Microsoft Azure gives businesses incredible scalability and agility, but those benefits come with a hidden catch. If you don’t actively manage and align usage with real needs, you leave money on the table. Far too often, companies obsess over compute costs while quietly hemorrhaging money on unmonitored storage. And in a world where managed disk storage alone can silently eat up a large chunk of your cloud budget, that oversight is a strategic failure. Azure cost management helps businesses scale smart, stay competitive, and unlock Azure’s true value.
The Azure cost management tools we have highlighted in this guide will help you achieve your cost visibility and optimization goals.
What are the best Azure cost management tools?
1. Ternary
Ternary is an Azure FinOps tool that was developed from the ground up to help you control cloud costs. Are you in finance, trying to understand consumption patterns? Or on the engineering side, looking to pinpoint waste? Ternary gives you the tools to do it all with a platform that supports all leading cloud providers. This is especially useful for organizations operating in a hybrid or multi-cloud setup, where visibility gaps make cost management difficult.
Here’s a quick look at Ternary’s key features:
- Flexible, agentless deployment. Whether you prefer SaaS or need a self-hosted solution to meet compliance standards, Ternary has you covered. It also offers agentless monitoring for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which reduces operational overhead and makes deployment easier.
- Workload and rate optimization. Ternary provides actionable recommendations for compute, storage, database, and Kubernetes services. It also supports rate optimization strategies like Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.
- Real-time anomaly detection. The platform helps detect unexpected changes in cloud spend quickly. You can easily configure alerts and thresholds so your team is notified as soon as anything out of the ordinary happens.
2. Native Azure tools for cost management
Microsoft provides out-of-the-box also referred to as “native” tools to help organizations manage and optimize their cloud spend on Azure. These include Microsoft Cost Management, Azure Advisor, and Power BI. Together, they offer cost visibility, usage tracking, and optimization insights—all directly within the Azure ecosystem.
- Microsoft Cost Management delivers built-in cost and usage reporting, budget tracking, and forecasting.
- Azure Advisor offers actionable cost recommendations, in addition to performance, security, and high availability.
- Microsoft Power BI, while requiring a separate license, can be integrated to create advanced, custom dashboards and reports for deeper financial analysis.
While it might not offer the same level of cross-functional automation or multi-cloud bells and whistles as some third-party tools, Microsoft Cost Management is one of the most accessible entry points for organizations looking to implement foundational cost management practices.
Here are the key features of Microsoft Cost Management:
- Seamless Azure integration. Fully embedded in the Azure portal, requiring no external setup or licensing for core features.
- Hierarchical cost visibility. Supports management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups, enabling top-down budgeting and cost control across large organizations.
- Free for Azure. No added cost for using Cost Management with Azure resources—making it a cost-effective solution for teams just getting started with cloud financial governance.
3. Turbo360
Turbo360 is a dedicated Azure cost management and monitoring tool that zeroes in on making your cloud usage smarter, leaner, and way more transparent.
Turbo360’s Cost Analyzer feature particularly is a purpose-built feature designed for Azure cost analysis, monitoring, and optimization.
Let’s dig into the features that make Turbo360 a strong contender for Azure only users:
- Comprehensive cost visibility. Turbo360’s Cost Analyzer breaks down Azure expenses by resource, service, or subscription.
- Optimization scheduling. Turbo360 lets you define optimization schedules to scale down resources during off-peak hours and scale them up when business demand returns.
- Application-level mapping. Groups multiple Azure services into business-focused units for visibility.
4. CloudHealth
CloudHealth (formerly VMware Tanzu CloudHealth by Broadcom) is a multi-cloud cost management platform that combines financial visibility with governance and security monitoring. This makes it a strong fit for enterprises that need more than just basic cost reporting.
The platform is especially effective for large enterprises operating across multiple cloud providers. It gives centralized control over Azure, AWS, GCP, and VMware services, which is essential for avoiding fragmented cost tracking.
Key Azure features include:
- Optimization recommendations. CloudHealth provides rightsizing recommendations for Azure Virtual Machines, SQL Databases, and AKS to improve efficiency. Additionally, it surfaces commitment-based discount recommendations for reservable Azure services.
- Governance policy engine. You can implement policy-based rules to manage budget enforcement and usage thresholds.
- Security integration. CloudHealth also supports cloud security posture management, making it suitable for environments where SecOps and FinOps overlap.
