What Is the Harness Cloud Cost Management Platform?
Harness Cloud Cost Management is a platform to help organizations control and optimize their cloud spending. It supports multi-cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes.
Harness provides granular cost visibility, automation, and policy-based governance to help improve cost attribution, budgeting, and resource efficiency. Teams can define cost categories, track usage by team or application, and identify idle resources. It also provides anomaly detection which helps users detect and respond to unexpected cost spikes.
Harness also provides tools for commitment management and cluster optimization, enabling organizations to manage activities like reserved instance planning, savings plans optimization, and Kubernetes node scaling.
Key Features of Harness Cloud Cost Management
Here are the key capabilities that help organizations manage and reduce cloud costs across multiple environments:
- Granular cost reporting: Provides visibility into cloud expenses, enabling accurate chargeback and showback through hierarchical cost attribution and custom cost categories.
- AI-driven optimization: Identifies idle resources and automates shutdowns, helping organizations reduce non-production cloud costs. Includes actionable recommendations for optimizing a range of cloud resources.
- Cloud AutoStopping: Automatically detects unused infrastructure and stops it when idle, with auto-start capabilities for when resources are needed again.
- Commitment orchestrator: Automates the management of AWS EC2 commitments to maximize savings and ensure efficient long-term coverage.
- Cluster orchestrator: Handles autoscaling and spot instance management in EKS clusters to reduce Kubernetes costs.
- Cloud asset governance: Enforces real-time governance policies using governance-as-code, with automated remediation and policy generation.
- Multi-cloud support: Enables cost tracking and optimization across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes.
- Anomaly detection and budgeting: Monitors for abnormal cost spikes and supports budget tracking with forecasts and alerts.
Harness Pricing Packages
Harness offers three pricing tiers: Free, Essentials, and Enterprise. The cloud cost management features are only offered in the Enterprise plan. Other plans include Harness’s CI/CD and GitOps capabilities.
Free
This plan is intended for individual developers and small teams. It provides access to a basic open source platform that supports core software delivery lifecycle management. It includes tools such as Harness Open Source and Litmus Chaos to get started with DevOps workflows.
Essentials
Designed for growing organizations with small to mid-size teams, the Essentials plan includes a set of packaged modules for continuous software delivery. It provides standard support and focuses on improving operational efficiency. The main features under this plan include:
- Continuous delivery and GitOps
- Continuous integration
- Infrastructure as code management
- Security testing orchestration
Enterprise
The Enterprise tier is intended for large-scale organizations with complex requirements. It offers the most flexibility, allowing teams to select individual modules based on their specific needs. This plan includes advanced features, dedicated support, and a broader set of tools across five solution areas:
- Modernizing DevOps: Adds artifact registry, feature management, chaos engineering, service reliability, and database DevOps
- Improving developer experience: Offers insights, internal developer portals, and cloud dev environments
- Secure software delivery: Expands security with software supply chain capabilities
- Optimizing cloud spend: Includes cloud cost management tools
- Custom support: Provides premium support and access to a dedicated account manager
Pricing for the Essentials and Enterprise plans are available upon request.
Harness Limitations
While Harness Cloud Cost Management offers features for optimizing cloud spending and visibility, there are some limitations that users should be aware of. These limitations were reported by users on Trust Radius:
- Steep learning curve: Users have reported that the platform can be difficult to learn, especially for teams new to CI/CD. It requires time and training to fully understand and use all features effectively. Teams often need to invest additional effort during the initial setup phase.
- High cost for smaller teams: Pricing is considered relatively high, particularly for small to mid-sized organizations. Some users feel the value may not justify the cost unless the full feature set is being used, making it less accessible for teams with limited budgets.
- Incomplete feature set: Certain features are still evolving and may not yet be fully developed. Although the platform is actively updated and responsive to user feedback, the lack of maturity in some areas can limit functionality and delay adoption for specific use cases.
Notable Harness Competitors
1. Finout
Finout and Harness both provide cost management, but they’re built on very different foundations. Harness cost management is an add-on to a broader CI/CD and DevOps platform, which makes it useful but limited—it wasn’t designed with FinOps as the core discipline. Finout, on the other hand, was built from the ground up for cloud cost management and FinOps at enterprise scale. That means its architecture, data model, and integrations are purpose-built to give engineering and finance teams shared visibility into spend, with the granularity and flexibility needed for modern multi-cloud and SaaS-heavy environments. In short, Finout is not a bolt-on—it’s a modern, specialized tool for doing FinOps effectively today.
On top of that, Finout’s FinOps suite goes beyond basic cost allocation. It provides complete capabilities for unit economics, anomaly detection, forecasting, and automated reporting, all in a single platform. This makes it easier for organizations to operationalize FinOps practices without stitching together multiple tools or relying on manual processes. The suite is designed to support collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams—ensuring cost data isn’t just tracked, but actually used to drive better decisions at scale.
Source: Finout
2. YotaScale
Yotascale is a cloud cost management platform intended to provide engineers, FinOps teams, and platform owners with insights into cloud usage and spend. It supports multi-cloud environments and focuses on making cloud costs actionable by surfacing allocation data, enabling anomaly alerts, and offering workload-level optimization recommendations.
