Cloud computing has become a crucial paradigm for large-scale data-intensive applications, but it also brings challenges like energy consumption, execution time, heat, and operational costs. Improving workflow scheduling in cloud environments can address these issues and optimize resource utilization, leading to significant ecological and financial benefits. As data centres and networks continue to expand globally, efficient scheduling becomes even more critical for achieving better performance and sustainability in cloud computing. Schedulers mindful of energy and deadlines will assign resources to jobs in a way that consumes the least energy while upholding the task’s quality standards. Because this scheduling involves a Non-deterministic Polynomial (NP)-hard problem, the schedulers are able to minimize complexity by utilizing metaheuristic techniques. This work has developed methods like Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for optimizing the scheduler. Local search and exploration are respectably supported by heuristic algorithms. The algorithm’s exploration and exploitation features must also be balanced. The primary objective is to optimize computation-intensive workflows in a way that minimizes both energy consumption and execution time while maximizing throughput. This optimization should be achieved without compromising the Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee provided to users. The focus is on striking a balance between energy efficiency and performance to enhance the overall efficiency and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing environments. According to the simulation findings, the suggested ABC has a higher guarantee ratio for 5000 jobs when compared to the GA, PSO, GA with the longest processing time, and GA with the lowest processing time, by 7.14 percent, 4.7 percent, 3.5 percent, and 2.3 percent, respectively. It is observed that the proposed ABC possesses qualities like high flexibility, great robustness, and quick convergence leading to good performance.