5. IBM Cloudability
Apptio’s Cloudability, now acquired by IBM, has been a big name in the cloud cost management space for years. Cloudability is particularly useful for finance-driven FinOps teams that want structured multi-cloud reporting and forecasts.
Here are its standout features:
- Business mapping. Cloudability lets you group Azure cloud costs by business units, projects, or functions for cost visibility and reporting.
- Gamification with scorecards. Promotes accountability and efficiency across teams by tracking key KPIs.
- ITFM integration. Natively connects with ApptioOne for IT financial management and CIO-level planning.
For practitioners interested in adopting a suite of tools, IBM now offers several FinOps tools including Cloudability, IBM Turbonomic for application resource management and cloud optimization, Kubecost for Kubernetes native cost visibility and optimization, and IBM Instana for observability.
6. Flexera
Flexera is a cost management platform that helps businesses keep a tight grip on hybrid cloud spending. It offers a mix of financial visibility, operational control, and automation that makes it one of the more capable Azure cost management tools on the market.
Here are Flexera’s core capabilities:
- Enterprise cost visibility. Flexera gives you visibility into cloud spend, on-premises infrastructure, and SaaS licensing for hybrid and multi-cloud governance.
- Automated cost optimization. The platform detects unused or underutilized resources and then takes automated action by rightsizing or shutting them down.
- Cross-discipline coverage. Flexera’s capabilities and toolset span FinOps, IT asset management, SaaS management, and software asset management.
Like IBM, Flexera now has a portfolio of cost management tools including FlexeraOne, Spot by NetApp, and CloudCheckr.
7. Cast AI
If your infrastructure is built around containerized workloads running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Cast AI delivers an AI-powered solution to help you get your costs under control, your clusters properly balanced, and your engineers slightly less stressed.
The platform seamlessly integrates with Microsoft’s AKS and other Kubernetes services like Amazon EKS.
Here’s a breakdown of what Cast AI brings to the table:
- Real-time Kubernetes cost monitoring. It lets you track Kubernetes costs at every level i.e. clusters, workloads, namespaces, and even labels.
- Cloud cost optimization. Cast AI’s bread and butter is slashing Kubernetes costs through automated scaling, intelligent provisioning, and strategic bin packing.
- Automated security for containers. Cast AI scans for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance risks, keeping your infrastructure secure without the manual babysitting.
Honorable mentions
Many multi-cloud FinOps platforms provide Azure cost visibility. However, not all of them provide complete optimization capabilities equivalent to what they support for AWS. If we compiled a list of every product that claimed to provide Azure cost management, our list of top solutions would be much longer. Nonetheless, we’d be remiss if we didn’t recognize a few additional FinOps tools in the market.
- CloudZero offers several resource utilization insights for Azure. CloudZero is a ProsperOps partner for rate optimization.
- Finout lets you see how much Azure costs, but it doesn’t help you optimize. Based on their documentation, Finout’s CostGuard feature does not provide Azure recommendations and their My Commitments feature only supports AWS.
Final thoughts
With the right Azure cost management tools, your team can finally gain the visibility and control needed to stop waste in its tracks and achieve real savings.
Ternary makes it easy to visualize, manage, and optimize your Azure spend with powerful insights and cost controls.
Unlock smarter Azure cost control with Ternary.
FAQ
What are common Azure cost management challenges?
Notable Azure cost management challenges include:
- Azure pricing is complex and depends on services, region, and usage.
- Understanding cost breakdowns across services can be difficult.
- Surprise bills are common due to poor visibility or overprovisioning.
- Free tier limitations may cause confusion when services start billing.
- Manual cost tracking is time-consuming and error-prone.
- Old habits, like leaving unused resources running, increase costs.
What are best practices for Azure cost optimization?
Some of the top best practices for Azure cost optimization are:
- Use Azure cost optimization tools to monitor spend.
- Set budgets and alerts to stay within spending limits.
- Rightsize underused resources and shut down idle ones.
- Purchase Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for predictable workloads.
- Schedule non-production resources to run only during business hours.
What KPI should I track?
You should track KPIs like:
- Total cost by subscription, service, and region
- Cost per resource or application
- Budget vs. actual spend
- Resource utilization rates
- Savings from Reserved Instances or optimization actions
- Cost trends over time
- Cost per user, team, or business unit
