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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
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
85
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM SoftLayer
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
21st
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
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 IBM SoftLayer is 1.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon S315.0%
IBM SoftLayer1.8%
Other83.2%
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

"Overall, it's a good solution. The stability is very good. It's an easy solution to set up."
"Some of the most valuable features are how convenient and easy to use S3 is; it's nicely integrated with AWS and is available on the AWS console."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that I mostly used the tool's free tier version, so I like the fact that its cost is very low."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon S3 for me is static deployment; it doesn't charge much, and I can integrate CloudFront for DNS and routing. It is very useful and affordable."
"The best thing about S3 is the security."
"Overall, I rate Amazon S3 a ten out of ten."
"Feature-wise, Amazon S3 is the cheapest and it's reliable."
"I used Amazon AWS/S3 solution to prove my concept before deploying it on real hardware. It was a great experience and was really scalable."
"The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
"The solution is highly stable."
"The ability to extract 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 is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
 

Cons

"The security model can be improved as it is a bit confusing."
"Amazon S3 could improve the load balancers. They are very basic compared to other solutions in the industry, such as F5. It has to be able to be analyzed up to a certain level."
"It could maybe use more integration."
"The installation could be more straightforward for inexperienced users."
"Amazon S3's unit of measure for expansion should be smaller."
"Sometimes we have to concentrate networks to a certain location, like the EU, for example. Therefore, if we set S3 in the EU region from the Middle East or Africa, the latency is an issue and we find it hard to connect to that S3."
"They could always increase object storage ability."
"The feature at present does not suffice most of the requirements of an enterprise-class organization."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is okay."
"One can manage the price of the tool. The tool is worth the money if we want to store the data in Amazon S3."
"Not many products in the market beat the solution in terms of quality or price."
"This solution has reasonable pricing and a low cost."
"The price of the Amazon S3 is reasonable. There are not any licensing costs, they have a pay-as-you-use model."
"The cost of Amazon S3 could be better. As the number of data increases, you'll pay more for Amazon S3. It's around $200, which is okay, but my company uses it less often."
"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."
"The price of Amazon S3 is competitive with other solutions."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise18
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?
The only downside is the scalability limitations. I don't know if that is from AWS or my subscription.
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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: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.