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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
20th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Amazon S3 is 15.3%, up from 11.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SoftLayer is 1.9%, 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 S315.3%
IBM SoftLayer1.9%
Other82.8%
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 solution is easy to use for anyone with minimal technical knowledge."
"Feature-wise, Amazon S3 is the cheapest and it's reliable."
"I don't have any problems with the solution. It's issue-free."
"It's reliable and stable."
"The main aspect we like is that it's been easy to use."
"S3 is a great service offering numerous possibilities."
"Amazon S3 is easily scalable and provides fantastic performance, especially in comparison to other cloud solutions like OCI and Azure."
"Amazon S3 is straightforward, scalable, and globally available and there are some good security features for making sure control over access is taken care of."
"The solution is highly stable."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
"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 ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
 

Cons

"Amazon S3 can improve by decreasing the overall costs."
"File versioning could be improved and I'd like to see some additional security features."
"Amazon S3 could improve the limitation on how much data can be stored."
"However, this sign is not compliant with internet regulations."
"Amazon S3 could improve by being more secure."
"Maybe it could be a bit cheaper. There are many people using it or willing to use it, and the data size is increasing."
"Sometimes it's difficult to set it up, such as when naming your bucket. The naming conventions require unique global names, which can be cumbersome."
"One aspect I would mention is the naming in Amazon S3. If I create an S3 bucket with a specific name, such as 'Roberto bucket,' I cannot create it in another account with the same name."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I have seen the pricing on AWS, but I believe it's a discount price for organizations."
"The cost depends on the data we access."
"The pricing can be improved."
"The solution is very inexpensive at 50 cents per gigabyte, per month."
"The solution is fairly priced."
"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 price of Amazon S3 depends on various variables. However, the price overall is fair."
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is reasonably priced."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
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 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 primary use case for Amazon S3?
I use Amazon S3 mainly for backup purposes, specifically for the backup of the internal and user data of the end users or our customers.
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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: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.