Top 12 FinOps Tools to Consider in 2024

Adopting FinOps is more than just a strategic choice; it's a cultural shift that prioritizes collaboration and accountability among IT, DevOps, and finance teams. The primary objective is to optimize cloud usage and costs through comprehensive accountability across every product, feature, and transaction.

Organizations quickly realize that implementing FinOps methodologies requires a dedicated solution to manage the immense challenge of allocating and governing 100% of their infrastructure spending. FinOps tools and platforms are specifically designed to help decision-makers navigate complex billing using advanced budgeting and forecasting, correlate costs with products, projects, and teams, and ensure efficient growth and sustainability. An enterprise FinOps solution can do all that and more on a massive scale.

Table of Contents

1. Cloud Cost Management Versus FinOps
2. Key Functions and Features
3. 12 FinOps Tools to Consider in 2024 
4. Choosing a FinOps Tool Thats Right For Your Business

Cloud Cost Management Versus FinOps

Understanding the differences between FinOps and conventional cloud cost management is crucial, especially since FinOps is a relatively new term. While both share similarities, they cater to different audiences and offer distinct features.

Cloud cost management tools, like AWS Cost Explorer or GCP Cost Management, focus on reporting cloud resource usage and costs. These reports, typically seen by a small audience, lack actionable insights and a comprehensive view of the entire infrastructure. In contrast, modern FinOps tools provide enhanced visibility and control over cloud spend, injecting business context such as cost per team or feature. They enable governance through budgeting, forecasting, anomaly detection, and cost optimization. Independent of specific cloud vendors, FinOps tools also offer actionable insights for reducing and optimizing cloud spend, including recommendations for resource tagging, rightsizing, and cost spike alerts.

Once a company gets to a specific size, it is almost impossible to progress in your FinOps journey without building or buying a modern FinOps tool.

FinOps tools Key Functions and Features

The FinOps framework, defined by the FinOps Foundation, identifies 18 capabilities that represent the features necessary to meet the demands of the FinOps principles. A comprehensive cloud FinOps tool should support all these capabilities across a business's entire cloud estate, including containers, data lakes, warehouses, and instances. A few key capabilities of a good FinOps tool include: 

• Cost allocation: the ability to divide up bill components among providers, features, teams, and even customers.
• Tagging the ability to assign human-readable labels to cloud resources, allowing greater visibility and smarter budget allocation. This may be automated. 
• Reporting: this will enable teams to build customized reports tailored to the needs of specific departments, roles, and cloud apps.
• Forecasting: the ability to leverage past cloud usage data to help anticipate future demand and inform teams of which areas to invest in.
• Anomaly management: the capability to detect, identify, and alert on cost spikes and anomalies that may inflate cloud bills.
• Managing commitment-based discounts: the capability to help users better plan, manage, and benefit from spend and usage-based discount

12 FinOps Tools to Consider in 2024

A new FinOps tool seems to pop up every other day, offering a new and exciting way to progress in your FinOps journey. Happily, we're here to help and share our pick for the best 12 FinOps tools in the market, including both holistic tools such as Finout and point solutions that do something really well, like optimization EC2 rightsizing ones. 

#1. Finout

Finout is an enterprise-grade FinOps solution designed to help companies easily allocate, manage, and reduce their cloud spending across their entire infrastructure, including AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, Kubernetes Datadog, Snowflake, and more.

Finout's solution provides the organization as a whole with complete visibility and business context for cloud costs, enabling them to save money, work smarter, and innovate more profitably without needing to add code or an agent.

Unlike traditional CCMs, Finout offers a holistic, 100% accurate observability layer known as the MegaBill. In addition, Finout provides an instant virtual tagging layer that allocates 100% of the enterprise cloud spend, including shared cost reallocation. Finout's offering has a fixed, transparent price with no savings fees.

Finout's customers include Lyft, the New York Times, Choice Hotels, Wiz, and Tenable. On average, customers report a total cost reduction of 30% year over year and a 50% time savings for engineers.

Quote from Tenable: “I highly recommend Finout to any organization seeking to optimize their cloud resource management and drive cost efficiency in dynamic Kubernetes environments. Our experience with Finout has been exceptional, and I am confident that it will continue to play a crucial role in our ongoing success.”

Vijay Kurra | Senior Manager Cloud DevFinops

Year founded: 2020, Tel Aviv, Israel

Finout is best fitted for enterprises with complex infrastructures that need to allocate and reallocate shared costs and then provide teams with features to govern and reduce their spending.

Pricing structure: Finout's offering has a fixed, transparent price with no savings fees of around 1% of the cloud spend.

#2. Harness cost management solution

Harness is an automated cloud cost management tool that integrates with a wide range of third-party services. Although primarily a software delivery platform, Harness offers a robust suite of cloud cost optimization features tailored to the needs of DevOps teams. It is designed to help development teams save up to 70% on cloud bills through intelligent cloud cost automation.

Harness emphasizes automation throughout the entire delivery pipeline for cloud software. It efficiently manages cloud resources and idle time without requiring custom scripts or manual engineering. The platform also provides automated tagging and detailed visibility into Kubernetes costs.

