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Kubecost vs. CloudHealth Comparison

Which is the best Cloud Cost Management provider for you?

November 23, 2022

Written by
Louis-Victor Jadavji, Cofounder of Taloflow

Who should you choose and why?

✋ Most important consideration

  • If Kubernetes applies to greater than 50% of workloads, you probably want to leverage a solution focused on that, like Kubecost. However, if you’re looking to build an enterprise “Cloud Center of Excellence” (cloud financial management, policies, and governance), CloudHealth is the better fit.

🤔 Strongly consider Kubecost over CloudHealth if

  • If Kubernetes insights are of singular importance, we would recommend Kubecost.
  • You want better insights for optimizing container utilization. CloudHealth has less mature tools for drilling down to the container level.
  • Getting the latest cloud spend data visible in your dashboard sooner is crucial for your engineering team.

🤔 Strongly consider CloudHealth over Kubecost if

  • You want a more mature platform for monitoring native services on Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS.
  • You want to analyze and manage cloud cost, usage, security, and governance in one place through a cloud management platform (not just “cost management”).
  • The Finance department at your company will make heavy use of the tool you chose.
  • You want some kind of discount management tool on the same platform.

📝Other Notes

  • CloudHealth has powerful dynamic reports called "perspectives" that are really handy for finance teams to get a grip on the spend activity of various business units.
  • If one of your mandates is tying infrastructure costs to business processes and metrics (cost per API call, etc.), your team could stitch together Tableau (or a similar BI platform) and CloudHealth to get there.

Kubecost

Kubecost is an open-source platform that provides a bespoke cloud cost management solution designed primarily for teams extensively using Kubernetes. Born from the minds that contributed to the creation of Kubernetes at Google, Kubecost brings a deeply informed perspective to Kubernetes cost management. Recently, they have broadened their scope by incorporating capabilities to track non-Kubernetes cloud spending, expanding their utility and value proposition for teams operating mixed-technology environments.

CloudHealth

CloudHealth by VMware is a robust cloud management platform suitable for enterprises aiming to build a “Cloud Center of Excellence”. As a pioneer in Cloud Financial Management, CloudHealth was one of the first platforms capable of supporting multi-cloud environments at the enterprise level. It offers a suite of tools to help businesses manage and optimize cloud cost, usage, security, and governance, making it a vital component for successful cloud financial management.

We put all the information below in an interactive quiz to make your cloud cost management provider choice easy.

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"Gotchas"

  • CloudHealth is notorious for having a slow ingestion of cost and usage reports from cloud providers, sometimes taking 3-4 days to make the cost metrics visible on their platform.
  • While possible, tying infrastructure costs to cost centers in CloudHealth is kludgey and requires you to pull data from tools like DataDog and produce visuals in tools like Tableau.

Feature Comparison

Integration With Other Services

Compliance Requirements

Helpful Links

Learn more about Cloud Cost Management

Learn more about cloud cost management from our deep dive posts created with the help of the leading industry analysts in the field.

About the Author

Louis-Victor Jadavji (or "LV") is a recognized leader in the cloud services industry. He's helped 50+ digital native companies like ModusBox, Later, and NS1 choose the right cloud stack for their applications. His work has been featured in Forbes (30 Under 30 All-Star), HuffPost, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Inc. Magazine.

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