The 5 Best FinOps Tools For 2022

Cloud financial management has become an increasingly sophisticated business function over the past few years, far beyond what many cloud stakeholders anticipated. As a result, many companies are unable to monitor and allocate cloud costs accurately. 

In 2022, Gartner estimates companies will waste as much as 30% of their cloud budgets due to this problem. A more holistic approach to cloud cost management is necessary to reduce waste and optimize cloud spending. 

Consider using a cloud-based financial management system instead. Fully embracing FinOps is one way to achieve this goal.

Why FinOps?

Cost savings are just one aspect of FinOps. By enabling proactive organizations to optimize operations at scale, FinOps also empowers them to make more money. 

Through FinOps, you can automate cloud spend management, bringing financial accountability to the cloud’s variable spend model. When you know the costs involved in running different aspects of your business, you can determine which levers to pull to produce the results you desire.

For example, when you understand your cost per customer, you can more accurately calculate the gross margin per customer. If you discover your gross margins are at risk, you can decide to review your SaaS pricing at renewal. 

We’ve covered what FinOps is in more detail before, including how aligning finance and operations benefits SaaS businesses. 

In this guide, we'll go over several of the best FinOps tools you can use to automate financial governance in the cloud.

What Are The Best FinOps Solutions?  

An effective FinOps solution will align finance and operations in a language they both understand. You'll want a tool that can source the right metrics for each team. To make it more comprehensive, it should also enrich that data with cost insights from multiple, relevant sources, such as infrastructure and app data. 

Then it should break down the data into cost dimensions that speak the language of your business and stakeholders, such as finance (cost per customer), engineers (cost per feature), C-suite (COGS), and investors (gross margin).

Among the many cloud cost management tools out there, here are five you’ll want to check out.  

1. CloudZero

CloudZero translates cloud cost into a language that makes sense to your FinOps stakeholders, including finance, engineering, product, and more. You can measure relevant business metrics, like cost per product feature, customers, unit cost, or whatever flexible dimensions make sense for your business.

The advantage of this cloud cost intelligence approach is it enables operations and finance to do so even without engineers implementing a perfect AWS tagging strategy. It also makes CloudZero great at identifying wastage and optimizing costs, breaking down AWS bills into insightful unit cost metrics, and proactively alerting your FinOps team about cost anomalies before they occur. 

FinOps teams can easily connect costs to specific events, such as deployments, with CloudZero's easy-to-explore interface. Your team can then identify the driver of every cost. So for teams looking for a tool that can help forecast, plan, and allocate AWS costs more reliably, CloudZero can help.  

You can also get your own FinOps coach at CloudZero, who will help you optimize your cloud spend like a pro, even if you have struggled before. As a result, you'll have fewer awkward discussions about cloud costs with C-suite, the board, and investors. 

Year Founded: 2016

Category: Cloud cost intelligence 

Best for companies that want to see who, what, when, and how they spend on the cloud, and how that relates to their everyday business activities, such as onboarding new customers and adding new features. 

Pricing model: Flat annual rate 

Request a CloudZero demo to learn how CloudZero has helped companies such as Remitly, Drift, MalwareBytes, and more make sense of their cloud costs — and can help you do the same. 

2. ProsperOps

ProsperOps leverages AIOps, an always-working-in-the-background approach, and FinOps automation techniques to deliver results. 

But ProsperOps has a greater focus on optimizing AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. The tool might be worth checking out if you want a FinOps tool to identify unused cloud resources and that automatically manages RI and Savings Plans in one place. 

ProsperOps also charges you for the savings you make, unlike many tools that charge you a percentage of your cloud spend. 

Year Founded: 2018

Category: Automated RI and savings management

Best for companies with AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans that need automated optimization.

Pricing model: $0.05 per dollar saved (compute) and $0.35 per dollar saved on optimized/purchased RIs.

3. Harness

Harness’s Cloud Cost Management (CCM) makes it possible for finance and IT teams to track cloud spend collaboratively. FinOps teams can prioritize software development projects based on resource allocation and changes to business strategy.

Harness monitors and reports on opportunities to end unused instances on an hourly basis. It also enables FinOps teams to create and enforce cost policies. Teams can also use it with cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Harness' Continuous Delivery Platform also offers root cost analysis to help correlate cloud events with costs. It may be a bit pricey for some companies, depending on how their cloud infrastructure is set up. 

Year Founded: 2016

Category: Automated cost management

Best for companies seeking more granular information on their cloud spending beyond AWS. 

Pricing model: Tiers (limited freemium and paid plans) that charge by the percentage of cloud spend (2.25% of cloud spend for Teams, and 2.5% of cloud spend for Enterprise users)

4. Densify

For customers who want FinOps tools that support multiple cloud environments, including IBM Cloud and Google Cloud, Densify is worth considering. It is also compatible with container services such as Kubernetes and RedHat and hybrid environments on VMware.

Using machine learning, the tool identifies optimization opportunities, enables resource matching, accurately forecasts available resources, and prevents overprovisioning to reduce costs.       

With Densify, finance and operation teams can intelligently create scaling groups and integrate FinOps workflows with DevOps pipelines to boost their efficiency. 

Year Founded: 1999

Category: Hybrid cloud and container financial management

Best for companies that want to reduce overwhelm by checking their hybrid cloud spend in one place. 

Pricing model: Request pricing 

5. AWS Cost Explorer

Amazon Web Services introduced Cost Explorer in response to customer demand. AWS users previously complained that AWS bills were difficult to understand. Today, Cost Explorer is a popular starting point for cloud cost and usage analysis, rightsizing, cost anomaly alerting, and savings recommendations.  

Using Cost Explorer, you can generate customized cost and usage reports sent to you monthly. Although it may not provide unit cost analysis like CloudZero, the tool offers resource-level granularity (hourly, daily, or monthly) and historical data going back 12 months, should you wish to compare your costs over time. 

Despite this, most users cannot rely on AWS Cost Explorer because it relies heavily on implementing a perfect tagging strategy, which is challenging, especially in multitenant architectures, shared resources, and untagged resources. 

Moreover, AWS Cost Explorer reports are tricky to understand, interpret, and link to real business activities. When visibility is this limited, optimization opportunities become harder to identify.         

Year Introduced: 2014 

Category: AWS native cost tools

Best for companies with basic cloud costs and usage analysis.

Pricing: Free as an AWS user

See CloudZero In Action

With CloudZero, finance and operations can work together to automate cloud financial management. CloudZero provides insights that both teams, executives, and other stakeholders can use to understand the cost of each business activity in the cloud. 

Each party can then make informed, quick, and accurate strategic decisions in the best interests of the organization's finances.

to see how CloudZero can help your FinOps team achieve healthy gross margins and grow faster.