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Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

 

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
7.1
Number of Reviews
258
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
15th
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 May 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.5%, up from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 5.1%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS13.5%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry5.1%
Other81.4%
PaaS Clouds
 

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.
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

"This solution is very easy to use and it has a professional interface."
"It improves the speed for us to access vendors."
"Amazon AWS cloud is pretty mature in terms of availability for most of the infrastructure components."
"The ease of use is the solution's most valuable aspect for us at this point."
"The product is reliable and quite stable."
"Without AWS, our organization simply would not exist."
"Before AWS, the time for availability of a new server would be more than a week, and currently, it can be measured in minutes."
"Amazon AWS is stable and we have not faced any issues."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies, and it has very good performance."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."
"I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities."
"Stability is not a concern with this product."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."
"The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line interface has the ability to push instances to the cloud easily."
 

Cons

"Charges are high at the moment."
"Its only cons are on the data warehouse side. AWS' data warehouse Redshift is not as good as it should be."
"The product should reduce carbon emissions."
"The pricing is something you have to watch. You really have to constantly optimize your costs for instance, storage, IPs and things like that, and that can become a job in itself to manage just from a budgeting standpoint if you are a moderate to heavy user."
"On the console, they used to have some shortcuts making this solution easier to work with, but now we have been dealing with so many problems on the console, and some of the options are not very useful in my perspective, so they should bring back those options that make things easier to run some of the services."
"Scaling is an area that can be improved. For example, I would like to be able to change the amount of memory that is allocated to a server."
"We have had several issues with the products and services but as of now, there are no good alternatives."
"The sorting model in AWS is a little bit complicated. When you are going through any component, you can get some surprising results."
"There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."
"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology it is a bit complex."
"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features and they should be included."
"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's expensive. It costs you an arm and a leg."
"It's expensive."
"This is not an expensive product but it would be an improvement if the price were cheaper."
"Its pricing can be simplified a little bit more. Even though they have been reducing it, I still believe they can do better as compared to GCP, Google Cloud."
"To anyone thinking about using AWS, I would suggest carefully designing your implementation. This is very important because it will impact the monthly cost of the solution. You need to think ahead and talk with your staff to find opportunities to make this more efficient."
"We are currently paying for the solution on an annual basis."
"This solution offers good pricing."
"The tool is expensive."
"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."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"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."
"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."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Insurance Company
4%
University
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise114
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: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.