As with all of the native cloud providers, Azure Cost Management is a suite of free tools that provides basic visibility and cost optimisation recommendations, but falls short on provide automated cost optimization, or deep support for Kubernetes and proactive cloud governance that Digiusher provides out of the box.

Features	Digiusher	Azure Cost Management
Solution
Deployment Option	SaaS, Dedicated Managed Hosting & Self-Hosting	SaaS
Multi-Cloud Support	AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba (OCI – Coming Soon!)	Azure and AWS only
On-Prem Cost Monitoring	Kubernetes Only	NONE
Pricing Model	Fixed Annual Subscription Fees	Azure: Free, AWS: Percent of Cloud Spend
Enterprise Pricing Model with Unlimited Spend, Accounts, Users, Subscriptions	Enterprise Annual Subscription Available	NOT AVAILABLE
Cost Visibility
Cost Perspectives / Chargeback / Showback	YES	PARTIAL
Cost Categories / Dynamic Bucketing	YES	PARTIAL
Kubernetes Cost Allocation (By Node/Cluster/Workload)	YES	NO
Multi-Cloud Cost Visualizations	YES	AZURE, AWS
Databricks Cost Visibility	YES	NO
Snowflakes Cost Visibility	Coming Soon!	NO
Import 3rd Party Costs	Coming Soon!	NO
Out-of-the-Box Dashboards	YES	YES
Custom BI Dashboards	YES	YES
Forecasting	YES	YES
Cloud Inventory	YES	YES
Cost Optimization
Anomaly Detection	YES	PARTIAL
Idle Resource Management	YES	NO
AWS Compute Recommendations	YES	NO
Azure Compute Recommendations	YES	YES
GCP Compute Recommendations	YES	NO
RI / SP Planning and Recommendations	YES	AZURE ONLY
Governance
Budgets	YES	PARTIAL
Alerts	YES	YES
Reporting	YES	YES
Administrative
Multi-Currency Support	YES	PARTIAL (NO CONVERSION)
Role-based Access Control	YES	YES
Full Audit Trails	YES	YES
Training	YES	YES
Documentation	YES	YES
Support Available	8X5 through Email and Support Website	24X7 Available
MSP-Specific
Single Dashboard to manage multiple clients	YES	NO
Billing Engine	Coming Soon!	NO

Summary: 

Azure Cost Management provides a good set of visibility, savings, and forecast tools for Azure, and visibility into AWS (for a fee). As a free tool available to Azure customers, it provides the basics that finance teams and budget owners would want to know. However, they fall short in providing support for multi-cloud setups and container orchestration outside of AKS, which is where the world is headed. To fully leverage the capabilities of Azure Cost Management and get a deep understanding of costs, there’s an inordinate amount of tagging required, and customers find themselves lacking support for day-to-day operations. Azure Cost Management is built for point-in-time views into costs, not for the daily toil that goes into efficient cloud cost management.

If you’re looking for rich multi-cloud and container cost visibility, optimization and governance, Digiusher Multi-Cloud Cost Governance and Optimisation is the clear winner. Digiusher delivers automated cloud cost savings features that don’t exist in Azure Cost Management, as well as deep visibility into multi-cloud and Kubernetes costs. Our Cloud Asset Governance provides proactive cost optimization and guardrails for future cloud spend. 

Multi-Cloud Cost Visibility and Optimization

We live in a multi-cloud world, and understanding your cloud costs across all of your cloud providers is an essential requirement for most firms. Visualizing costs by resource, region, and management groups is a minimum requirement when assessing cost management tools.

Azure Cost Management does have support for creating connectors into AWS accounts, so they can give customers unified views of cloud costs by cloud provider, as well as importing that data into their Power BI tool for more advanced cost analytics. Unfortunately, this is where their multi-cloud support stops. They do not provide cost recommendations for AWS resources, nor recommendations for AWS SP/RI commitments, which one should reasonably expect when they are being asked to pay for AWS support.

Digiusher delivers true multi-cloud support, giving powerful cost visibility via Cost Perspectives and Categories that allow users to create granular, business specific views of multi-cloud costs. We can also provide recommendations across all cloud providers, as well as Kubernetes clusters.

Kubernetes Support

Cloud-native deployments depend on Kubernetes to deliver scalable and powerful services that can be deployed on shared infrastructure. The challenge, though, is getting the full picture of what portion of shared clusters are consumed by different teams or applications. 

Azure Cost Explorer doesn’t include any specific support for viewing AKS cluster costs, and can only statically allocate shared costs at a management group or subscription level. Given the dynamic nature of shared cluster usage, this is a major gap in cost visibility. You also won’t get any cost optimization recommendations from Azure Advisor, which is fairly limited in the scope of resources it can cover. 

Digiusher not only gives you deep insights into shared cluster costs, but we also provide detailed rightsizing recommendations at the workload and node pool levels.

Network Cost Visibility

Azure does not provide any clear visibility into data transfer costs in an interactive manner, thereby, making it a very hard for engineers to unlock architecture and design bottlenecks.

With Digiusher, its a cakewalk with built-in dashboards and navigation edited to unlock the data transfers

Enterprise Offering:

Large enterprises, Regulated industries and public sector firms needs to have a secure offering that could run within their own environment under their control. Therefore, Digiusher offers a self-hosted unlimited Enterprise offering in its pricing model making it highly beneficial and apt for such customers. For details visit our pricing page.