Stratusphere™ FinOps vs. AWS Billing and Cost Management: An In-depth Comparison

Having the right tools to understand your AWS spending and performance can increase your innovations, and cloud budget. Discover how Stratusphere and AWS Billing and Cost Management Console can support you to understand your cloud costs, and what the key differences between the two tools are.

Cost Management Tool Overview

Stratusphere™ FinOps

Stratusphere is a unique FinOps platform that enables you to reduce your AWS costs by up to 50% and take control of complex AWS environments. Stratusphere automatically organizes all spending insights by level of effort to optimize your time, effort, and spending. Enterprises and Private Equity firms can access a comprehensive view of their spending across all their AWS accounts.

The granular data available, including projections, user activity, and content watch time, transforms your understanding and analysis of data.  

AWS Billing and Cost Management Console

AWS Billing and Cost Management Console is a suite of features that supports you in setting up your AWS billing, finding and paying invoices, and analyzing, organizing, and optimizing your spending. It also allows you to see your costs across multiple AWS accounts, enabling you to allocate costs to different teams and applications and tag costs accurately.

Stratusphere™ FinOps vs. AWS Billing and Cost Management

Primary Focus and Functionality

AWS Billing and Cost Management enables you to understand, analyze, and organize your spending. Stratusphere takes it a step further by projecting future savings, prioritizing the level of effort each change will require to undertake.  

Cost Management and Reporting Capabilities

With AWS Billing, you can view and download current and past invoices, manage payment methods, access your redeemable credits, and consolidate your charges across accounts. 

Stratusphere provides users with pre-made reports and dashboards to save you time maintaining and updating reports manually. You personalize your dashboards by inputting targets to view your benchmarks, goals, and current performance.

Target Audience

AWS Billing is made for all AWS users, especially those with increasing usage or several accounts. Stratusphere’s target audience is private equity firms to view all your portfolio’s AWS accounts and gain rapid ROI. It’s also ideal for large companies and enterprises that manage highly complex AWS environments to get visibility, detailed cost analysis, and insightful recommendations.

How Each Tool Helps Businesses Achieve Cost Efficiency

AWS Cost Management Console includes AWS Cost Explorer, Cost Optimization Hub, Cost Anomaly Detection, and Savings Plan. These different tools identify cost savings opportunities across your AWS environment.

Stratusphere analyzes all spending across all your AWS accounts, providing you with key insights and prioritization on increasing your cost efficiency.

Type of Recommendations You Can Expect

The Billing and Cost Management Console provides access to many features. Savings Plans, for example, provide flexible pricing with a commitment plan. Airbnb uses it to improve its cloud management processes and drive cost savings.

Stratusphere provides recommendations for savings in a clear dashboard with the savings rankings and by benchmarks. By diving into insights, you can view the biggest savings opportunities, full findings and analysis.

Ease of Integration and Use

AWS Billing provides several integrations, including with Data Dog, IBM® Turbonomic®, and Kubecost. As mentioned above, it is a suite of features; some are simpler than others, but overall, they’re easy to use. Stratusphere only connects with your AWS account to pull and organize the information. It is designed to be easy to use and understand.

Pros and Cons

Experience the Power of Stratusphere™ FinOps – Start Your Free Trial Now!

Using Stratusphere, you can identify 18x potential ROI, as Crunchyroll did. Crunchyroll’s AWS accounts had become increasingly complex and lacked consolidated visibility into their spending and performance. Using Stratusphere and the analysis provided by StratusGrid, they identified 5x actual monthly savings compared to month 1. Within four months, they increased their AWS net savings by four times.

To increase your savings, visibility, and cloud innovations, start your 30-day free trial of Stratusphere.