Technologies related to acceleration benefit estimation are generally described. In some examples, data centers may identify applications that may benefit from Programmable Hardware Accelerators (PHAs), and test the identified applications by running accelerated versions thereof, i.e., versions that use one or more identified PHAs, and comparing performance of the accelerated versions to reference versions, i.e., versions that do not use the one or more identified PHAs. Data centers may report comparison results may be reported to data center customers to encourage customer adoption of PHAs.