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Alibaba Cloud vs SAP S4HANA on 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)
11th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP S4HANA on AWS
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 5.4%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP S4HANA on AWS is 2.3%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP S4HANA on AWS2.3%
Alibaba Cloud5.4%
Other92.3%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Salahuddin Shaikh - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at EPAM Systems
Alibaba Cloud has evolved a lot in all specially in AI space, but still needs to improve the support offered to users.
The part where the product lacks is not because of the services it offers. The support offered by the tool is ridiculous. Whenever you raise the support ticket, someone from China comes over the phone. When I used to raise a ticket for support, some person from China came along with another English-speaking person to whom I had to explain my issues, after which the English-speaking individual used to translate it into Mandarin for the person from China. The Chinese person used to explain something in Mandarin to the English-speaking person, and it used to keep happening continuously, making it a hectic support service from Alibaba Cloud. The support was time-consuming, and it was also frustrating. As a technical person, if you are someone who is expecting something to be done as soon as possible and the support services offered to you turn out to be time-consuming and frustrating, then it won't be a great experience for the users.
Jayakrishna Amm - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
End-to-end accounting has been streamlined and secures data with automated controls
SAP S4HANA on AWS is mostly well secured because you need a VPN of the company you are working in to log in and view only with the VPN. It is not possible to connect to a random network, and it is very safe. In terms of usage and automation, SAP S4HANA on AWS is very good at automation, where instead of manually punching entry by entry as with Tally, Zoho, or NetSuite, you can do a bulk upload and close it from one GL to another GL entry from one T-code to another T-code. These are all the options and features, and it is user-friendly. Once you learn SAP S4HANA on AWS, you tend to know how to customize things and what features you want. You can add in features by working closely with the SAP team, whether it is a direct SAP team or through a contract with some agent. There are numerous things you can do; it is not limited to only one function. You can have end-to-end control, and back-dated entries are not possible as in Tally or Zoho, which is very good in terms of security and safety. There are no accounting frauds; we can even identify who has done an entry by name. It is very secure; a password gets locked automatically after two incorrect attempts, and you have to contact the SAP team for that. Data privacy is very good, and overall, it is a better option. Regarding real-time analytics features in SAP S4HANA on AWS, you can integrate with Qlik or Power BI, and I believe there is also an analytics component within SAP itself. SAP S4HANA on AWS provides one analytics tool, and these tools can be integrated and customized however you want. It is very easy to do analytics; you can download reports or integrate those reports with Power BI. It is very convenient that way. When it comes to AI capabilities integrated with SAP S4HANA on AWS, I am not certain because most of it comes via tools such as Qlik and Power BI. There are multiple other things that can help you integrate and work on it. For example, integrating Power BI with N28 or Cloud is convenient with tools such as Copilot. However, I am unsure how it works in SAP S4HANA on AWS because most organizations do not allow integrating AI with SAP S4HANA on AWS.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The cost of hosting the solution is very reasonable. It's quite inexpensive."
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"Otherwise, the cost of Alibaba Cloud is reasonable, and service-wise, it's also good because it has many available services worth trying."
"It's easy to use, cheaper than other solutions, and more secure."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"It is a scalable product. So, scaling up or scaling down is possible."
"When comparing solutions such as GCP, which is the same as Alibaba Cloud, and others such as Amazon AWS and Azure, Alibaba Cloud is the preferred solution in China."
"Alibaba Cloud has lower costs and good support."
"The most valuable features of SAP S4HANA on AWS are that it's simplified and the analytical capabilities are good."
"Especially for manufacturing, it offers great integration with my costing."
"There are two main features that we find very valuable. One is the interface and the new user experience. That's really, really helpful for the end-user. The second is the HANA database itself because it speeds up the process. In other solutions, like Oracle, there is a lot of redundancy that slows things down."
"I like that they are very familiar with our VM which makes it easy to use."
"The solution is scalable."
"The Fiori interface is the most valuable feature; it's one of the highlights that they offer, and the in-memory of S4 is very fast."
"The tool covers many modules, like production, planning, management, and finance. It is a very scalable tool that can be beneficial for any company."
"They have their own instances where you can host your database."
 

Cons

"It is not robust."
"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."
"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."
"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."
"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"From a performance point of view, Huawei and Azure are faster. Alibaba isn't as good."
"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."
"Doesn't have a common development environment."
"More availability zones will help customers choose AWS. I would like to see features that provide easier onboarding for ERP solutions like SAP. SAP has already partnered with S/4HANA on AWS for hosting its public cloud as well. More educational videos for customers to choose this cloud path would be great to have. That is, providing more documentation and marketing material would be better."
"I would like scalability to be improved in the future for faster performance."
"The product could use more capabilities in the areas of robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, but these improvements are already on the way."
"The product can be very complex."
"Sometimes, the tool has bugs."
"One thing which is really killing a lot of people using this product is because they have been using it for twenty or twenty-five years and a lot of the customers' customizations are not working anymore."
"There might be an additional document approval workflow that can be done on top of already existing functionality."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The cost of Alibaba Cloud is lower than that of AWS, but I feel that its price is on the higher end of the spectrum. Alibaba Cloud charges its users a price in dollars"
"The cost is better than similar solutions."
"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."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"The product is not that expensive."
"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."
"I don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."
"The price of SAP S4HANA on AWS is reasonable, given how much it costs to maintain a scratch-built system. To upgrade the support there is a fee."
"It is a significant investment, around six hundred thousand dollars, and it involves both a one-time on-premises installation on servers and a cloud subscription with different flavors for SAP S4HANA."
"SAP S4HANA on AWS has reasonable pricing."
"I rate the price of SAP S4HANA on AWS an eight out of ten."
"I would rate the pricing as a two and a half out of five."
"The pricing is on the higher end."
"Compared to its competitors, SAP S4HANA on AWS is a costly solution."
"The vendors have different pricing, ways of serving, security, and providing the service. You go and compare the offerings. Some might be better with smaller companies. For example, Microsoft Azure can handle small and medium-sized companies best but still can cover some large companies. Whereas Amazon AWS and IBM are going to cover sized companies. There's no clear advantage. Probably Amazon AWS may have been the first to be certified by SAP as a cloud-hosting partner. Then Microsoft Azure and IBM were certified at the same time. You have to partner up and be certified by the software."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

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,...
What is your primary use case for Alibaba Cloud?
I was using Alibaba Cloud for the deployment of one of the products that my previous company was developing for a client in the KSA, where I had utilized servers, storage accounts, email services, ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP S4HANA on AWS?
The main issue is the pricing, which is typically too high for small companies.
What needs improvement with SAP S4HANA on AWS?
Regarding points of improvement for SAP S4HANA on AWS, there are numerous features available; it depends on how you want to customize and utilize them. If you have someone knowledgeable about end-t...
What is your primary use case for SAP S4HANA on AWS?
I mainly use SAP S4HANA on AWS for the entire accounting process, starting from the GL process, P2P procure-to-pay, and in terms of accounts receivable, accounts payable, and invoicing. It covers t...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SAP S/4HANA on AWS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
Brigade Group, DoHome, Royal FloraHolland
Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. SAP S4HANA on AWS and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.