14 top multi-cloud management platforms for 2025

What is a multi-cloud management platform, and what does it do?

A multi-cloud management platform is a software tool designed to help administer workloads that are hosted on multiple cloud environments. Sometimes, vendors might also refer to this type of software as a hybrid cloud management platform, especially if it supports managing private clouds or on-premises resources in addition to public cloud environments. This article sticks with the more generic term of multi-cloud management.

While the exact functionality of multi-cloud management platforms can vary, most provide the following core capabilities:

• Automation and orchestration for both applications and individual VMs.
• Policy governance and compliance, including audits and service-level agreement metrics.
• Performance monitoring of the infrastructure -- compute instances, storage and networks -- and applications.
• Cost management through resource optimization and billing estimates.
• Security, including identity management, data protection and encryption.

Multi-cloud management platforms can accomplish these tasks across multiple clouds at once. That makes them different from the tooling built into cloud platforms, which can do things like help orchestrate workloads or monitor performance, but which usually only work in the same cloud platform. You generally can't use the tools built into Amazon Web Services (AWS) to manage infrastructure and workloads on Microsoft Azure, for example, or vice versa.

The ability to streamline management tasks across clouds is important because although all the major cloud platforms provide the same core types of services and resources, they implement them in different ways. Each cloud provider has its own take on identity and access management (IAM), for example. They also have somewhat different pricing models, even for the same types of services. And each generates different metrics for tracking cost and performance.

As a result, it can be challenging to deploy, monitor and secure workloads across clouds in a consistent or systematic way using a cloud providers' native tools. Without the help of a third-party multi-cloud management platform, organizations are stuck having to administer each of their cloud environments separately, without centralized or consolidated processes.

To be clear, multi-cloud management platforms don't completely abstract away the underlying cloud platforms. Businesses will still need to learn the ins and outs of each cloud they use, and they'll have to use each cloud's built-in tooling for routine tasks like launching new resources or configuring user permissions. But multi-cloud management tools can help provide a consolidated view of the various clouds a business uses.

The current outlook on multi-cloud management adoption

At present, the overriding trend in multi-cloud management is that it's becoming increasingly important. Spending on multi-cloud management software, which totaled $13.33 billion in 2023, is projected to increase by a compound annual growth rate of 23.8% over the coming decade, according to research by Fact.MR.

That growth rate is substantial but not exactly surprising. Starting in the late 2010s, businesses began eagerly adopting multi-cloud strategies -- a 2023 report from 451 Research commissioned by Oracle estimated that no fewer than 98% of enterprises use or plan to use at least two clouds. But again, managing multiple clouds can be tough because each cloud works a little differently, and cloud providers themselves offer few tools to help. Now that multi-cloud has become the norm, more and more businesses are likely realizing they need a dedicated multi-cloud management application to reap the full benefits that multi-cloud stands to offer.

Notable multi-cloud management tools and providers

Multi-cloud management vendors continue to expand their functionality in a race to offer the broadest range of tools. They often provide a centralized view into an enterprise's distributed resources, though each vendor has its strengths and weaknesses. The market remains vibrant, with a longstanding trend of acquisitions and product updates.

The following are high-level breakdowns, in alphabetical order, of the most notable vendors and products currently in the multi-cloud management market. These options span management vendors, IT service management (ITSM) tools and infrastructure-as-code options.

CloudBolt

The platform broadly supports cloud environments and hypervisors. It automates the importing and redeployment of legacy installations to the cloud. CloudBolt includes modules for cloud resource and cost management. It works through agentless technology, which can simplify deployment of resource blueprints to disparate cloud environments.

CloudCheckr

The cloud management platform integrates with existing enterprise financial systems to provide a comprehensive view of an organization's spending. Its pivot table feature lets budget analysts better understand usage, trends and inefficiencies. The tool is offered by Spot from NetApp, but continues to be available largely as a standalone product that businesses can use separately from other NetApp tools and services.

