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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

"Everything is moving to the cloud now, and AWS covers a lot of services, including computing, networking, storage, IoT, and management, and they are good in every way."
"The installation and initial setup are easy."
"This product is stable and we plan to continue selling it in the future."
"Amazon AWS is very user-friendly."
"I like many features, like the recently released useful analytics features. There are many from the data analytics or database side."
"AWS has large community support."
"It integrates well."
"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."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
"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 solution is highly stable."
 

Cons

"The problem with AWS is you have to keep up with the technology."
"User personalization and robotic process automation services need to be mature enough. More APIs are required for robotic process automation services. Azure is more mature in terms of user personalization and robotic process automation services. The document processing can also be better. Whenever we want to do any kind of document management, I try to do OCR, ICR, etc. The functionality in AWS has to be more like that."
"The networking is overly complex."
"The cost structure could be better. It needs to be more transparent."
"It works very well with open-source solutions like Java, but not with .NET technologies."
"RDS doesn't have shell access, which could be especially beneficial for Oracle databases."
"It's a good cloud, however, if I compare it with Azure, Azure is more of a feature-rich cloud."
"Unfortunately, the price is high."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Looking at the primary market for AWS, I see that there's a lot of customers who have only mid-level performance requirements, because you will have all these normal applications such as online auction websites, gaming applications, voice applications, and so on. These are not, for example, large monitoring applications, financial independents, or brick and mortar companies. So AWS caters to about 40% of the market when it comes to general applications. As it happens, in many cases, you simply don't need the high-performance offerings from AWS, nor the innovative products from Google Cloud Platform, which can come with large price tags."
"The pricing is reasonable. It's not expensive, nor will it be cheap, but the free credits initially given provide leverage for new companies to start their businesses."
"One of the best thing in Amazon AWS is you are billed for the service you use."
"The solution is expensive compared to other providers because you need many of the services and it can add up fast."
"AWS is expensive and the cost should be reduced."
"When I first started using the solution I used a free trial, and then we upgraded to a pay-as-you-go subscription. We have an allocated budget of $50."
"We are reducing costs year-over-year."
"It is not the cheapest one, but there is a good ratio between the quality of service and the pricing. Its price is good for me."
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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.