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Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS comparison

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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)
9th
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 November 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 5.5%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon AWS is 12.8%, down from 16.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS12.8%
Alibaba Cloud5.5%
Other81.7%
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.
MM
Data Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Cloud training has boosted my data analytics skills and simplifies building small projects
One area that could be improved in Amazon AWS is its learning curve. The large number of services and configuration options can be overwhelming, especially for new users. Understanding its pricing can also be challenging, as costs can add up unexpectedly if resources are not monitored carefully. For data analytics, setting up and integrating services such as S3, Glue, and Athena sometimes requires a good understanding of permissions, data formats, and service configurations. More guided, simplified onboarding for analytics use cases would make the platform more accessible. One additional area for improvement is documentation and service selection. Amazon AWS offers many services with overlapping capabilities, and it can sometimes be difficult for users to determine which service is the best fit for a particular use case. More decision support tools and guided recommendations would help reduce this complexity. From a data analytics perspective, cost visibility could also be improved since analytics workloads can scale quickly. Having more proactive cost forecasting and optimization recommendations would help teams manage budgets more effectively. Another challenging area is IAM and permission management. While Amazon AWS provides strong security controls, configuring permissions correctly can be complex, especially when multiple analytics services need to interact with one another. Simplifying permissions while maintaining security would enhance the overall user experience. The other area I would mention for improvement is the overall user experience. Given the huge number of services, which are truly excellent, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to navigate, especially for a new user that requires much training. A more streamlined interface and clearer recommendations between similar services would make it easier to get started. I would also like to see more built-in cost optimization guidance and cost management tools. Other than that, Amazon AWS is a very good and mature platform. Most of my feedback is about making it easier to learn, manage, and optimize rather than adding new capabilities.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a scalable product. So, scaling up or scaling down is possible."
"We use the product for storage and as a VPN."
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"It is easy to set up."
"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"
"We cut our costs significantly by migrating our infrastructure to the cloud, and Alibaba Cloud employs a pay-as-you-go model, so that minimizes many costs for us."
"Alibaba Cloud has lower costs and good support."
"I rate Alibaba Cloud's scalability an eight out of ten."
"Having a cloud available has been great; it makes things faster and easier and the deployment is pretty quick and very straightforward."
"Amazon AWS is very, very stable."
"They are all excellent in terms of offering great functionality."
"Amazon AWS has a good Redshift database."
"750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux t2.micro instance usage (1 GiB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) -- It's enough hours to run continuously each month."
"The solution has good speed. It's very fast."
"Easy to deploy through the channel model for serverless architecture and easy to integrate through the organization model."
"The installation and initial setup are easy."
 

Cons

"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."
"I wouldn't recommend Alibaba. I think other companies should just use Azure instead, as it's a much simpler solution."
"The majority of the tools and processes, in general, have a lot of room for improvement."
"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 flexibility of the solution could be improved."
"The solution name is not favorable in some markets and could cause us some problems gaining customers."
"From a performance point of view, Huawei and Azure are faster. Alibaba isn't as good."
"The solution should have more integration."
"AWS is expensive and the cost should be reduced."
"Recently, new dashboards have been launched. This new UI is an improvement that they have made."
"More complete and specific training for many of the technologies, specifically with Python Django and the CMS (Mezzanine)."
"They have a low code platform, but it is for intervention."
"The interface is relatively complex."
"Many of our clients prefer in-house cloud rather than the application data sitting in the infrastructure owned and managed by Amazon."
"While AWS often is at the top of my list to recommend to people, I always have to tell them, "Hey, you got to be careful because if they don't like you, they can shut you down in a heartbeat. And they can kill an entire company by doing that.""
"It works very well with open-source solutions like Java, but not with .NET technologies."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of Alibaba Cloud is lower than that of AWS, but I feel that its price is on the higher end of the spectrum. Alibaba Cloud charges its users a price in dollars"
"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."
"The cost is better than similar solutions."
"The product is not that expensive."
"I don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."
"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'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 price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."
"The pricing is fair."
"It's an expensive product."
"The licensing cost varies with the project involved."
"Licensing is on a yearly basis. I believe we are satisfied with the current pricing. Otherwise, we would have switched to another vendor."
"Some customers will provide their own license and others will purchase it directly from AWS."
"If you can plan capacity for one or three years, you can use the upfront payment option which allows you to save up to 50%."
"When I first started using the solution I used a free trial, and then we upgraded to a pay-as-you-go subscription. We have an allocated budget of $50."
"The cost is on a monthly basis."
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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
16%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
 

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

Which solution do you prefer: Alibaba Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
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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: November 2026.
920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.