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Amazon AWS vs IBM Public Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

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

Amazon AWS
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
256
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)
IBM Public Cloud
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
IoT Platforms (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 12.7%, down from 17.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Public Cloud is 3.2%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds
 

Q&A Highlights

NC
Oct 16, 2021
 

Featured Reviews

HarishMahanta - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable cloud service enhances ERP management with advanced security features
I use Amazon AWS for ERP implementation. My responsibility is to integrate our application into the AWS cloud and provide AI solutions to the infrastructure AWS is stable and has provided a reliable infrastructure for my organization. AWS offers add-on services such as security and automated…
Premnath Jaganathan - PeerSpot reviewer
Affordability and security improve our cloud experience while learning new systems
I'm not working with any AI features in IBM Public Cloud, but they are in the process of building it.I am very satisfied with the security that IBM Public Cloud provides. I would rate IBM Public Cloud eight out of ten, where one is worst and ten is the best.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is highly available and on-demand. So, you can scale up and scale down whenever required."
"Some of the introduced one-year and three-year reservations helped us reduce costs early on. With time, we learned how to minimize our at REST capacity, allowing us to scale up and scale down in near seconds."
"The most useful feature of Amazon AWS is it can be accessed from anywhere."
"Friendly console for implementation."
"The tool's most valuable features are AWS Security Hub and AWS GuardDuty."
"AWS has a lot of flexibility, which is great."
"The product is reliable and quite stable."
"We deploy our core application and our integration platform on AWS EC2 instances. These applications contain multiple containerized Python Django applications, which need to scale up and down dynamically."
"It provides robust analytics and management tools to give customers complete visibility into their environment and infrastructure."
"The beauty of cloud service providers, especially public cloud service providers, is that they are scalable every time when you need them because their payment model is pay-as-you-go."
"I am very much satisfied with the technical support team at IBM Public Cloud."
"I've found the stability to be excellent. The performance is good."
"The availability is second to none. Customer support is very good."
"There is no installation for this product because it is a cloud product."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Public Cloud is the AI integrations."
"It's straightforward, has a good environment and is cost-effective."
 

Cons

"While feasible, custom configuration will be more time consuming than standard."
"The interface needs a bit of work. It's not intuitive."
"The price could be better. Support for data analytics could be better. I don't see much support for data analytics. They have a lot of support in Azure, but I don't see a lot of innovation on the data analytics side in AWS."
"Amazon AWS could be improved by lowering the general storage price."
"The solution is pretty mature."
"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of hybrid Kubernetes management."
"There are some limitations for certain applications that happen regionally and it is an issue for us."
"The customization could improve. However, it depends on the customization needed."
"The deployment can be a bit of a pain. There are a lot of packages and a lot of options and it can require complex configuration to get it right."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly deployment process in the next release of this solution."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"Normally, for any cloud, we get a lot of information on the web, but that is missing in the case of IBM Public Cloud. We need some technical support documents. That is the only thing missing in IBM Public Cloud."
"Recently, we just faced some issues with the operating system due to the end of life of CentOS 6...So, then the client wanted to try it out under AWS instead of IBM. In short, it has some complexities."
"The initial setup and the pricing are areas that need improvement."
"They do not have a very good virtual network implemented, and the VPC is the most important feature that needs to be improved."
"An area for improvement in IBM Public Cloud is getting up-to-date information on how to set up everything. It's hard to find new documentation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of Amazon is higher than that of SalesForce."
"We are happy with the pricing."
"Amazon AWS is really cost-effective."
"As a startup business, it's very well priced, but if a number of transactions go up, clients have voiced that they are in a situation and feel a type of pressure and desire to move out of AWS."
"The pricing of Amazon AWS is high compared to any other cloud provider."
"It's expensive. It costs you an arm and a leg."
"Its pricing model is too complex."
"With Amazon AWS, you pay as you go."
"The licensing fees are straightforward and predictable."
"It pretty much has a standard price. There is no hidden price with IBM Public Cloud."
"IBM Public Cloud is pretty cheap. They have an ongoing free tier that basically won't expire, so as long as your solution is small enough, you can have a test set that you can use for demos, which will cost you almost nothing."
"We are using the trial version of this solution, so we have not paid anything."
"Pricing is not as fair as Amazon or Azure."
"IBM has a lesser price compared to other cloud service providers like Azure and AWS."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten."
"The price of IBM Cloud is very cheap compared to competitors AWS and Azure."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Answers from the Community

NC
Oct 16, 2021
Oct 16, 2021
I agree with Vik and Marcelo. AWS cloud is more matured, but you would like to run some specific IBM business tools like document management, IBM Watson for AI, SPSS analytics then IBM Cloud should be preferred.
2 out of 3 answers
VD
Oct 12, 2021
Amazon AWS is superior to IBM public for several reasons.  The most important reason is the diversity of software tools, the geographic diversity and availability, lower operating costs and excellent customer service. All cloud companies are simply playing catch-up to AWS. 
MJ
Oct 14, 2021
AWS, the main reason is the number of DC distributed arround the world
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
University
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity ...
What needs improvement with IBM Cloud?
The front end is not pervasive, so it is very difficult get the status of your current services or account from a mobile device.
What do you like most about IBM Public Cloud?
The most valuable feature of IBM Public Cloud is the AI integrations.
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
IBM Bluemix
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Uvionics Tech, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Alpha Modus, Inventive, Web Business Consulting, FindBrok, SilverHook Powerboats, United Way of Allegheny County
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS vs. IBM Public Cloud and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.