We compared Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
Microsoft Azure is praised for its scalability, reliability, and extensive range of services, while users appreciate its customer service and support. On the other hand, Alibaba Cloud stands out for its security measures, efficient data management, and competitive pricing options. Both platforms offer positive returns on investment, but Alibaba Cloud users mention the need for improvements in customer support and service reliability.
Features: Microsoft Azure is praised for its scalability, versatility, reliability, and extensive range of services. In contrast, Alibaba Cloud is valued for its excellent scalability, robust security measures, reliable performance, extensive resource options, efficient data management, and friendly customer support.
Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure's setup cost has been praised for its ease and simplicity, with users appreciating the reasonable and competitive pricing. In contrast, Alibaba Cloud offers manageable setup costs, allowing customers to choose a suitable plan. The licensing process is smooth and straightforward., Microsoft Azure has been praised for its cost savings, increased efficiency, and improved scalability. Its wide range of services and tools streamlines operations and reduces infrastructure costs. Alibaba Cloud is highly regarded for its cost-effective cloud services, offering excellent value for money. It enhances efficiency, scalability, and reliability and provides extensive features and functionalities for overall business performance.
Room for Improvement: Microsoft Azure has received feedback regarding areas that need improvement, while Alibaba Cloud could benefit from enhancements in several aspects, including its interface, stability, reliability, customer support, and response times.
Deployment and customer support: Based on user feedback, there are differences in the duration required to establish a new tech solution between Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud. Some Azure users mention a three-month deployment period with an additional week for setup, while Alibaba Cloud users mention both deployment and setup taking just one week. Context and usage of these terms must be considered in evaluating the overall duration., Microsoft Azure's customer service and support receive positive remarks for their responsiveness and expertise, offering prompt and helpful assistance. Users appreciate comprehensive documentation. In comparison, Alibaba Cloud's customer service is also praised for being attentive and helpful, with extensive documentation, but some users have expressed dissatisfaction with response time and expertise.
The summary above is based on 32 interviews we conducted recently with Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"What's good about Alibaba Cloud is its database service. It's also good in the virtual machine area."
"The most valuable feature of Alibaba Cloud is the communication it allows between two servers."
"We use the solution to run VMs."
"It's easy to use, cheaper than other solutions, and more secure."
"The installation is easy."
"Flexibility and costs were probably the most important thing for us. The cost was one of the big factors for choosing Alibaba Cloud relative to other cloud solutions, especially in Asia"
"Feature-wise, it provides many features. ECS, VM, SP, bucket object storage, and databases are the most valuable."
"The Azure Portal has an advantage in terms of UX making buying resources or downgrading is really easier to understand. AWS has micro, smaller functionalities whereas Azure has more end-to-end focus which makes it easier saving you time and money."
"The product scales extremely well."
"The tool’s stability is good."
"I like the functionalities and the price. I'm very satisfied with Microsoft Azure."
"There are many useful features. We use web apps, so instead of starting a web server, we just have machines running some web services. This was helpful for us in terms of the scalability of the application. We also use Active Directory for authentication and some services for the data backup. It is a very good and reliable solution. It was easy to implement this solution. It fits very well into our plans and covers our needs to provide infrastructure in the cloud. The portal to configure new resources is very easy, and it is very easy to allocate new resources."
"The valuable features of Microsoft Azure are that it is cloud-based and has good storage. The storage is completely managed by Azure. We do not need to do any patching of security because it is handled by Azure which is a benefit. The solution is fully compatible with the Microsoft technology stack and is very scalable."
"I think Azure's level of automation to achieve efficiency or agility is valuable. I also like the change capability cadence, the showback capabilities, and understanding what our costs are."
"Databricks is really nice because you have the power to process lots of data and you can create queries and provide big analysis for the business using a robust cluster."
"Users use websites as a tutorial. However, the Alibaba Cloud website has the content, and the scripts are copied from Amazon Web Services. We had received customer feedback where the customer asked us to get formulate original content instead of copying from Amazon Web Services. It’s very odd and awkward."
"From a performance point of view, Huawei and Azure are faster. Alibaba isn't as good."
"Alibaba Cloud has some problems related to latency and connection issues. If you go for a cloud solution provider, you will need to access the Internet, which may result in latency and bandwidth issues, leading to slowness in operations."
"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"A big area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is its support. Another area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is SDK-based service because sometimes, the SDKs don't work correctly. Support for API-based services also needs improvement in Alibaba Cloud because, at the moment, it's not that stable."
"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."
"It is not robust."
"Alibaba Cloud's initial setup is somewhat complex."
"From a security perspective, there is always something that can be improved as we serve our customers."
"The solution could always work to reduce its costs."
"The solution could improve by providing better tutorials and documentation."
"I would like to see better policy-based management and everything related to security management could have been better integrated."
"For deploying multiple resources in a big number, such as in hundreds, we need a streamlined process and more user-friendly scrips. The scripts have to be more user-friendly, and they should also supply some standard templates to deploy multiple resources at a time. Currently, it is very easy to deploy a couple of resources, but if you want to deploy multiple resources, it becomes complex. The material that they provide for integration with an existing on-prem data center is complex. They have to make them user-friendly. The scripts related to resource management need to be simplified."
"Microsoft Azure could improve by having more virtual machine operating systems available."
"The tool needs to improve its navigation."
"Maybe Azure could add an address code to create your analysis without SQL or Python because some business users don't want it to code. So it's good to have a service application that connects to the data lake to conduct analysis and simplify the business process."
Alibaba Cloud is ranked 9th in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) with 16 reviews while Microsoft Azure is ranked 1st in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) with 299 reviews. Alibaba Cloud is rated 7.4, while Microsoft Azure is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Alibaba Cloud writes "The solution is useful for application development, but the user interface and user experience must be improved". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Azure writes "Promotes clear, logical structures preventing impractical configurations and offers seamless integration ". Alibaba Cloud is most compared with Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Google Firebase and DigitalOcean, whereas Microsoft Azure is most compared with Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Pivotal Cloud Foundry and OpenShift. See our Alibaba Cloud vs. Microsoft Azure report.
See our list of best Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) vendors.
We monitor all Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
I believe that with Microsoft Azure you will have a bigger advantage due to the amount of partners that there are in the market. If you need support from Partner one and you don't get it, it's easy to switch to another partner to get help.
Further to this Microsoft Azure now has datacentres worldwide which makes it easier to deploy anywhere.
Microsoft Azure