No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 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

Alibaba Cloud
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
11th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon AWS
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
260
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 5.2%, down from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon AWS is 15.1%, up from 12.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS15.1%
Alibaba Cloud5.2%
Other79.7%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Min HtetOo - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Marketing Officer at Soft Intelligence
The solution is useful for application development, but the user interface and user experience must be improved
The product must be made easier to use. The design is a bit tricky. When we log in to the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace and browse products, they look very small. The user experience must be improved. Alibaba Cloud must increase its partner network and brand awareness in our country. It will give our customers more opportunities to scale and save in the long run.
Asif  Meem - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet
Managed cloud services have helped accelerate experiments with flexible configuration options
Sometimes the costs associated with spinning up a service, especially managed services, have implications. For example, if I create a Glue job, that will create S3 buckets and other resources that have cost implications, but once I clean up a Glue job, it does not delete the other accessory resources. Sometimes, I have to go hunting for what resources Amazon AWS might have provisioned and how it is costing behind the scenes. It can be complex depending on your level of expertise. It is not as easy to get started, especially when it comes to secure practices. Amazon AWS is more hands-on than other platforms.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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"
"It is easy to set up."
"When comparing solutions such as GCP, which is the same as Alibaba Cloud, and others such as Amazon AWS and Azure, Alibaba Cloud is the preferred solution in China."
"I rate Alibaba Cloud's scalability an eight out of ten."
"We use the solution to run VMs."
"The installation is easy."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"The most valuable feature of Alibaba Cloud is the communication it allows between two servers."
"Not really, I fell in love with AWS right away: their services, quality and quantity of documentation."
"AWS has a lot of flexibility, which is great."
"Amazon AWS is a stable solution."
"Almost everything is good. It is a whole ecosystem. It is not only the storage, computing, or networking. It is interesting in the way all things are combined to form this ecosystem. It is a very well-built and logical ecosystem that has some small building blocks. These building blocks can be used in the right way to build a much bigger ecosystem that is robust, secure, scalable."
"The technical support is good."
"Our primary use case is to use the solution for running many relatively small instances for back office applications and various other business important applications."
"This is a great cloud platform and scalability is an outstanding feature."
"Easy to deploy through the channel model for serverless architecture and easy to integrate through the organization model."
 

Cons

"I wouldn't recommend Alibaba. I think other companies should just use Azure instead, as it's a much simpler solution."
"From the improvement point of view, there are lots of issues that we are facing. In all the areas, it seems like it is not mature. For example, a customer wants to provision some VM that has many configurations. If I want to show the price to the customer, it is very challenging. The SDK that Alibaba has provided is very limited. We can have the pricing for VM, but we cannot have pricing for RDS databases or some other services. This is a big concern area for us. They should put more effort into the SDKs or APIs that they provide, for example, pricing APIs or pricing SDK. They do not provide support for most of the services they provide. For example, if I want to get the price of MongoDB, that SDK is not available from Alibaba. Similarly, robust API support is required for S3, which is OSS or Object Storage, so that we can read the data in a faster manner, for example, in chunks. We have raised many issues with the Alibaba support team, and they have been fixing the issues after we report them."
"From the improvement point of view, there are lots of issues that we are facing. In all the areas, it seems like it is not mature."
"The support offered by the tool is ridiculous."
"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."
"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"Alibaba Cloud needs to increase availability in Thailand."
"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."
"They should really consolidate and make things simpler rather than offer you hundreds of random options."
"The pricing structure can be improved and made more straightforward."
"AWS is expensive and the cost should be reduced."
"It can be daunting because of the number of AWS products there are."
"The user interface (UI) needs improvement. Right now, it's not the best."
"Some services which were easy to use through shortcuts are now more complicated to use."
"The customization could be improved."
"In future releases, I would like to see more automation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"I don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"We cut our costs significantly by migrating our infrastructure to the cloud. Alibaba Cloud employs a pay-as-you-go model, so that minimizes many costs for us."
"I noticed on the pricing that it's quite expensive. It is the price you pay for making a practical choice for enterprise-level companies since it has so many features and it fits an enterprise-level company just like our company right now."
"I'm not sure about the exact pricing, but let's just say if it cost a dollar for Amazon AWS, it was closer to 70 to 80 cents for Alibaba Cloud."
"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"The product is not that expensive."
"We are not happy with the general price and find most of Amazon's products to be quite expensive."
"Licensing is on a yearly basis. I believe we are satisfied with the current pricing. Otherwise, we would have switched to another vendor."
"It is much more expensive than any other cloud provider."
"The price is good and licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"It is comparable if you add in the price structure to an on-prem solution."
"To anyone thinking about using AWS, I would suggest carefully designing your implementation. This is very important because it will impact the monthly cost of the solution. You need to think ahead and talk with your staff to find opportunities to make this more efficient."
"The pricing depends on the workload. For example, if your workload involves Windows technologies, AWS may not be the most cost-effective option. In that case, you might be better off with Azure."
"When you compare Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure, the pricing of both is almost the same. There are some instances when one is cheaper than the other in one area but it is difficult to pinpoint which one is cheaper because it depends upon a lot of factors, such as the use case. However, the overall price of both solutions could be reduced."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) solutions are best for your needs.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise120
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alibaba Cloud?
On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten.
What needs improvement with Alibaba Cloud?
Alibaba Cloud needs to improve emails. Its pricing can also be lower. Regarding security issues, Alibaba Cloud is more complex and better suited for developers and R&D teams. On the other hand,...
How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...
Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure
We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Amazon Web Services, AWS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. Amazon AWS and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.