CloudZero Vs. Vantage

1. Cost allocation

With CloudZero, you can transform and allocate your spend in real-time — and 100% of your cloud spend in hours, not days or weeks. 

Because CloudZero does not rely on tags (perfect or messy) to allocate costs, you can quickly and accurately view the people, products, and processes that drive your cloud spend — with no tag-related omissions.

Cost allocation in Vantage is tag-reliant, which means your cost data will be as accurate as your tags are. That also means you may struggle to get the whole picture because tags provide insight as far as the scope they cover. Vantage also cannot allocate shared costs, meaning potentially major cost data omissions.

In comparison, CloudZero leverages infrastructure and application data to enable you to capture, understand, and act on the costs of tagged, untagged, and untaggable resources — as well as view cost per unit within shared environments.

2. Unit cost

Vantage lets you view your “per unit costs” in four business-specific metrics: cost per customer, per query, per unit, and per endpoint. This can help you capture your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) to some extent. Plus, you can programmatically add data via API to keep your unit data within Vantage — should you want it as your sole source of truth.

Vantage’s limitation is that “per unit costs” are calculated via crude math: dividing your total cloud costs by your total number of users, for example. This means a “per unit cost” is an average cost — not a precise figure driven by a combination of billing and usage data.

With CloudZero, you get up to 12 standard views (Dimensions) by default, including cost per individual customer, per feature, and per project. You can then add custom Dimensions to see costs in the business metrics you actually care about.

Plus, CloudZero reports context-rich cost data in the context of engineering (cost per feature, per deployment, per environment, per service, per team, etc), finance (cost per customer, per project, etc), and FinOps (COGS, gross margin analysis, etc).

3. Multi-cloud visibility

Both CloudZero and Vantage offer multiple platform support, including cloud providers AWS, Azure, and GCP. They also support cost visibility into platforms such as Snowflake, Kubernetes, Datadog, New Relic, MongoDB, and Databricks. In other words, you can see the costs of all connected vendors in one place.

Yet, CloudZero provides the truest single pane of glass for your cloud costs. That’s both because CloudZero is the only platform to dynamically allocated untagged, shared, and multi-tenant costs, ensuring that you’re seeing 100% of your costs, with no omissions. 

Also, only CloudZero delivers complete Kubernetes cost data alongside non-containerized cost insights. This helps you see your entire costs in one place, rather than a separate view for each metric or Dimension. No room for blindspots. 

4. Kubernetes cost visibility

CloudZero’s Kubernetes Cost Analysis captures, analyzes, and breaks down your Kubernetes costs into immediately actionable insights — down to the hour. In addition, these cost insights align with popular Kubernetes concepts, such as cost per namespace, per service, per cluster, per node, per pod, etc. 

Ultimately, CloudZero empowers you to view your containerized and non-containerized costs together for easier analysis. With Vantage, you can drill into Kubernetes spend, such as cost by service or label, alongside out-of-cluster spend, such as caching, storage, or database costs.

5. Cost optimization

Vantage takes the traditional approach; finance-oriented cost optimization. For example, it allows you to purchase and sell 3-year, no-upfront RIs to save money as soon as possible. It also auto-generates cost recommendations and automatically implements them in your environment to save you time and money.

Using CloudZero’s engineering-led optimization (ELO) approach, your technical teams can understand the cost impact of their architectural decisions. This cost-awareness drives them to build cost-effective solutions that achieve both short-term and long-term cost optimization.  

Plus, CloudZero helps you identify the specific people, products, and processes that consume your cloud spend. This means you can pinpoint who, what, or why your costs are changing. It also means you can tell exactly where to reduce usage to cut costs or increase investment to maximize revenue and returns.

One more thing. Vantage sends automated, cross-vendor cost anomaly alerts via Slack, Teams, or email. You choose how often you receive them: daily, weekly, or monthly. In addition, you can archive them or create a workflow for a specific person to fix the cost issue. 

CloudZero detects cost anomalies in real-time and across providers. A context-rich notification then alerts your team to potential overspending through Slack, email, and text message, so they can fix it ASAP.

6. Customer success

Unlike other platforms, CloudZero’s customer support is done by professionals with actual FinOps experience. A CloudZero FinOps Account Manager consults with you on an ongoing basis. They share best practices — and even implement them on your behalf. This helps reduce your time to value. 

Vantage puts its best foot forward to serve its customers. Yet, its only customer rep is not a FinOps specialist, so they may not answer questions you have. To its credit, Vantage does offer automated cost recommendations that it automatically implements in your environment.