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Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alibaba Cloud
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
7th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon AWS
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
257
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 12.0%, up from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon AWS is 16.6%, down from 19.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon AWS16.6%
Alibaba Cloud12.0%
Other71.4%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Min HtetOo - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution is useful for application development, but the user interface and user experience must be improved
The product must be made easier to use. The design is a bit tricky. When we log in to the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace and browse products, they look very small. The user experience must be improved. Alibaba Cloud must increase its partner network and brand awareness in our country. It will give our customers more opportunities to scale and save in the long run.
Asif  Meem - PeerSpot reviewer
Managed cloud services have helped accelerate experiments with flexible configuration options
Sometimes the costs associated with spinning up a service, especially managed services, have implications. For example, if I create a Glue job, that will create S3 buckets and other resources that have cost implications, but once I clean up a Glue job, it does not delete the other accessory resources. Sometimes, I have to go hunting for what resources Amazon AWS might have provisioned and how it is costing behind the scenes. It can be complex depending on your level of expertise. It is not as easy to get started, especially when it comes to secure practices. Amazon AWS is more hands-on than other platforms.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We use the solution's AI features for data analysis."
"It is easy to set up."
"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"Feature-wise, it provides many features. ECS, VM, SP, bucket object storage, and databases are the most valuable."
"What's good about Alibaba Cloud is its database service. It's also good in the virtual machine area."
"The installation is easy."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"I rate Alibaba Cloud's scalability an eight out of ten."
"Amazon has a much better understanding of the workflow of data scientists and machine learning processes. This is seen by their SageMaker which offers different versions of the models to be used."
"Cloud Management has been a valuable feature."
"You can build and release applications quickly with AWS instead of waiting for months to get the necessary hardware. That's the real benefit. The time-to-market for developing applications is much shorter."
"AWS has many integrations and plenty of tools available for anyone to take advantage of. There are new features being added all the time."
"Macie is great. It is a service that makes recommendations on a data layer for cybersecurity. It is a great service."
"The most valuable feature is the availability, as we work in different availability zones."
"The AWS feature that I most enjoy is Lambda functions. I primarily use serverless components because they allow you to process things without having to compromise on resources like when running EC2 instances or virtual machines. With minimal effort, you can scale up an unlimited number of processes, even concurrently, to process things. I frequently work with web APIs, so I use Lambda a lot in this area."
"Amazon for DevOps is fantastic. Amazon has fast clouds, and the process and the Dev is very good."
 

Cons

"The solution name is not favorable in some markets and could cause us some problems gaining customers."
"Alibaba Cloud's initial setup is somewhat complex."
"A big area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is its support. Another area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is SDK-based service because sometimes, the SDKs don't work correctly. Support for API-based services also needs improvement in Alibaba Cloud because, at the moment, it's not that stable."
"It is not robust."
"The majority of the tools and processes, in general, have a lot of room for improvement."
"From the improvement point of view, there are lots of issues that we are facing. In all the areas, it seems like it is not mature. For example, a customer wants to provision some VM that has many configurations. If I want to show the price to the customer, it is very challenging. The SDK that Alibaba has provided is very limited. We can have the pricing for VM, but we cannot have pricing for RDS databases or some other services. This is a big concern area for us. They should put more effort into the SDKs or APIs that they provide, for example, pricing APIs or pricing SDK. They do not provide support for most of the services they provide. For example, if I want to get the price of MongoDB, that SDK is not available from Alibaba. Similarly, robust API support is required for S3, which is OSS or Object Storage, so that we can read the data in a faster manner, for example, in chunks. We have raised many issues with the Alibaba support team, and they have been fixing the issues after we report them."
"Alibaba Cloud needs to increase availability in Thailand."
"The user experience must be improved."
"There is room for improvement in cost. Everyone complains about AWS being expensive. The initial cost starts small but can skyrocket unexpectedly."
"We don't know whether to increase server capacity or alert notifications. We don't know which hard disc to purchase or what the next recommended CPU is. There should be an indicator. We would like to have more guidance."
"They're really good on the business computing side, but there are other services where they can do really well. They can improve the data analytics platform and the data warehousing platform."
"Amazon still has room for improvement in terms of being more mature on the monitoring side and in terms of the native capabilities. Amazon should get their services portfolio stronger on OEM-based workloads such as Microsoft and Oracle. There are a lot of areas that still do not have offerings, so there is room to grow. I would be happy if they bring more maturity to the monitoring capabilities and SaaS offerings. They are strong on Infrastructure as a Service, but they are not mature on SaaS."
"The setup of the solution is not so easy, it requires various skills to complete it. The whole implementation can take a month."
"The interface needs a bit of work. It's not intuitive."
"AWS could be more scalable."
"The solution could offer better integration capabilities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We cut our costs significantly by migrating our infrastructure to the cloud. Alibaba Cloud employs a pay-as-you-go model, so that minimizes many costs for us."
"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"I noticed on the pricing that it's quite expensive. It is the price you pay for making a practical choice for enterprise-level companies since it has so many features and it fits an enterprise-level company just like our company right now."
"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."
"The price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."
"The product is not that expensive."
"I'm not sure about the exact pricing, but let's just say if it cost a dollar for Amazon AWS, it was closer to 70 to 80 cents for Alibaba Cloud."
"Amazon AWS has pay-as-you-go options available."
"There are many variables involved in pricing service in AWS and overall the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"Amazon AWS is on the cheaper side, as their pricing is more competitive. There are no additional costs besides the license. However, Azure sells Microsoft licenses, so they have an advantage."
"I find that Amazon AWS is expensive."
"It seems to be reasonable. It's the first one that I've used as a cloud platform, so they've set the benchmark for me, and now, I'm comparing everything else to them."
"​AWS is much too expensive compared to current on-premises solution for this type of work."
"The price of the solution is fair compared to competitors."
"Amazon AWS is really cost-effective."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 14, 2013
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise112
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Alibaba Cloud?
ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alibaba Cloud?
On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten.
What needs improvement with Alibaba Cloud?
Alibaba Cloud needs to improve emails. Its pricing can also be lower. Regarding security issues, Alibaba Cloud is more complex and better suited for developers and R&D teams. On the other hand,...
How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...
Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure
We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Amazon Web Services, AWS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. Amazon AWS and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.