Key capabilities include:
- Cost visibility: Role-based dashboards with cost breakdowns by team, project, or individual engineer.
- Allocation: Automatic tagging and normalization of untagged or poorly tagged resources.
- Optimization: Engineer-level recommendations for right-sizing compute, memory, and network resources.
- Budgeting and forecasting: Predictive alerts and ML-driven commitment planning (Savings Plans, Reserved Instances).
- Anomaly detection: Immediate alerts with ownership context for rapid response to unexpected spend.
Source: Yotascale
3. Cloudhealth
CloudHealth, now known as Tanzu CloudHealth, is a cloud financial management platform that helps organizations optimize costs, govern cloud usage, and improve operational efficiency across multi-cloud environments. It offers tools for cost allocation, forecasting, rightsizing, and governance.
Key capabilities include:
- Multi-cloud visibility: Aggregates and analyzes cloud data across providers.
- Business grouping: Organizes resources by business units, teams, or applications to support chargeback, accountability, and access control.
- Cost allocation and chargeback: Aligns cloud costs to internal teams or departments with allocation and reporting.
- Budgeting and forecasting: Tracks cloud budgets and provides insights to help prevent overspending.
- Rightsizing and waste reduction: Identifies underutilized resources and recommends changes to improve efficiency.
Source: VMware
4. Pelanor
Pelanor is an AI-driven FinOps platform that helps organizations interpret and act on complex cloud spending patterns. It offers visibility into cloud and SaaS costs with a focus on clarity, anomaly explanation, and ROI-driven decisions. The system contextualizes spend at the resource level, providing impact assessments and human-readable summaries for cost spikes.
Key capabilities include:
- Cost contextualization: Maps cloud spend to specific products, customers, and projects.
- Anomaly detection: Surfaces cost anomalies with auto-generated, human-readable investigations.
- Optimization: Highlights over-provisioned resources and identifies waste through usage trend analysis.
- Custom dashboards: Visualizes shared and unit-specific cloud usage across business and engineering teams.
- AI-powered workflows: Automates insight generation and streamlines FinOps collaboration across departments.
Source: Pelanor
5. Flexera One
Flexera One is a cloud-based IT asset management (ITAM) and FinOps platform to unify visibility and control across hybrid IT environments. By combining insights from software, hardware, SaaS, and cloud infrastructure, it helps organizations manage their cloud spending.
Key capabilities include:
- Hybrid IT visibility: Delivers a centralized view of cloud, SaaS, data center, and hardware assets using enriched inventory data from Technopedia.
- Cloud cost optimization: Identifies opportunities to reduce cloud spend by analyzing usage and improving resource efficiency.
- Integrated ITAM and FinOps: Bridges asset management and financial operations with insights into SaaS, software, and cloud utilization for smarter technology decisions.
- Business-aligned cost analytics: Maps spending to business units, services, and cost centers.
- License and subscription optimization: Increases ROI by rationalizing underused licenses and eliminating redundant SaaS subscriptions.
Source: Flexera
6. IBM Cloudability
IBM Cloudability (formerly Apptio Cloudability) is a FinOps platform that enables organizations to manage, optimize, and align cloud spend with business value. It offers visibility, automation, and collaboration tools to drive cost efficiency in the cloud.
Key capabilities include:
- Cost visibility: Tracks cloud, container, and application-level spend across major providers.
- Business mapping and cost allocation: Assigns cloud costs to business units, teams, or products for chargeback and budget alignment.
- Budgets and forecasting: Provides tools to set budgets, track spend, and forecast future costs using historical data and business KPIs.
- Anomaly detection and CostGuard: Identifies unexpected spending patterns and enforces controls to prevent cost overruns.
- Automation and optimization: Automates actions like rightsizing and commitment management while maintaining performance.
Source: Apptio
7. Datadog
Datadog Cloud Cost Management (CCM) is an integrated FinOps solution within the Datadog observability platform. It enables organizations to track, allocate, and optimize cloud costs alongside performance and infrastructure metrics.
Key capabilities include:
- Cost and observability data: Combines cost data with performance metrics across AWS, Azure, GCP, and third-party SaaS providers like Snowflake and Databricks to present a complete view of infrastructure efficiency.
- Service-level cost attribution: Breaks down cloud spend by team, product, or service using Tag Pipelines, enabling cost allocation and accountability across engineering and business units.
- Container and Kubernetes cost allocation: Identifies costs by cluster, namespace, or pod—including workload and idle spend—so teams can measure application costs.
- Automated cost optimization: Provides recommendations for rightsizing, eliminating idle resources, and optimizing infrastructure usage based on observability and billing data.
- Service-specific unit economics: Supports unit cost analysis by combining service-level usage and performance data.
Source: Datadog
Conclusion
Harness Cloud Cost Management is one option for optimizing cloud usage at scale. However, organizations should weigh its costs and complexity against their internal capabilities and priorities. As with any FinOps solution, the value depends on how well it integrates into existing workflows and how effectively teams can use its insights to drive change.
