comparing-finops-for-cloud-and-spend-management.md

Comparing FinOps for Cloud and Spend Management

FinOps for Cloud is SoftwareOne's cloud management tool offering comprehensive insights into your cloud infrastructure.

If you have previously used SoftwareOne's Cloud Spend Management for managing your cloud expenses, this topic will help you understand the key differences between FinOps for Cloud and Cloud Spend Management.

Integration with cloud vendors

Feature	FinOps for Cloud	Cloud Spend Management
Name	Data Sources	Cloud Tenant Setup
Amazon Web Services	Supported	Supported (currently unavailable)
Google Cloud Platform	Supported	Not supported
Microsoft 365	Not supported	Supported
Microsoft Azure	Supported	Supported

Cost allocation

Feature	FinOps for Cloud	Cloud Spend Management
Name	Pools	Custom Groups
Resource allocation	Allocate resources by name, ID, tags, data source, resource type, and region.	Allocate resources by tags or virtual tags.

Cost visualization

Feature	FinOps for Cloud	Cloud Spend Management
Name	Pools + Resources	Dashboard + Reports
Customizable dashboards	Not supported	Configuration of tiles to represent data.
Cost drill-down	Ability to filter data using categories (such as service, region, resource type, data source, owner, pool, and more) and periods (daily, weekly, or monthly). See Resources.	Ability to filter data using categories (such as platform type, provider, tenant, subscription, custom group, provider, resource name, tag, and more) and periods (half-year, monthly). See Reports.
Detailed reports	Not supported	Reports can be customized to focus on specific metrics or time periods. They can also be downloaded, emailed, or published to SFTP.
Consolidated consumption	Costs are displayed on a chart (bar or linear) with details placed in a table. See Resources.	Different chart types (such as bar, linear, area, horizontal bar, and pie) and tables (table, summary table) are used to display costs. See Reports.

Cost optimization

Feature	FinOps for Cloud	Cloud Spend Management
Name	Recommendations	Recommendations + Cloud Cost Optimization
High level overview	Main data overview contains information like total possible monthly savings, check time log, savings with commitments and savings on storage.	Overview of savings breakdown by Strategy, Total Predicted Cost, and Total Predicted Savings for 1 or 3 years.
Recommendations filtering	Based on categories (such as Savings, Security, or Critical) and applicable cloud provider services.	Based on categories (such as Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, or Security) and applicable cloud provider services.
Recommendation options	Information with short description, assigned category, affected cloud providers, affected resources, potential savings (in total and per each resource), actions (download report, settings, exclude pools, pin) and settings (each recommendation has its own conditions that can be updated during every auto check).	Shows Cost Optimization Strategy with predicted savings in the chosen currency or as percentage. Also includes a description of the purpose of chosen change.
Legacy data	Access to Archived recommendations.	Access to Realised and Unrealised recommendations.

Tagging

Feature	FinOps for Cloud	Cloud Spend Management
Name	Tagging Policies	Tags
New tags setup	Tagging policy must specify if tag is required, prohibited, or if there's a correlation. Resources affected by the policy are chosen based on filters, such as suggested filters, data source, pool, region, service, resource type, resource state, with recommendations, with violated constraints, paid network traffic from/to.	Allows you to manage and create tags. You can also specify the rule, name, add a new tag, or group as a new tag. You can also select an existing tag or create a new tag if it doesn't exist. Additionally, you can filter resources based on criteria, such as resource type, region, service, and more. Additional options include 'With recommendations', 'With violated constraints', and 'Paid network traffic from/to'. Resources are displayed in a table containing columns, such as Resource Name, Data Source, Pool, Region, Service Name, Resource Type, Resource State, and Software Asset.
Virtual tags	Not supported	Supported
Uploading tags to cloud provider	Not supported	Manage tags in manual or automated Resource rules based on resource properties, option to write tags back to vendor.

Budgeting and forecasting

Feature	FinOps for Cloud	Cloud Spend Management
Name	Quotas and Budgets	Budgets
Cloud budget manager	Tabular view when creating a new quota or budget policy is possible. Each policy allows you to review resources grouped by configured filters.	Configurable views to display Consumption and Utilization grouped by Custom Groups or Provider.
New budget setup	Budget policy must contain the type, such as resource quota, recurring budget, or expiring budget. Resources affected by the policy are chosen based on filters, such as suggested filters, data source, pool, region, service, resource type, resource state, with recommendations, with violated constraints, tags, and paid network traffic from/to.	Allows you to set up a budget by specifying the parent group name, name, total amount in USD, start date, end date, and owner email address. Resources affected by the budget are chosen based on filters such as suggested filters, data source, pool, region, service, resource type, resource state, with recommendations, with violated constraints, tags, paid network traffic from/to.

Chargeback

Feature	FinOps for Cloud	Cloud Spend Management
Name	Chargebacks	Chargebacks
Chargebacks	Not supported	Allows you to distribute cloud spend to the relevant business units and cost centers across your organization. You can select the account for which you want to add chargebacks by specifying details such as date, amount, and reason, and add multiple chargebacks. The form includes a table listing of your existing chargebacks.

Anomaly detection and spike alerting

Feature	FinOps for Cloud	Cloud Spend Management
Name	Anomaly Detection	Alerts
New anomaly detection setup	The anomaly detection policy must specify the type, such as Resource Count or Expenses. Resources affected by the policy are chosen based on filters such as suggested filters, data source, pool, region, service, resource type, resource state, with recommendations, with violated constraints, tags, paid network traffic from/to.	Three types of cloud consumption alerts are supported, including Spike Alerts, Overage Alerts, or Reserved Instance Utilization. Spike alerting identifies usage anomalies in Azure or AWS environments. Overage alerting notifies you if consumption exceeds defined values. Reserved Instance alerting monitors the utilization of reservation purchases.
Manage anomaly detection	List of all implemented policies with their names, visualization of the status, short description and applied filters.	List of implemented alerts with their names, type, visibility, last run, along with the most important columns to quickly grasp the context of the definition.
Anomaly detection details	Detailed information about the policy together with detailed history showing all historical violations.	The preview section is a graphical representation of the alert, highlighting the time at which it occurs. You can interact with this chart, which includes 'hover-over text' when viewing a vertical bar in the chart.

Governance and compliance

Feature	FinOps for Cloud	Cloud Spend Management
Name	Events	N/A
List of historical events	General list of events with simple filtering by All, Info, Warning, Error. You can also check event details, such as exact date, object name, object type, and short description.	Not supported (Audit trail redirects to Marketplace)

Collaboration

Feature	FinOps for Cloud	Cloud Spend Management
Name	User Management	N/A
Roles and permissions	Supports four types of permissions, including Organization Manager, Manager, Engineer, and Member.	User management (Moved to Marketplace in v2)
Name	Organization	Collaboration Site
Multi-organization approach	A user can be a part of different organizations and can switch between them using the Organization menu.	A user can be a part of different organizations with different role and can switch between them.
Document collaboration	Not supported	Store and share large files conveniently.

Notifications

Feature	FinOps for Cloud	Cloud Spend Management
Name	Settings	Alerting
Reporting	Supported	Supported
Alerts	Supported	Supported
Notification settings	The Organization Manager can change notification settings. Notifications can be enabled or disabled from these modules: FinOps, Policy Alerts, Recommendations, System notifications, and Account management.	Supports individual notifications with an option to share the notifications with other users.
Notification service	Email	Portal only, email and/or SMS