A Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Right FinOps Tools in 2024

Feb 8th, 2024
A Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Right FinOps Tools in 2024
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What Are Cloud FinOps Tools?

FinOps presents a paradigm shift to cloud cost management from the siloed approach of the old to a new mindset where everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage and spending.

First and foremost, it’s a cultural change that prioritizes team collaboration and accountability by bringing together IT, DevOps, and finance teams under a common goal. That goal is to optimize cloud usage and costs by enabling full-funnel accountability across every product, feature, and transaction.

Although FinOps is a cultural movement, software plays a vital role in helping businesses understand their cloud consumption and the costs associated with it. Cloud FinOps solutions and platforms are designed to help decision-makers make sense of complex billing and invoices and correlate costs against products, projects, and teams. For SaaS companies in particular, whose business models are entirely reliant on the cloud, FinOps is essential for ensuring long-term growth and sustainability. 

Table of Contents

  1. Cloud Cost Management Versus FinOps
  2. Key Functions and Features 
  3. Choosing a FinOps Tool Thats Right For Your Business 
  4. 5 FinOps Tools to Consider in 2024

Cloud Cost Management Versus FinOps

AWS Cost Explorer helps you visualize the costs and usage associated with your AWS services.

It is important to understand the differences between FinOps and conventional cloud cost management. The two are commonly confused, in part because FinOps is a relatively new term.

While both approaches have their similarities, they cater to different audiences. Cloud cost management is primarily a reporting function that shows how a business is using cloud-hosted resources and how much those resources cost. These reports are largely seen by a relatively small audience, and they generally don’t provide actionable insights, nor do they offer a truly granular view of cloud unit economics. Examples of cloud cost management tools include native apps such as AWS Cost Explorer or GCP Cost Management.

FinOps solutions take cloud cost management to the next level. They give businesses visibility into the cloud unit economics that matter to them, rather than to a specific cloud vendor. In addition, they provide actionable insights into how businesses can reduce and optimize their cloud spend in complex multi-cloud environments. Some, for example, may provide recommendations for resource tagging and rightsizing as well as cost spike alerts. 

Key Functions and Features

The FinOps framework, defined by the FinOps Foundation, identifies 18 capabilities, which 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 allows 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

5 FinOps Tools to Consider in 2024

The FinOps sector is growing in popularity and has seen substantial investment in the last few years. As more and more businesses move to the cloud, the market is becoming increasingly saturated with tools that support FinOps practices. Below, we’ll look at some of the best FinOps tools currently available: 

#1. Finout

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Finout offers a single source of truth for your AWS, GCP,  Kubernetes, Snowflake, and Datadog costs and usage metrics.

Finout serves as a single source of truth for all usage-based costs associated with AWS, GCP,  Snowflake, Datadog, and Kubernetes. The platform prioritizes accessibility and ease of use, which are core tenets of the FinOps framework. It only takes a short period of time to set up and get used to, and it brings DevOps, finance, and product teams together to make better, data-driven decisions about their cloud spending. 

What sets Finout apart from other tools are cloud unit economic metrics that allow you to track and manage costs in a wider business context. This means that you can understand at a glance how much a specific team, feature, or even customer is costing you. Teams can also build custom dashboards to track spending that matters to them and use that data to create real-time reporting mechanisms. 

Furthermore, unlike a lot of FinOps tools, Finout has a set pricing system that’s never connected to the percentage of your cloud bill.

"Finout allows our team to look at their cost bills from a business perspective, saving cost and engineering hours daily."

Ofir Nir, Head of DevOps at Singular.

Year founded: 2021, Tel Aviv, Israel

Best for: SaaS companies that require granular visibility into their cloud unit economics across AWS and GCP.

Pricing structure: Flat monthly rate starting at $500 per month. A free version is available for companies with a maximum annual cloud spend of $50,000.

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#2. Harness

Harness provides automated cloud cost management and integrates with a wide range of third-party tools.

Harness describes itself as a software delivery platform rather than a dedicated FinOps tool. That said, it provides a comprehensive range of cloud cost optimization features and functions tailored to the needs of DevOps teams. The solution is primarily orientated towards development teams and claims to save up to 70% of your cloud bill thanks to its intelligent cloud cost automation.

Automation is one of Harness’s main focus areas, and it spans the entire delivery pipeline for cloud software. It also actively manages cloud resources and idle time more effectively, without the need for custom scripts or manual engineering effort. Additionally, Harness offers automated tagging and provides granular Kubernetes cost visibility.

Year founded: 2016, San Francisco, California

Best for: Companies looking for a scalable solution for automating cloud cost management in AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Pricing structure: Tier-based pricing structure that charges a percentage of cloud spend of between 2.25 and 2.5%. A limited free version is also available.

