Kubecost vs. CloudZero Comparison

Who should you choose and why?

✋ Most important consideration

• If you use a combination of AWS-native services alongside Kubernetes, CloudZero is the more mature choice while also having robust reporting for Kubernetes (spend and allocations to namespaces, etc.). Kubecost has recently added support for AWS cost monitoring.

🤔 Slightly consider Kubecost over CloudZero if

• Kubecost is a good option if the lion’s share of your workloads are on Kubernetes.
• You prefer to use an open-core solution. If you want to use an open-source cost allocation tool for your cloud spend, Kubecost also created OpenCost.

🤔 Strongly consider CloudZero over Kubecost if

• You want support for cloud spend tracking for other kinds of PaaS and SaaS services, like Databricks, Snowflake, Dynatrace, and MongoDB.
• You want to abstract away the complexity and minutiae of purchasing decisions and cost allocation to things like the cost of a customer, a deployment, a feature, or a unit of work. 
• You want to get a strong grasp on your unit economics on the cloud and link cloud costs to business margins.
• You use AWS-native services.
• You’d like integrated tooling to help you optimize your upfront commitments or discount plans with cloud vendors.

📝Other Notes

• Although Kubernetes is not in its name (as it is with Kubecost), CloudZero has comparable tools for monitoring Kubernetes-related cloud spend for most use cases.
• Kubecost is open core software.