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Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 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

Amazon AWS
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
260
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
16th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.7%, up from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 5.0%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS13.7%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry5.0%
Other81.3%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

MM
Data Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Cloud training has boosted my data analytics skills and simplifies building small projects
One area that could be improved in Amazon AWS is its learning curve. The large number of services and configuration options can be overwhelming, especially for new users. Understanding its pricing can also be challenging, as costs can add up unexpectedly if resources are not monitored carefully. For data analytics, setting up and integrating services such as S3, Glue, and Athena sometimes requires a good understanding of permissions, data formats, and service configurations. More guided, simplified onboarding for analytics use cases would make the platform more accessible. One additional area for improvement is documentation and service selection. Amazon AWS offers many services with overlapping capabilities, and it can sometimes be difficult for users to determine which service is the best fit for a particular use case. More decision support tools and guided recommendations would help reduce this complexity. From a data analytics perspective, cost visibility could also be improved since analytics workloads can scale quickly. Having more proactive cost forecasting and optimization recommendations would help teams manage budgets more effectively. Another challenging area is IAM and permission management. While Amazon AWS provides strong security controls, configuring permissions correctly can be complex, especially when multiple analytics services need to interact with one another. Simplifying permissions while maintaining security would enhance the overall user experience. The other area I would mention for improvement is the overall user experience. Given the huge number of services, which are truly excellent, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to navigate, especially for a new user that requires much training. A more streamlined interface and clearer recommendations between similar services would make it easier to get started. I would also like to see more built-in cost optimization guidance and cost management tools. Other than that, Amazon AWS is a very good and mature platform. Most of my feedback is about making it easier to learn, manage, and optimize rather than adding new capabilities.
reviewer2263239 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
PCF allows for fine-grained configuration, especially regarding scaling but routing limitations
Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice. A few things, such as what OpenShift does better are cluster management. Like, you can manage the entire thing together. Currently, it's possible to manage all the clusters, especially when it comes to cluster management using straightforward configuration. As of now, we have to handle each application instance individually, which means servicing them one by one. It would be better if we could perform these actions as a group or in a more streamlined manner. One more downside is actually the cost of this environment. So, major downside of Pivotal, it's the cost. So, the runtime running costs are very high. Extremely high.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The environment is a rich playground, and if you tried to do the same things on-premises that you do on AWS, it would be a lot more challenging to execute. You can open up a virtual machine on AWS, run some experiments, and be done with it. It's much easier than buying new servers, provisioning them, etc"
"The tool's most valuable features are AWS Security Hub and AWS GuardDuty."
"IaaS with easy management and rapid implementation using Python Django Mezzanine."
"The product is nice and stable. Its performance is great."
"AWS is easy to manage."
"It scales well and is flexible."
"It is stable."
"This solution is magnificent."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."
"Stability is not a concern with this product."
"The solution is stable, and we have not experienced any infrastructure issues, so it is very good and captures a few metrics, onboarding to App Dynamics."
"I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."
 

Cons

"The price needs improvement."
"The response time of technical support could be better. It is not so good."
"Some features may be better in Azure or some other portal. AWS could add some of those features."
"Its only cons are on the data warehouse side. AWS' data warehouse Redshift is not as good as it should be."
"There are plenty of areas for improvement. For example, the ease of tagging could be improved. The tool could integrate AI tools to identify better and manage costs. Calculating the cost of some services could be more straightforward."
"The support could be better. It's an aspect of the solution that isn't as good as everything else."
"There's a huge cost for support."
"The technical support from AWS has not been very forthcoming; it is very difficult to get."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve the documentation. They are good, but they could improve more. Additionally, it would be beneficial if there were more use case examples."
"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."
"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."
"The initial setup was not easy, it was a bit complex."
"I would prefer to use Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform rather than Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
"Scalability is terrible. So far we have not been able to scale it up."
"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay for Amazon AWS annually."
"The pricing of Amazon AWS is high compared to any other cloud provider."
"AWS is not an expensive product."
"I rate the tool's pricing a six to seven out of ten."
"The pricing depends on the workload. For example, if your workload involves Windows technologies, AWS may not be the most cost-effective option. In that case, you might be better off with Azure."
"The solution is on a subscription-based model, and it is pay-as-you-go. The price could be cheaper."
"In comparison to Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, the database offered by Amazon AWS is relatively expensive. However, the database also offers rich features."
"The price of the Virtual Desktop service from Amazon AWS could improve, it is more expensive than competitors. The pricing model we are using is pay-as-you-go. You only pay for what you use."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market."
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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
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise120
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

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Which would you recommend - Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift?
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native application platform to simplify app delivery. It is efficient and effective. The best feature is how easy it is to handle external services such as database...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Humana, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Liberty Mutual, The Home Depot, GE, West Corp, Merrill Corporation, CoreLogic, Orange, Dish Network, Comcast, Bloomberg, Internal Revenue Service, Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Volkswagen, Solera, Allstate, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ScotiaBank
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.