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Amazon AWS vs IBM SoftLayer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
260
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd), PaaS Clouds (2nd)
IBM SoftLayer
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Public Cloud Storage Services (20th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Cloud Services solutions, they serve different purposes. Amazon AWS is designed for Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) and holds a mindshare of 15.1%, up 12.8% compared to last year.
IBM SoftLayer, on the other hand, focuses on Public Cloud Storage Services, holds 1.9% mindshare, up 0.3% since last year.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS15.1%
Microsoft Azure8.6%
Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode)7.8%
Other68.5%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM SoftLayer1.9%
Amazon S315.3%
Amazon S3 Glacier9.9%
Other72.9%
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

Featured Reviews

Asif  Meem - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet
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.
reviewer1032702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Principal Cloud Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Stable with excellent speed and agility
The most valuable aspect of the solution is simply to have the ability to host in a cloud form and out of the data center - the IBM big iron solution. It's the speed and the agility that really sell SoftLayer. The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer. The ability to extract act from your current location, load into your future location, with limited change, and then be able to take the transfer actions slowly and methodically after you're in your new location is the part that really makes this awesome. The stability and scalability are quite good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is subscription-based, and we are happy with its pricing."
"AWS is easy to manage."
"I like that all of the features are complimentary."
"We have been able to leverage the agility of AWS to work faster and, in some cases, fail fast so we can get on to the next thing, which works."
"Friendly console for implementation."
"Support is really good."
"The whole solution is well designed and AWS has decent documentation, which is not to be taken for granted, and I've also found that AWS is easy to use."
"When a customer comes in and says that they need an instance clustered with certain options and a certain amount of service, it's usually firing up one line of code, and then everything gets set up, including the infrastructure."
"The solution is highly stable."
"The ability to extract from your current location, load into your future location with limited change, and then be able to take the transfer actions slowly and methodically after you're in your new location is the part that really makes this awesome."
"The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
 

Cons

"Like anything, Amazon AWS has room for improvement, but it's not bad."
"In the next editions, the use of this tool should be extended to Google and Apple operating systems."
"The cost of the solution could be improved, it's quite expensive."
"However, I was a bit disappointed with the AWS representative for Brazil."
"The dashboard and interface need improvement. It could be more user-friendly."
"Some extensions are better than others."
"The AWS documentation is written in a way that is not very intuitive. That's an area they can improve."
"Their metadata management in AWS needs improvement."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you compare Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure, the pricing of both is almost the same. There are some instances when one is cheaper than the other in one area but it is difficult to pinpoint which one is cheaper because it depends upon a lot of factors, such as the use case. However, the overall price of both solutions could be reduced."
"I find Amazon AWS very expensive compare to Microsoft Azure."
"It's pay-as-you-go... but I think the pricing becomes a problem as the IT organization grows. They need to give better pricing when companies grow."
"We are reducing costs year-over-year."
"It's a pay-per-use model."
"The pricing is one of the best in the segment."
"It's paid on a monthly basis and you have to pay for the resources that you use."
"The pricing is expensive."
Information not available
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise120
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
CloudLayer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Whogohost Ltd., Skypicker, Infinity Computers and Communications Company, Grace Co. Ltd., Keyword, Uvionics Tech, Tennis Australia, immixGroup, Salesbox, Cxense ASA, Avnet Inc., Komsomolskaya Pravda, Seekr
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: May 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.