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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 March 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.6%, up from 13.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 6.2%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS13.6%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry6.2%
Other80.2%
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 used as the basic requirement for any virtual machines use cases, the storage is used for each use case."
"The solution can scale well."
"The solution has good speed. It's very fast."
"It is stable. For the cloud version, we require some installation platforms and we don't have a server with us right now. We require it from Amazon AWS. We can just plan and get the AWS server."
"I like that it helps us do everything really fast, and its advanced services."
"AWS is stable and has provided a reliable infrastructure for my organization."
"It scales well and is flexible."
"One of the most valuable features is that Amazon AWS has a lot of data centers and regions where we can position our virtual machines for leverage. Amazon AWS is also easy to use. You can quickly spin up something, use Explorer, building proofs of concept, things like that. Once the proof of concept is built once and we know how things are going to look from a production perspective, we try to move everything to the data centers. These features and the ease of use are the main reasons why we use AWS."
"The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."
"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."
"It is a scalable product...We are not facing any particular issues since most of the applications in our company are written in Java and .NET."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to scale. The services that connect to the database are also very good."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies. It has a very good performance."
"It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well."
 

Cons

"The features that should be improved are that there should be better clarity on their invoicing. There are so many things they charge for - high line items in the invoice. I think there should be more clarity and more ease of use with their billing. I'd like to see better ease of use of with the billing console and a clear dashboard to understand the usage."
"The pricing is reasonable but there is always room to be better."
"Not all of the functionality is available in Europe and our customers in France want to be able to use features that are only available in the US."
"Its only cons are on the data warehouse side. AWS' data warehouse Redshift is not as good as it should be."
"Monitoring could be better IMHO. We currently hack together an extra monitoring piece into the puzzle for each project."
"At times we find ourselves a little trapped, with the lack of customization, for what we need."
"The dashboard can be improved a little bit to provide more information."
"I don't have complaints. Previously, we asked for more end-to-end workshops, examples, and tutorials and these have been added and improved."
"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."
"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."
"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features."
"It should offer more security features."
"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."
"There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."
"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are many variables involved in pricing service in AWS and overall the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"Reasonably priced and comparable to similar services."
"This solution offers good pricing."
"The Oracle licensing is higher than it is with Amazon AWS."
"They have different pricing models for each suite of services."
"Pricing is good. It's average."
"The licensing cost varies with the project involved."
"It's a pay-per-use model."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"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."
"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."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"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
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
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Insurance Company
5%
Retailer
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business132
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: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.