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Amazon S3 vs Google Cloud Storage Nearline comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 1, 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 S3
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
85
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Google Cloud Storage Nearline
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Amazon S3 is 15.0%, up from 11.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Storage Nearline is 5.7%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon S315.0%
Google Cloud Storage Nearline5.7%
Other79.3%
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2774889 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has reduced storage costs and improved data management through automated lifecycle and seamless service integration
The best features that Amazon S3 offers are high durability and availability with virtually unlimited storage, lifecycle management for automated tiering and cost control, versioning to retain and recover data changes, and integration with services such as Glue, Athena, EMR, Lambda, along with strong security via IAM roles, bucket policies, and encryption. These features help by ensuring data is always available, securely stored, and easily accessible for pipelines. Lifecycle policies reduce manual cleanup, versioning safeguards against accidental deletions, and integrations allow us to directly run analytics or trigger workflows without moving data around. Amazon S3 event notifications help automate tasks such as triggering ETL jobs or Lambda functions on new data arrivals, and features such as cross-region replication ensure data redundancy and compliance, while fine-grained access control makes it easy to manage permissions across teams securely. My organization has seen improvements in data accessibility, reduced infrastructure costs, and simplified data management through Amazon S3. We now have a unified scalable storage layer that supports analytics, backups, and migrations seamlessly, leading to faster workflows and better decision-making.
Seamless integration with cloud services improves workflows but documentation needs enhancement
One area that needs improvement is the documentation, which I find to be disorganized and not user-friendly. The lack of comprehensive walkthrough guides for specific use cases makes it difficult to follow. To enhance the experience, more detailed examples, guides, and tutorials from start to finish would be beneficial. Additionally, the cost compared to other providers like Amazon could be regarded as a downside.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features are unlimited storage, scalability, and performance."
"The main aspect we like is that it's been easy to use."
"S3 is well suited for both big and little data repositories of objects ranging from backup to archive to active video images and much more."
"The most valuable features are VNet, virtual machines, and Elastic Kubernetes Service."
"Enables content sharing by multiple users."
"Great for storing all types of data."
"Amazon S3 is very stable. I don't worry about data stored in the S3 bucket as it's safe."
"The solution is stable and reliable, the performance has been good, it's been problem-free, there are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze."
"I find the flexibility in storing documents or data and the ease of retrieval valuable with this solution."
"Nearline is highly stable."
"The most valuable aspect of Google Cloud Storage Nearline is its integration with the wider Google Cloud ecosystem."
"It provides the necessary support and flexibility to manage data storage effectively, especially during times of variable data flow."
"Nearline is highly stable."
"Google is always introducing new features and tends to have a new release every month."
"The API integration with the storage packet is the solution's most valuable feature."
"The data structure and the types of data that are supported are very good."
 

Cons

"The free web and DB hosting could be improved. It could be faster when you download huge files from the S3 bucket to your local system. If the S3 bucket availability and performance could be improved, we would consider hosting our database over there."
"We would like Amazon to reduce the price of storage."
"Technical support is inefficient and poor."
"Amazon S3 can improve by decreasing the overall costs."
"I would like a batch downloading option added to the AWS console."
"The feature at present does not suffice most of the requirements of an enterprise-class organization."
"Could include some additional security features."
"We would like some improvement in the cost of storage via this solution, as it currently has a very high price point."
"Documentation is an area for improvement in Google Cloud Storage Nearline."
"They need a better, more visual, user interface for folders and files."
"The interface for managing file storage in the buckets could be improved."
"Nearline security could be better. The solution could integrate better with SEIM tools."
"From a storage standpoint, it would be beneficial if the retrieval cost could be optimized, as it is comparatively higher than storage costs in Nearline."
"They need a better, more visual, user interface for folders and files."
"Nearline security could be better. The solution could integrate better with SEIM tools."
"One area that needs improvement is the documentation, which I find to be disorganized and not user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of storage is cheap. However, the cost to have a better interface can get expensive. We are using Athena for this purpose and if we did some heavy queries the cost will start adding up. When the Athena query is running, it will scan the bucket and they charge for how many GBs we are going to scan. The function of scanning has a lot of costs attached to it, this is a negative point."
"Amazon S3 is a cost-effective solution compared to the others."
"The solution is very inexpensive at 50 cents per gigabyte, per month."
"The price of Amazon S3 could be less expensive."
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is reasonably priced."
"The license of Amazon S3 is based on volume, capacity, and time. The overall price of the solution could improve. The support has to be added if you want it at an additional cost."
"The price of the Amazon S3 is reasonable. There are not any licensing costs, they have a pay-as-you-use model."
"I use the tool's free tier. I believe that there is a need to make annual payments towards the licensing charges associated with the product."
"Right now, for the number of servers and the storage that I have, I would say I'm charged between $125 and $150 per month."
"Google Cloud Storage Nearline is very inexpensive. It costs us less than $50 a month to store our files. We use approximately 10 terabytes. Overall, I would rate the product a five out of five for affordability."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
University
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise39
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon S3?
We can easily connect to the AWS resources.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon S3?
Since using Amazon S3, storage costs have reduced by around 35% to 40% through lifecycle tiering, data availability improved to 99.9% which minimizes downtime, ETL processing time decreased by appr...
What needs improvement with Amazon S3?
The only downside is the scalability limitations. I don't know if that is from AWS or my subscription.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud Storage Nearline?
My experience with the licensing and cost of Google Cloud Storage Nearline has been positive.
What needs improvement with Google Cloud Storage Nearline?
Documentation is an area for improvement in Google Cloud Storage Nearline. Documentation might cause some issues during deployment in future updates of Google Cloud Storage Nearline. Other than tha...
What is your primary use case for Google Cloud Storage Nearline?
I have integrated Google Cloud Storage Nearline with BigQuery for analytics.
 

Also Known As

S3, Simple Storage Service
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Airbnb, Thomson Reuters, Zillow, Alert Logic
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon S3 vs. Google Cloud Storage Nearline and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.