CloudSphere

The multi-cloud platform for enterprises helps plan cloud migrations and manage cloud costs and security. It uses a predictive analytics engine with more than 400 million benchmarked data points to optimize an organization's decisions about cloud costs, budgeting and resource allocations. Other capabilities include agentless application discovery and service dependency mapping, IAM, self-service provisioning within defined policies and policy compliance monitoring for both VM and container environments. Some features, such as instance planning, app cost modeling and resource inventory, are only available for certain cloud platforms like AWS, so it might not work for some enterprises' multi-cloud management needs.

Emma

The Emma platform provides workload deployment, management and cost-optimization features that work across virtually all major cloud platforms, including options like DigitalOcean and Alibaba in addition to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. It compares infrastructure costs across cloud platforms to help choose the most cost-effective option for each workload, and it sends alerts in real time if a better deal becomes available. The product also offers features like user and identity management across clouds.

Flexera Cloud Management Platform

Flexera CMP is a long-established, mature multi-cloud management platform whose features include service orchestration, policy enforcement, usage controls, cost optimization and budgeting. It has an extensive list of supported cloud providers that includes not just AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, but vendors like Oracle and SAP.

Flexera Snow Commander

Another Flexera tool, Snow Commander, provides cloud cost management, cloud resource management automation and unified governance and compliance policies across environments. It works with both public and private cloud resources. It includes automation templates, cloud expense reporting and budgeting, self-service deployment from a central resource catalog, task approval workflows and policy compliance auditing.

IBM Cloudability

IBM Cloudability -- formerly Apptio Cloudability -- addresses the cost management aspect of multi-cloud operations; security and governance aren't areas of product focus. However, the tool can automatically download and aggregate data from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud into a uniform, standardized cost database. Cloudability normalizes usage reports from multiple vendors into standard categories and tracks spending and usage across applications, projects and business units.

IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management

The Red Hat OpenShift-based hybrid cloud management platform provides a unified view of applications and cloud resources across on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Besides Red Hat, it supports VMware, Kubernetes and OpenStack private environments along with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud. The product uses Ansible and Terraform for configuration and deployment automation.

Morpheus Data

The platform offers modules for automated and self-service provisioning, resource configuration, monitoring and incident management, workload scaling, policy compliance and reporting. It has broad multi-cloud support covering more than a dozen platforms, and a large third-party ecosystem for integrations with automation, backup, IAM, ITSM, monitoring, networking and security providers. Features such as a persona-based service catalog, UIs for invoicing and reports, cloud integrations with better support for AWS Cost and Usage Reports and an updated ServiceNow plugin certified for the platform's Paris release are also offered. The numerous integrations and options for setup mean organizations with existing tools must do some post-deployment integration testing, which might require professional services.

Nutanix NCM Cost Governance

Formerly known as Beam, NCM Cost Governance monitors cloud resource consumption and includes modules for consumption, cost controls, spending policies and optimization. Unlike other multi-cloud management options, NCM Cost Governance doesn't include infrastructure or other cloud service management, though other Nutanix products do. It optimizes configurations and costs but isn't a full workload management system. Complementing this product is NCM Self-Service -- formerly known as Calm -- an application orchestration and lifecycle management tool for Nutanix's hyper-converged infrastructure.

OpenText Hybrid Cloud Management X

HCMX takes a service-centric approach to multi-cloud management with a graphical workflow designer that includes a configuration management database, more than 8,000 prebuilt workflows, 300+ application components and 150 third-party software integrations. It also can build customized usage reports that include service consumption and chargeback information.

Scalr

Scalr offers a rich set of cost management and optimization features and is particularly strong at controlling resource sprawl in VM environments. It includes self-service provisioning from a defined service catalog with a policy engine to enforce controls on resource provisioning and usage. The platform includes a modern, intuitive GUI and is known for its scalability to thousands of users. Support for VMware environments is relatively immature, with some potential feature gaps compared with other supported platforms. Users must supplement its limited monitoring feature set with third-party integrations. The product offers role-based access control (RBAC) security with built-in roles to provide granular control over user and group permissions.

ServiceNow ITOM Cloud Provisioning and Governance and Cloud Cost Management

The vendor's platform supports multi-cloud operations management in two modules. Cloud Provisioning and Governance enables resource configuration and provisioning within defined policy limits to ensure compliance across environments. Cloud Cost Management -- formerly Cloud Insights -- provides reports and dashboards of cloud usage and costs, including breaking out spending by organization, cost center or business unit.

