgets of those six new locations by allowing us to forecast a multi-year, multi-location budget of a $225 million project effectively in PFP and ended up significantly under budget when it was finished, thus avoiding the need to go back to the board to approve more funds for the project.
The best features that Apptio Costing offers include reducing the total cost of ownership associated with large applications in any organization while providing a business-centric view of technology with insights that help our IT organization unlock and shift resources.
It understands any business unit expense from the app, product, or service down to the general ledger and allocates costs based on consumption metrics, enabling precise resource allocation and budget optimization.
All the features of Apptio Costing are great and helpful, as it helps organizations classify, categorize, and consolidate IT spend, ensuring investments are directed to the highest value-add opportunities.
In addition to the features, cost recovery, where Apptio Costing determines the proper billing amount from each business unit using business rules, and unit rate billing, where it exposes the drivers business units can use to mitigate cost and reinvest in high-value IT activities, also stand out.
To improve Apptio Costing, a fixed asset data input needs to allow for more details such as quantities by line item, not by total amount, and I would appreciate access to more of our plans, as we have to achieve or purge prior monthly plans in order to keep the system running faster for our users.
It is worth mentioning that Apptio Costing does not have historical balance sheets.
I have been using Apptio Costing for the past five years.
Apptio Costing is very stable.
Apptio Costing's scalability is very good as it grows with my organization's needs, and I can handle it seamlessly and perfectly.
The customer support for Apptio Costing is very great as they are supportive and responsive 24/7.
I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to ten as eight out of ten.
Positive
Before switching to Apptio Costing, I previously used Microsoft Power BI, but I switched because it was not that leveraging, was a bit costly, and was not easy to use.
Apptio Costing was deployed in our organization using a public cloud.
I have seen a return on investment, as identifying ownership gaps in technology and applications has been easy while providing IT leaders with operational details tied to the financials, such as how much we are spending on projects versus what we think we are spending.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been that the price is relatively cost-effective, and I do not have a problem with that.
The setting is a bit straightforward when you are able to ingest everything and learn about everything; the setting becomes simple.
Before choosing Apptio Costing, I also evaluated Workiva.
The advice I would give to others looking into using Apptio Costing is that it is suited for IT finance leaders to plan, forecast, and budget, as well as automate some monthly close tasks to save time and cost. On the other hand, it is not suited to replace accounting functions software.
My company has a business relationship with the vendor as customers.
I have additional thoughts about Apptio Costing, as we are striving for a thirty to forty percent reduction in application run cost in 2026, and if we hit this, it will be a major component to making that happen.
I would rate this review an eight out of ten overall.