Founded in 2016 in San Francisco, California, Harness is ideal for companies seeking a scalable solution for automating cloud cost management across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Its pricing structure is tier-based, charging a percentage of cloud spend between 2.25% and 2.5%. A limited free version is also available.

#3. Densify

Densify leverages machine learning to identify and forecast cloud resource usage and availability, making it a powerful tool for automating cloud cost and usage optimization. Key features include instance rightsizing and intelligent scaling of cloud resource types. Densify excels in containerization, particularly with Kubernetes, by efficiently managing clusters, namespaces, quotas, and projects at scale.

Unlike other FinOps tools, Densify primarily serves cloud engineering teams, who are increasingly pressured by finance departments to report and validate their cloud resource usage. The platform is suitable for single-, hybrid-, and multi-cloud environments, including IBM Cloud and container services like Red Hat and Kubernetes.

"Densify lets us optimize our cloud infrastructure costs, helping us save money and time."

• Cindy Vo, Finance Business Partner, Autodesk

Founded in 1999 in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Densify is ideal for companies seeking to optimize their cloud containerization in public or hybrid cloud environments. Its pricing structure is customized for each customer based on their cloud usage.

#4. Spot

Spot by NetApp provides cloud cost and usage transparency for AWS, GCP, and Azure. Since its acquisition by NetApp in 2020, Spot has enhanced its capabilities, offering advanced cloud storage and compute optimization. This acquisition has enabled the development of a comprehensive CloudOps platform that provides a wide range of data and cloud management services. Spot primarily serves large enterprises and managed service providers needing extensive cloud solutions.

Spot utilizes machine learning and automation to provision and scale cloud resources, including spot instances, reserved instances, and on-demand instances, according to application needs. The platform aims to eliminate overprovisioning and minimize cloud waste, particularly for enterprises with large cloud footprints facing significant challenges in adapting to demand.

"It is great that the impact on our bottom line was immediate and Spot will continue to make it even better."

• Dan Najjum, VP of Finance at SignalVine

Founded in 1992 in San Jose, California, Spot is ideal for businesses with large cloud environments looking to optimize their use of spot, reserved, and on-demand instances in AWS, GCP, and Azure. Its pricing structure includes a monthly pay-as-you-go plan with no annual commitment or a negotiated subscription plan based on usage and savings.

#5. Cloudability

*Cloudability co-founder Mat Elis is now on Finout's board.

Cloudability is a platform designed to analyze and optimize AWS, GCP, and Azure usage and spending. As a certified FinOps platform by Apptio, Cloudability aims to unite IT, finance, and DevOps teams to optimize cloud usage, enhance service delivery, and reduce costs. It is one of the few platforms that specifically aligns with the FinOps framework, catering primarily to large enterprises and leading cloud adopters.

Cloudability also offers a range of professional services, including strategic guidance and deep technical expertise, to help businesses implement a FinOps culture. It supports all major cloud providers and offers native integrations with Atlassian Jira, Datadog, and PagerDuty. The platform's pricing structure is based on cloud usage.

“We didn’t even have to wait until the end of the project to see benefits from working through our challenges and implementing Apptio.”

• Simone Lonoce - IT Strategy, Performance & Capabilities Director
  Barilla

Founded in 2011 in Bellevue, Washington State, Cloudability is ideal for large enterprises seeking a certified FinOps platform that streamlines SaaS portfolio management across all major cloud platforms.

Its pricing structure is customized based on business size and cloud usage, with a free 14-day trial available but no free plan.

#6. CloudHealth

*CloudHealth was bought by VMware and Broadcom, which today is widely considered a legacy solution.

CloudHealth leverages advanced analytics and automation to optimize cloud costs and usage, making it an effective tool for managing multi-cloud environments. Key features include cost allocation, budget tracking, and performance monitoring. CloudHealth excels in providing comprehensive visibility and control over cloud resources, particularly across AWS, GCP, and Azure.

CloudHealth serves a broad range of organizations, from large enterprises to smaller businesses, enabling them to gain insights into their cloud spending and resource utilization. The platform is suitable for single-, hybrid-, and multi-cloud environments, offering integrations with major cloud providers and services.

Founded in 2012 in Boston, Massachusetts, CloudHealth is ideal for companies seeking to optimize their cloud costs and usage across multiple cloud platforms. Its pricing structure is customized based on customer needs and cloud usage and is around 3% of the cloud spend.

#7. CloudCheckr

CloudCheckr leverages comprehensive analytics and automation to optimize cloud costs and ensure compliance, making it an essential tool for managing complex cloud environments. Key features include cost allocation, security and compliance monitoring, and resource optimization.

CloudCheckr excels in providing detailed insights and control over cloud resources, particularly across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

CloudCheckr caters to a wide range of organizations, from large enterprises to government agencies, helping them to maintain security standards and optimize cloud spending. The platform supports single-, hybrid-, and multi-cloud environments, offering integrations with all major cloud providers

Founded in 2011 in Rochester, New York, CloudCheckr is ideal for companies seeking to optimize cloud costs, enhance security, and ensure compliance across multiple cloud platforms.