#3. Densify

Densify uses machine learning to identify and forecast cloud resource usage and availability.

Densify is another platform that makes extensive use of machine learning to automate cloud cost and usage optimization. Automated routines include instance rightsizing and intelligent scaling of cloud resource types. It primarily focuses on containerization using the Kubernetes platform, thanks to its ability to manage clusters, namespaces, quotas, and projects at scale.

Unlike other FinOps tools, Densify caters primarily to the needs of cloud engineering teams, who find themselves under increasing pressure from finance departments to report and validate their use of cloud resources. The tool is suitable for use in single-, hybrid-, and multi-cloud environments, including IBM Cloud and container services such as Red Hat and Kubernetes.

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

Cindy Vo, Finance Business Partner, Autodesk

Year founded: 1999, Richmond Hill, Ontario

Best for: Companies looking to optimize their cloud containerization in public or hybrid cloud environments. 

Pricing structure: Densify offers customized pricing plans for each customer based on their cloud usage.

#4. Spot

Spot by NetApp provides cloud cost and usage transparency for AWS, GCP, and Azure.

In 2020, NetApp, a leading global data-management company, acquired Spot and has since leveraged its capabilities to bring cloud storage and compute optimization to the next level. This has resulted in the development of a CloudOps platform that provides a broad range of data and cloud management services. Spot's services primarily cater to the needs of large enterprises and managed service providers who require an extensive range of solutions.

Spot uses machine learning and automation to provision and scale cloud resources, such as spot instances, reserved instances, and on-demand instances according to application needs. Spot’s goal is to eliminate overprovisioning and minimize cloud waste, particularly for enterprises that have huge cloud footprints and find it extremely challenging to adapt 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 

Year founded: 1992, San Jose, California

Best for: Businesses with large cloud environments seeking to optimize their usage of spot, reserved, and on-demand instances in AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Pricing structure: A monthly pay-as-you-go plan with no annual commitment, or a negotiated subscription plan based on usage and savings.  

#5. Cloudability

Cloudability is a platform for analyzing and optimizing AWS, GCP, and Azure usage and spending.

Apptio Cloudability is a certified FinOps platform that aims to bring IT, finance, and DevOps teams together to optimize their cloud usage, enhance service delivery, and reduce costs. It’s one of the few platforms that align specifically with the FinOps framework, although it caters primarily to large enterprises and industry-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 of the major cloud providers and offers native integrations with Atlassian Jira, Datadog, and PagerDuty. However, its pricing structure is based on cloud usage.

“When we saw the software, we realized, not only was it simple enough for our IT finance team to use, it was simple enough for the budget owners we work with every day.”

Stephanie Rendon, Director of Finance

Year founded: 2011, Bellevue, Washington State

Best for: Big enterprises looking for a certified FinOps platform that streamlines SaaS portfolio management across all major cloud platforms.

Pricing structure: Individual custom pricing based on business size and cloud usage. There is a free 14-day trial but no free plan. 

Choosing a FinOps Tool That's Right For Your Business

Implementing a FinOps culture isn’t something that happens overnight, but it’s undeniably the key to building a more sustainable business model.

Businesses typically start with cost management tools that are native to their cloud platforms of choice, such as Cost Explorer in AWS. However, implementing the right cloud FinOps tools brings your business significantly closer to achieving a high level of maturity. Ultimately, with the right strategy empowered by the right tools, you’ll be able to address complex edge cases, automate cloud cost management, and set higher performance goals across the entire business. 

Some FinOps platforms, even if they’re not advertised as such, introduce greater complexity, often because they offer a very broad approach encompassing all the major cloud providers and services. For example, you probably don’t need a FinOps tool that provides visibility into Azure cloud costs if you only use AWS and GCP. Some platforms cater to global enterprises with massive cloud footprints, while others are better suited to startups and scaleups that may have smaller but rapidly growing cloud environments. It’s important to choose a tool that suits the size of your business, your current and anticipated level of FinOps maturity, and your business KPIs.

Final Words

When choosing cloud cost optimization and a FinOps solution, the most important thing to think about is your particular business and its key use cases. 

While all the FinOps solutions we’ve covered here offer robust and proven solutions, they also cater to different clientele. For example, if you’re looking for a platform that can support a large global enterprise with a highly complex cloud environment, one of the major providers might be a better choice. However, such solutions will likely be overkill for smaller businesses with more specific industry focuses.

To ensure you get started on the right track and get the most out of your cloud environment, we recommend carefully reviewing potential software providers. We also recommend reading their case studies to determine which vendors are the best match for your business, industry, and product.

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.

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