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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
259
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
14th
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 February 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.2%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 6.7%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon AWS13.2%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry6.7%
Other80.1%
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

"Great scalability."
"The most valuable feature is that it is simple."
"Newly introduced features advance capabilities."
"I like S3, load balancers, and Route 53."
"Amazon AWS offers flexibility and scalability."
"This solution is a good option if you are looking for cloud-based storage. Using a cloud-based solution, it is not required to accommodate a full workload. You can start with a basic version and scale up as needed."
"Technical support has been great."
"You can instantly scale resources up or down as needed, avoiding the need to build infrastructure from scratch."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to scale. The services that connect to the database are also very good."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."
"The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."
"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."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."
 

Cons

"Amazon tools are for more mature DevOps. The process and the Dev is very good, but it doesn't compare to the ease of using the Google Cloud Platform."
"The solution is pretty mature."
"IAM must be made simple and straightforward."
"Somehow Amazon associated their marketplace as a place to find images of various installs (preconfigured software) and was late in the game enabling and promoting SaaS-based solutions. Thus, the AWS marketplace has near zero awareness in the mind of the prospect to find solutions to various problems plaguing them."
"Their support can be improved. In some cases, their support is not as proficient as it can be. They should be quicker at getting back."
"In the next release, I would like to see better pricing."
"As far as the automation is concerned, the backups should be scaled."
"I would like to see CloudFormation made more in the programming way of thinking."
"I'd like to see a larger service offering."
"Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."
"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale. It's easy to scale on an application level, but not it is not similar to if you were using Amazon. Amazon you can scale thousands of applications."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For the initial 12 months, the solution is reasonably priced. On enterprise license contracts where you negotiate, have been reasonable too."
"They have different pricing models for each suite of services."
"It seems to be reasonable. It's the first one that I've used as a cloud platform, so they've set the benchmark for me, and now, I'm comparing everything else to them."
"For our infrastructure, the cost is approximately $25 per device, and you have to include the other tools that we have in the cloud, for a total of approximately $200,000 per year."
"Maintain a good budget, plan the consumption"
"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."
"It's paid on a monthly basis and you have to pay for the resources that you use."
"If I was going to compare the cost of Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure, they are approximately the same."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"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
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
38%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
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: February 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.