VMware

The vendor has expanded its virtualization management stack to include cloud deployments. The VMware Aria Suite features a central management console and control plane for VMware environments regardless of the deployment platform, and modules are available to cover blueprint-based resource management, resource catalogs, policies and self-service deployment and CI/CD for DevOps organizations.

VMware tools are multi-cloud since the VMware stack can run on AWS (natively), Azure and Google Cloud, but they're not stack-agnostic. The VMware Tanzu Kubernetes platform works with AWS, Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The recent acquisition of VMware by Broadcom may conceivably lead to some changes in VMware's multi-cloud management offerings. But so far, this part of the VMware product portfolio has not seen any major overhauls, although some product names have changed.

Infrastructure-as-code tools

For the cloud-savvy DIYer infrastructure as code (IaC) tools have become a popular alternative to purpose-built multi-cloud management products. They let organizations using DevOps teams integrate cloud-agnostic service deployment, configuration management and logging into existing CI/CD toolchains. However, IaC tools don't address resource consumption, costs and usage optimization or application services such as backup and disaster recovery. Furthermore, templates and blueprints require configuration coding expertise and a UI.

Platforms such as Chef, Puppet, Red Hat Ansible and HashiCorp Terraform can systematize and automate multi-cloud management. This is done via cloud-agnostic encapsulation of resource configurations and deployments, as text files structured with YAML or JSON, that are portable and easily automated. These templates let users consistently deploy resources and configurations across all IaaS platforms that their chosen tool supports, and add new platforms via software modules or libraries.

Tips for selecting a multi-cloud management tool

When selecting a multi-cloud management tool, there are many aspects to consider. Here are two basic issues you'll need to resolve first:

• Understand why you have implemented a multi-cloud strategy in the first place. This will help you prioritize aspects of management in whatever tools you evaluate. Is it to monitor cloud spending or consolidate deeper services, such as data analytics or AI capabilities? Keep in mind that no single tool covers 100% of every enterprise's wish list.
• Determine which platforms and tools your multi-cloud management setup must accommodate. What cloud platforms do you use or might consider in the future? Does this also involve assets in a private cloud? Do you use other management tools, and will this replace them or necessitate their integration? If your organization implements DevOps, how will those processes and tools tie into your multi-cloud management efforts?

A native cloud management console

Each of these vendors and products consolidates management across multiple cloud platforms into a single interface and control plane that consistently applies configurations, as well as usage and security policies. But what if you only use one cloud and don't have to worry about managing disparate environments?

Third-party software once plugged holes in cloud vendors' management capabilities, but the major public cloud providers have dramatically enhanced their native management platforms. Tools such as AWS Cost Explorer and Microsoft Cost Management and Billing include analytics, reporting and optimization features once found only in add-on products.

In addition, cloud service providers now offer hybrid cloud frameworks capable of streamlining the management of workloads across clouds in some cases. For example, Azure Arc makes it possible to manage workloads hosted outside of Azure using native Azure tools. Google Cloud Anthos offers similar functionality. The tradeoff with products like these is that they require workloads to be configured or deployed in certain ways; for instance, Anthos generally only works with Kubernetes-based environments. This makes these tools less flexible than multi-cloud management tools that help consolidate and centralize management of workloads across clouds no matter what their native configuration. But their advantage is that they come built into the public cloud platforms you might already be using, and don't require adding a new vendor to your stack.

The bottom line: Organizations that use a single cloud setup should stick with their cloud provider's native management services for cloud workloads, and their on-premises infrastructure management stack to the degree it supports that chosen cloud platform. If you extend the workload to another cloud environment or run into significant limitations with the built-in tools, such as lack of visibility or manual versus automated provisioning and analytics, explore these multi-cloud management options instead.

Chris Tozzi is a freelance writer, research adviser and professor of IT and society who has previously worked as a journalist and Linux systems administrator.

Kurt Marko was a longtime TechTarget contributor who passed away in January 2022. He was an experienced IT analyst and consultant, a role in which he applied his broad and deep knowledge of enterprise IT architectures.