The difference in one table
| Dimension | nable | CloudHealth |
|---|---|---|
| Buyer & motion | Self-serve. Any engineer starts in one command, no sales call. | Enterprise, sales-led, procurement and onboarding. |
| Where your data lives | On your machine, read-only, no vendor backend. | Ingested into the CloudHealth platform. |
| Surface | In Claude, Cursor, Zed via MCP, plus a local dashboard. | A hosted governance and reporting console. |
| AI / LLM spend | Token cost by model (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock), with cloud. | Cloud governance focus; AI cost is not the core. |
| Ships the fix | Drafts a Terraform PR, propose-only, human approves. | Policies and recommendations you action in your own tooling. |
| Time to first answer | Minutes. uvx nable and ask. | Weeks: contract, onboarding, data ingestion. |
This is our page, so weigh it accordingly. Everything above is checkable against CloudHealth's own docs and ours.
When CloudHealth is the right call
You are a large enterprise that needs org-wide governance, policy enforcement, chargeback and showback across many accounts and business units, with formal reporting. That scale of governance is what CloudHealth is for.
When nable fits better
You are an engineer or a Seed-to-Series-B team that wants cost answers and fixes today, in the editor, without a sales cycle, with AI and cloud spend together, and you would rather your bill never leave your machine.
Try nable in 30 seconds, free, no signup. It runs on your machine, reads your cloud and AI bill read-only, answers cost questions in Claude or Cursor, and drafts the fix as a pull request you approve. Nothing leaves your laptop.
Common questions
Is nable a CloudHealth alternative?
For the engineer-facing cost use case, yes. nable answers cross-cloud cost questions and drafts fixes, self-serve and local. It is not an enterprise governance suite; CloudHealth is built for org-wide policy, chargeback, and reporting at large scale.
Do I need a sales call to use nable?
No. nable is self-serve: run uvx nable and you are querying cost in minutes. No procurement, no onboarding project.
Does nable do chargeback and showback?
nable attributes cost by team, service, and tag and exports reports, which covers many showback needs for smaller orgs. For enterprise-scale formal chargeback across hundreds of accounts, a governance platform like CloudHealth is purpose-built.
Where does nable run?
On your own machine. Credentials stay in your OS keychain and your bill is cached locally, unlike a hosted platform that ingests your billing data.