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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

"The initial setup is not difficult and it did not take us more than one day."
"It offers durability, high availability, fault tolerance, and a high TCO benefit."
"The product's scalability is good."
"The product is highly scalable."
"The availability is good, you can get any service you need immediately."
"A scalable and secure product"
"Great scalability."
"The most important feature is deploying our production in multi-data regions around the world."
"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."
"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 the UI, it is easy to use."
"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"AWS should provide even more support and engagement to accelerate the adoption of new services and features."
"The solution is pretty mature."
"The product would be better if it was more secure."
"The product should reduce carbon emissions."
"I generally don't like the user experience of Amazon. It's not the best."
"Our API Management solution is integrated with Lambda, and last year, we had an issue while upgrading Lambda from version 8.0 to version 10. It seemed like Lambda runtime was changed by AWS, and there was a bug that caused the downtime. The loading of the dashboard is slow. It could be because I am located in China."
"Amazon still has room for improvement in terms of being more mature on the monitoring side and in terms of the native capabilities. Amazon should get their services portfolio stronger on OEM-based workloads such as Microsoft and Oracle. There are a lot of areas that still do not have offerings, so there is room to grow. I would be happy if they bring more maturity to the monitoring capabilities and SaaS offerings. They are strong on Infrastructure as a Service, but they are not mature on SaaS."
"One of the issues I'm facing is that my RDS SQL Server version 5.8 is reaching its end of life, and I need to upgrade it to a customer-wanted version. I want to do this on Graviton instances, but Graviton only starts with version 8.0 and currently doesn't support the 5.8 series. We've raised a Priority Feature Request (PFR) with AWS to have this functionality added for at least three months. This would give us enough time to upgrade our database to the 8.0 version without any issues."
"It should offer more security features."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
"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."
"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology it is a bit complex."
"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be better."
"The prices are a bit high."
"It's pay-as-you-go... but I think the pricing becomes a problem as the IT organization grows. They need to give better pricing when companies grow."
"The solution is on a subscription-based model, and it is pay-as-you-go. The price could be cheaper."
"Its pricing model is too complex."
"We are reducing costs year-over-year."
"In terms of price, there are less expensive options."
"The solution is on a pay-as-use pricing model. The price of the solution could always be better but it is priced competitively."
"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."
"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."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
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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 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: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.