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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)
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
7.2
Number of Reviews
256
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 12.9%, up from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon AWS is 12.7%, down from 22.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Min HtetOo - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Arun Srivastav - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows for automatic scaling of resources and provides built-in firewalls and security features, eliminating the need for external security solutions
One thing that's a bit different is that we're still accustomed to speaking to someone directly. AWS doesn't offer that kind of support. It's only through bots. You're speaking to chatbots, and that can sometimes be frustrating because there's no person on the other side. AI is not a substitute for a person. AWS marketplace is very strong, but somehow AWS doesn't promote it much. They have a huge customer base across the globe, and if products were launched in their marketplace, they could sell like hotcakes. They should improve their marketplace and promote the same product across the globe. They can take a cut, but they should promote it. That's something they don't do very much. So, AWS should promote its marketplace software. The company should promote it aggressively. Currently, they keep it very subtle. If you ask for it, they'll help you out. But they don't seem to advertise, "You're building a product on our platform? Why don't you sell it in our marketplace?" Improvement in AI: AWS is a little behind Microsoft Azure in terms of AI. AWS is still getting there, but the kind of examples and help files available in Azure for AI are much better. So AWS still needs to work on its AI functionality.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Alibaba Cloud is the communication it allows between two servers."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"The installation is easy."
"What's good about Alibaba Cloud is its database service. It's also good in the virtual machine area."
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"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 solution can scale well."
"One of the most valuable things about it, besides the stability, is that you can forget about infrastructure because you're just doing it on AWS. I remember the times before AWS and other cloud solutions existed, and it was a huge pain to get real hardware, put it inside, configure everything, report everything, and do a scale. It was very, very difficult compared to how it is now. Not even just AWS, but what all these cloud providers are doing, I would say, is a huge advancement in technology."
"It's very user-friendly."
"We pretty much like everything and we are excited about the seamless capability the EC2 service is offering."
"We have seen an improvement in our infrastructure, as the code makes it very easy to deploy quickly to AWS."
"The storage is most valuable. The gateway and documentation are also quite good."
"The most valuable features are load balancers, databases, and S3 buckets."
"The scalability of Amazon AWS is excellent. I would rate it as a 10 out of 10 because they have massive power."
 

Cons

"I think that sometimes the customer service for Alibaba Cloud is inefficient.... Sometimes it's hard to reach out to them."
"Regarding security issues, Alibaba Cloud is more complex and better suited for developers and R&D teams. On the other hand, Google Cloud is more convenient for new users."
"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"The solution should have more integration."
"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 support offered by the tool is ridiculous."
"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."
"The user experience must be improved."
"Customer access to APIs is limited so that logs cannot be checked properly."
"There are numerous use cases, and the setup varies from complicated to very simple in some cases."
"At times we find ourselves a little trapped, with the lack of customization, for what we need."
"The solution is pretty mature."
"The problem with AWS is you have to keep up with the technology. If you don't stay up to date with the technology and its latest changes then you won't know what to use in your infrastructure."
"They need to improve the engines' availability of services since they have been reducing that availability."
"One thing that Azure offers that I think is good is Migrate appliance. So, Azure has a migrate appliance that allows you to run against workloads to determine the cost, preparedness, and scalability. I haven't found a similar feature in AWS. That kind of service would be great on AWS too if you could point it to the data center."
"When you are first starting, the initial setup can be a bit complex, but it gets easier after that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."
"The price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."
"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"
"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."
"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 product is not that expensive."
"Looking at the primary market for AWS, I see that there's a lot of customers who have only mid-level performance requirements, because you will have all these normal applications such as online auction websites, gaming applications, voice applications, and so on. These are not, for example, large monitoring applications, financial independents, or brick and mortar companies. So AWS caters to about 40% of the market when it comes to general applications. As it happens, in many cases, you simply don't need the high-performance offerings from AWS, nor the innovative products from Google Cloud Platform, which can come with large price tags."
"AWS is cost-effective because it saves time. Faster deployments and testing make it very valuable."
"It's expensive."
"As a startup business, it's very well priced, but if a number of transactions go up, clients have voiced that they are in a situation and feel a type of pressure and desire to move out of AWS."
"We pay a monthly licensing fee. It's below $100 a month."
"Be careful with your consumption, especially when you are testing things. Costs can creep up on you relatively fast, without even noticing."
"It's paid on a monthly basis and you have to pay for the resources that you use."
"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%."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 14, 2013
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Alibaba Cloud?
ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution.
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 ...
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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 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.