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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 14.3%, down 15.1% compared to last year.
IBM SoftLayer, on the other hand, focuses on Public Cloud Storage Services, holds 1.9% mindshare, up 0.5% since last year.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS14.3%
Microsoft Azure8.7%
Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode)7.1%
Other69.9%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM SoftLayer1.9%
Amazon S315.8%
Amazon S3 Glacier10.3%
Other72.0%
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

"This solution is stable and reliable."
"The stability of the solution is very good."
"The managed services of Amazon AWS help with getting experiments out faster than it usually would have taken; it mainly provides quick accessibility from idea to execution."
"Amazon AWS is user-friendly and intuitive."
"I like AWS for its scalability, reliability, and availability, and it's much more mature and user-friendly compared to some other cloud providers. The learning curve and time for deployment are also shorter."
"As the solution is cloud-based, we always use the latest version, and we use the solution for our web platform business needs."
"It has many choices of computer options, storage options, and even database options."
"I'm just a customer and an end-user; I'd highly recommend the solution to other users as one of the best cloud options out there right now."
"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."
"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 stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
 

Cons

"I generally don't like the user experience of Amazon. It's not the best."
"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."
"It can be daunting because of the number of AWS products there are."
"AWS is very expensive. It's paid on a monthly basis and you have to pay for the resources that you use."
"Amazon needs to develop better tools for troubleshooting network traffic, application insights, performance, and even some aspects of integration mapping. I'm hoping AWS implements something like Azure's Network Watcher and a log analytics solution where a can pull logs from various services and present them in a single dashboard. I want to summarize the performance and usage of every service and application."
"Scaling is an area that can be improved."
"The billing should be more competitive."
"It works very well with open-source solutions like Java, but not with .NET technologies."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be better."
"For the initial 12 months, the solution is reasonably priced. On enterprise license contracts where you negotiate, have been reasonable too."
"Some customers will provide their own license and others will purchase it directly from AWS."
"It is subscription-based, and we are happy with its pricing."
"Reasonably priced and comparable to similar services."
"When compared to GCP, Google, or Azure, the price could be lower."
"It is comparable if you add in the price structure to an on-prem solution."
"Amazon AWS is really cost-effective."
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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
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
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: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.