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Alibaba Cloud vs VMware Cloud Foundation comparison

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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)
10th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Cloud Foundation
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 5.2%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Foundation is 2.2%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alibaba Cloud5.2%
VMware Cloud Foundation2.2%
Other92.6%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Min HtetOo - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Marketing Officer at Soft Intelligence
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.
MI
Cyber Security Analyst at Amdari
Has enabled reliable management of private and public environments with strong automation and integrated security
VMware Cloud Foundation can be used in either private or public environments, and its organization allows you to combine everything in the storage together with combined computer storage, network, visualization, management, and integrated stack, which makes it easier to run everything together. This is especially notable in the storage section. The automation capabilities of VMware Cloud Foundation demonstrate excellent performance because of the private cloud automation, where you can develop things and manage the software into the data section, which is the SDDC. It allows the organization to modernize their infrastructure and accelerate application delivery together with the support for both virtual machine and container. Regarding the impact of integrated security on data protection strategy, the product and management data varies in different ways, including collecting performance and configuration data, which enables monitoring of your product and platform to modernize the application. This includes handling data at rest and in motion to ensure data protection when disasters occur. This is achieved through gathering data at different intervals, ideally every five minutes, enabling recovery between VM and platform when something affects your data.

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 to run VMs."
"The installation is easy."
"Alibaba also offers a lot of flexibility compared to Google Cloud, where you can only use Google's Tools."
"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"Flexibility and costs were probably the most important thing for us. The cost was one of the big factors for choosing Alibaba Cloud relative to other cloud solutions, especially in Asia"
"We cut our costs significantly by migrating our infrastructure to the cloud, and Alibaba Cloud employs a pay-as-you-go model, so that minimizes many costs for us."
"Feature-wise, it provides many features, and ECS, VM, SP, bucket object storage, and databases are the most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Alibaba Cloud is the communication it allows between two servers."
"VMware Cloud Foundation can be used to make private clouds faster than the traditional way and can also be used for continuity."
"VMware Cloud Foundation's most valuable features are password and certificate management. The SDDC manager tool is the front tool we are using to manage the entire VCF stack. In the SDDC manager, we can able to rotate, and update the passwords of all users. Anything in the VMware portfolio, we can manage from a single dashboard and we have various data centers. We have connected everything into one Federation. From one single place, we are managing our entire virtual interactions."
"The most valuable aspect of VMware Cloud Foundation is you can manage everything from area."
"The scalability is very good, and autoscaling, scalability, and metering in any department are good, so a department can meter how much they're using, which is very helpful, and a business can calculate how many resources are being consumed by each department and how much it's costing."
"The stability of VMware Cloud Foundation is very high."
"A valuable feature of VMware Cloud Foundation is its ability to manage everything from a single console, including network, virtualization, and storage management."
"The automation capabilities of VMware Cloud Foundation demonstrate excellent performance because of the private cloud automation, where you can develop things and manage the software into the data section, which is the SDDC."
"The solution's most valuable features are automated provisioning, network, and storage."
 

Cons

"If you want more accuracy, stability, and 24/7 customer support, primarily relying on the SDKs and APIs, you should think twice."
"Users use websites as a tutorial. However, the Alibaba Cloud website has the content, and the scripts are copied from Amazon Web Services. We had received customer feedback where the customer asked us to get formulate original content instead of copying from Amazon Web Services. It’s very odd and awkward."
"Alibaba Cloud has some problems related to latency and connection issues. If you go for a cloud solution provider, you will need to access the Internet, which may result in latency and bandwidth issues, leading to slowness in operations."
"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."
"From a performance point of view, Huawei and Azure are faster. Alibaba isn't as good."
"The solution name is not favorable in some markets and could cause us some problems gaining customers."
"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's initial setup is somewhat complex."
"Integrations are slightly difficult, as getting resources to deal with it is not that easy."
"The tool's price tag is high."
"Compared to Nutanix, which many people consider a better option due to its single platform approach, VMware Cloud Foundation operates on different platforms."
"The deployment is clumsy and complex. There are too many things that need to be done in order to deploy."
"The maintenance cost has increased significantly, especially after Broadcom acquired VMware, with a shift from socket-based licensing to core-based licensing."
"They need to offer more support for Mac."
"VMware Cloud Foundation is complex, and there are always updates regarding security features, accessibility, and the user interface. Making changes isn't simple because there are a lot of tables to update. People in the field may not feel confident about managing it."
"The documentation could be easier to read."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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 solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"The product is not that expensive."
"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"
"VMware Cloud Foundation is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"There is an annual license required to use the solution."
"The tool's price is slightly on the higher side, but I guess you think there is no one-to-one comparison with other tools. The licensing part has become easier, while earlier, it was quite complex."
"If our customer has the option to buy a server for $4,000 or $5,000, but VMware asks for two-person licensing $7,000 to $8,000, which is more than the hardware price. So sometimes, the customer cannot pay for it because it's too expensive."
"VMware Cloud Foundation is overpriced, but I think we get what we pay for."
"The price of VMware Cloud Foundation is expensive."
"The pricing is moderate. I would rate it six out of ten."
"It is quite expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
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 Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

Which solution do you prefer: Alibaba Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
Thanks for sharing these insights! I completely agree that Microsoft Azure provides IT administrators with strong centralized management, robust security controls through RBAC, and tools for cost o...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Cloud Foundation?
The price for VMware Cloud Foundation is not cheap, as the market is competitive with AWS cloud. When comparing prices of both clouds, AWS is cheaper because they offer a free section for practice....
What needs improvement with VMware Cloud Foundation?
In VMware Cloud Foundation, areas that have room for improvement include the experience between VMware Cloud Foundation and the cloud. I prefer working with the cloud due to my study with the archi...
What is your primary use case for VMware Cloud Foundation?
Regarding my experience with application migration between on-premises and public clouds using VMware Cloud Foundation, I have used it for storage deployment.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
ricoh, dell technologies, sky
Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. VMware Cloud Foundation and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.