Its pricing structure is usually around the 3%

#8. Yotascale

Yotascale leverages machine learning and advanced analytics to optimize cloud costs and resource utilization, making it a powerful tool for managing dynamic cloud environments. Key features include real-time cost allocation, anomaly detection, and predictive analytics. Yotascale excels in providing granular insights and automated recommendations, particularly for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Yotascale is tailored to meet the needs of engineering and finance teams, enabling them to collaborate effectively to control cloud spending and improve efficiency. The platform supports single-, hybrid-, and multi-cloud environments, offering integrations with all major cloud providers.

Founded in 2015 in Menlo Park, California, Yotascale is ideal for companies seeking to optimize cloud costs and resource usage with real-time insights and predictive analytics. Its pricing structure is customized based on customer needs and cloud usage.

#9. Granulate

Granulate leverages real-time continuous optimization to enhance cloud performance and reduce costs, making it an essential tool for high-performance computing environments. Key features include workload optimization, latency reduction, and resource efficiency. Granulate excels in providing autonomous optimization, particularly for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Unlike other FinOps tools, Granulate is designed to meet the needs of performance-critical applications, enabling teams to maximize their infrastructure's efficiency and performance. The platform supports single-, hybrid-, and multi-cloud environments, offering seamless integration with all major cloud providers.

Founded in 2018 in Tel Aviv, Israel, Granulate is ideal for companies seeking to optimize cloud performance and reduce costs with real-time, continuous optimization. Its pricing structure is customized based on customer needs and usage patterns.

#10. Cast.AI

Cast.AI leverages artificial intelligence and automation to optimize cloud costs and manage resources, making it a vital tool for dynamic and scalable cloud environments. Key features include cost optimization, workload automation, and multi-cloud support. Cast.AI excels in providing real-time insights and automated cost-saving recommendations, particularly for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Unlike other FinOps tools, Cast.AI is designed to help DevOps and finance teams collaborate effectively to control cloud spending and improve operational efficiency. The platform supports single-, hybrid-, and multi-cloud environments, offering integrations with all major cloud providers.

Founded in 2019 in Miami, Florida, Cast.AI is ideal for companies seeking to optimize cloud costs and manage resources with AI-driven insights and automation. Its pricing structure is customized based on customer needs and cloud usage.

#11. ProsperOps

ProsperOps leverages advanced automation and machine learning to optimize cloud costs and maximize savings, making it a crucial tool for efficient cloud financial management. Key features include continuous savings recommendations, automated purchasing of reserved instances, and real-time cost visibility. ProsperOps excels in providing intelligent cost optimization, particularly for AWS environments.

Unlike other FinOps tools, ProsperOps focuses on delivering automated savings without manual intervention, helping finance and operations teams to achieve substantial cost reductions effortlessly. The platform supports single and hybrid cloud environments, offering seamless integration with AWS and GCP.

Founded in 2018 in Austin, Texas, ProsperOps is ideal for companies seeking to optimize cloud costs and maximize savings with advanced automation and real-time insights. Its pricing structure is performance-based, aligning with the savings achieved for the customer.

#12. Usage.AI

Usage.AI leverages machine learning and automation to optimize cloud costs and resource utilization, making it an essential tool for efficient cloud management. Key features include real-time cost tracking, intelligent instance resizing, and automated budget controls. Usage.AI excels in providing precise cost-saving recommendations and optimizing cloud resources, particularly for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Unlike other FinOps tools, Usage.AI focuses on delivering actionable insights and automation tailored to the needs of finance and operations teams, enabling them to achieve substantial savings and improved efficiency.

The platform supports single-, hybrid-, and multi-cloud environments, integrating seamlessly with all major cloud providers.

Founded in 2019 in San Francisco, California, Usage.AI is ideal for companies seeking to optimize cloud costs and resource usage with advanced machine learning and automation. Its pricing structure is customized based on customer needs and cloud usage.

Choosing a FinOps Tool That's Right For Your Business

Implementing a FinOps culture isn't something that happens overnight, but it's undeniably key to building a more sustainable business model. Businesses often start with native cost management tools provided by their chosen cloud platforms, such as AWS's Cost Explorer. However, integrating the right cloud FinOps tools significantly accelerates progress toward achieving a high level of maturity.

With the right strategy and tools, businesses can tackle complex edge cases, automate cloud cost management, and set higher performance goals across the organization.

Some FinOps tools, even if not explicitly marketed as such, introduce greater complexity due to their broad approach, covering all major cloud providers and services. For instance, a FinOps tool providing visibility into Azure cloud costs might be unnecessary if your business only uses AWS and GCP. Some platforms are designed for global enterprises with extensive cloud footprints, while others are better suited for startups and scale-ups with smaller but rapidly growing cloud environments. Choosing a tool that matches your business size, current and anticipated FinOps maturity, and KPIs is crucial.

Finout gives businesses total cloud cost observability in minutes with a single source of truth for your cloud spend. Book a demo with our specialists today to begin your FinOps journey.