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Amazon S3 vs IBM SoftLayer 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
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
84
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM SoftLayer
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
23rd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Amazon S3 is 13.4%, up from 11.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SoftLayer is 1.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon S313.4%
IBM SoftLayer1.3%
Other85.3%
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.
reviewer1032702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Principal Cloud Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Stable with excellent speed and agility
The most valuable aspect of the solution is simply to have the ability to host in a cloud form and out of the data center - the IBM big iron solution. It's the speed and the agility that really sell SoftLayer. The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer. The ability to extract act from your current location, load into your future location, with limited change, and then be able to take the transfer actions slowly and methodically after you're in your new location is the part that really makes this awesome. The stability and scalability are quite good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The users have nothing to worry about as the solution is well established."
"The most valuable features of Amazon S3 are compatibility and reliability."
"I find the cost-effective models particularly suitable for our needs."
"The most valuable feature is the automated replication of the data."
"The most valuable features are VNet, virtual machines, and Elastic Kubernetes Service."
"Great for storing all types of data."
"We've had no issues with stability."
"I rate the technical support from Amazon for S3 a ten out of ten."
"The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
 

Cons

"The tool helps us with data backup storage of payment files and helps us avoid issues with clients when we miss the data. For instance, in the payment file of my Google client, you can find details of one-to-one transactions like the payment information on the file header, payment ID, payment client ID, group headers, etc. We get these details into the file format of ISO which is the accepted format at JP Morgan & Chase. Once we get the file format, we process it through S3."
"The down side is the web app should be aware of all the features that S3 provides in order to leverage its full potential."
"We would like some improvement in the cost of storage via this solution, as it currently has a very high price point."
"It is expensive for storing."
"They could always increase object storage ability."
"You do need to get training on the setup process."
"It is difficult to retrieve files in an emergency because the public cloud has data limits for immediate downloads."
"The major challenge is the inability to create more than ten policies."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is fairly priced."
"The cost depends on the data we access."
"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."
"The licensing model is complex."
"The solution is cost-effective because it is based on a pay-as-you-go model, where I can purchase and use it according to my needs."
"I know it is very inexpensive compared to other solutions."
"There is a license to use Amazon S3."
"It's worth the price considering its functionality."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise39
No data available
 

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?
Amazon S3 can be improved with more intuitive cost visualization tools with forecasting capabilities, faster restore times from Glacier tiers, better real-time monitoring of data access patterns, a...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

S3, Simple Storage Service
CloudLayer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Airbnb, Thomson Reuters, Zillow, Alert Logic
Whogohost Ltd., Skypicker, Infinity Computers and Communications Company, Grace Co. Ltd., Keyword, Uvionics Tech, Tennis Australia, immixGroup, Salesbox, Cxense ASA, Avnet Inc., Komsomolskaya Pravda, Seekr
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon S3 vs. IBM SoftLayer and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.