AWS Cost Explorer vs Omni FinOps for engineering and finance teams cutting AWS costs.
Cost Explorer is free, already in your account, and where Omni FinOps reads your AWS costs from. Here’s what each one does, what Cost Explorer leaves to you, and when it’s all you need.
Facts about AWS Cost Explorer come from its own public pages, checked October 11, 2026.
Which one fits
Cost Explorer
- You run on AWS only, and someone has time to dig through the bill every week.
- The free native tools cover you: Cost Anomaly Detection, Budgets and Cost Optimization Hub.
- You want AWS to apply some fixes itself, like Compute Optimizer’s automation rules for EBS volumes.
Omni FinOps
- You run AWS and Google Cloud and want one answer for both.
- Finance needs each jump explained in a sentence, a month-end forecast and spend by team.
- You want every fix as a command your team reviews and runs, with nothing able to change your cloud.
Side by side
What each one costs, covers and is allowed to do. Where AWS Cost Explorer’s pages don’t say, the table says so instead of guessing.
| Aspect | Cost Explorer | Omni FinOps |
|---|---|---|
| Price | AWS Cost ExplorerFree in the console. The API costs $0.01 per request. Cost Anomaly Detection, Cost Optimization Hub and Compute Optimizer are free; Budgets charges for action-enabled budgets past the first two, and for reports. | Omni FinOps$500, $1,500 or $4,000 a month, covering up to $50k, $250k or $1M of monthly cloud spend. Annual billing saves two months. It reads Cost Explorer, so each refresh makes a few API calls at $0.01 each. |
| Clouds | AWS Cost ExplorerAWS only. | Omni FinOpsAWS and Google Cloud today. Azure and IBM Cloud are coming soon. |
| History | AWS Cost ExplorerThe current month plus 13 months, daily. Up to 38 months, monthly, if you opt in. | Omni FinOpsUp to 14 months of daily cost on the first refresh. |
| Why the bill jumped | AWS Cost ExplorerCost Anomaly Detection runs about three times a day, can take up to 24 hours to flag an anomaly, and splits the root cause by service, account, Region and usage type. | Omni FinOpsSpots the first day spend ran above typical and says in one sentence which service, account and resource is behind it. |
| Waste | AWS Cost ExplorerCost Optimization Hub recommends rightsizing, idle deletion, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances across EC2, EBS, Lambda, ECS on Fargate, RDS, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, NAT Gateway and more. | Omni FinOpsIdle, oversized and dev instances running 24/7, unattached volumes, gp2, old snapshots, unused AMIs and IPs, Graviton moves and Savings Plan sizing, on AWS and Google Cloud. |
| Making changes | AWS Cost ExplorerBudget actions can apply IAM policies or SCPs, or target EC2 and RDS instances. Compute Optimizer automation rules can delete unattached EBS volumes and change volume types, once you turn them on. | Omni FinOpsNever. It has read-only access, and every lead carries the exact command for your team to run. |
| Forecast and budgets | AWS Cost ExplorerForecasts up to 18 months ahead. Budgets alert at the thresholds you set. | Omni FinOpsBudgets & Alerts email you at the line you set. The Forecaster (Growth) projects the month with its likely range, and with your plan applied. |
Where AWS Cost Explorer is stronger
- It’s free, and nothing outside AWS ever reads your account.
- Wider coverage: Cost Optimization Hub recommends changes for more resource types than Omni FinOps checks today, and it factors in your own Savings Plan and Reserved Instance terms.
- Buying in place: you can buy a Savings Plan right from its recommendation.
- Longer history: up to 38 months of monthly data if you opt in.
Where Omni FinOps is different
- One place for AWS and Google Cloud, with the same rules and the same plain sentences for both.
- Answers, not filters: each page opens with one sentence carrying the figures, so finance doesn’t have to build the report.
- Read-only by design: it can’t act on your cloud even if someone asks it to, and every status change takes a comment that stays in the item’s history.
- A plan your team can run: the Planner sorts leads into four risk waves and exports a runbook (Growth).
Using both
Omni FinOps reads Cost Explorer, so adding it replaces nothing. Keep Cost Anomaly Detection and Budgets running in AWS. Use Omni FinOps for the explanation, the plan, Google Cloud, and the reports finance asks for.
Sources, checked October 11, 2026
- What is AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Cost Explorer pricing
- AWS Budgets pricing
- AWS Budgets actions
- Cost Anomaly Detection general availability
- Managing cost anomaly detection
- Cost Optimization Hub
- Compute Optimizer automation rules
- Multi-year data in Cost Explorer
Something here out of date? Write to [email protected] and we’ll fix it.
Keep Cost Explorer. Add the answers.
No card. Read-only access. Omni FinOps never changes your cloud.