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Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS vs Google Firebase comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 7.2%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon AWS is 17.4%, up from 14.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Firebase is 2.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS17.4%
Google Firebase2.7%
Alibaba Cloud7.2%
Other72.7%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Salahuddin Shaikh - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at EPAM Systems
Alibaba Cloud has evolved a lot in all specially in AI space, but still needs to improve the support offered to users.
The part where the product lacks is not because of the services it offers. The support offered by the tool is ridiculous. Whenever you raise the support ticket, someone from China comes over the phone. When I used to raise a ticket for support, some person from China came along with another English-speaking person to whom I had to explain my issues, after which the English-speaking individual used to translate it into Mandarin for the person from China. The Chinese person used to explain something in Mandarin to the English-speaking person, and it used to keep happening continuously, making it a hectic support service from Alibaba Cloud. The support was time-consuming, and it was also frustrating. As a technical person, if you are someone who is expecting something to be done as soon as possible and the support services offered to you turn out to be time-consuming and frustrating, then it won't be a great experience for the users.
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.
Himash Careem - PeerSpot reviewer
Intermediate Software Engineer at Xelleron Pty
Analytics integration has improved how I manage user identity and understand customer behavior
I face difficulties with the authentication parts in Google Firebase when it goes with iOS applications. With Android applications, that is easier because Google owns it. When it goes to iOS applications, there should be a much more straightforward, smoother way. I mostly faced that with Flutter because with Flutter, there are two sides with Android and iOS. The Android part was pretty much easier for me, but when it goes to the iOS part, there was more work on that.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The cost of hosting the solution is very reasonable. It's quite inexpensive."
"We use the solution to run VMs."
"The installation is easy."
"Feature-wise, it provides many features. ECS, VM, SP, bucket object storage, and databases are the most valuable."
"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"
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"We use the product for storage and as a VPN."
"It is easy to set up."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its cloud storage and compute services."
"We've built several AI ML solutions and done lots of work on the GPUs available on Amazon servers. We did a lot of work around web spidering, natural language processing, and machine learning or deep learning workloads."
"When it comes to cloud management, I have no complaints at present."
"The best thing is scalability."
"The most valuable features are how stable and easy to use Amazon AWS is."
"It's a very flexible and customizable service"
"A scalable and secure product"
"The scalability of the product is the solution's most valuable feature."
"The product’s most valuable features are integration and hosting."
"The connection between Firebase and the integrated development environments, especially when using Android Studio, is crucial as it saves time."
"I'm really happy with the performance and with what it gives us."
"It helps me understand user behavior more effectively with Google Analytics."
"Google Fire is providing a lot of features, such as the deployment of our application, and the real-time database where we can store data."
"The real-time database feature is the most valuable, allowing real-time feedback without needing to constantly poll the database."
"The user interface is very good and easy to navigate."
"The most beautiful feature of Google Firebase is that it gives you a lot of functionalities out of the box, without you having to develop or having to complete a solution. For example, identity management is integrated, and security is out of the box, particularly security for the user and the ability of each user to see his data. I also like that Google Firebase has a really good performance and is comparable to MongoDB. It's on the same level, and sometimes, it's on an even higher level than MongoDB. Other functions that Google Firebase has that I find valuable include information dissemination, mail automation, and SMS, available out of the box. Another valuable feature of the solution is that it allows you to develop some functionalities on the server side, so you can write JavaScript functions on the server side and use those functions quite easily. Google Firebase gives you almost a full backend environment out of the box without you having to do any deployments or a lot of administration because all administration is given out of the box."
 

Cons

"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"From a performance point of view, Huawei and Azure are faster. Alibaba isn't as good."
"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."
"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."
"Alibaba Cloud's initial setup is somewhat complex."
"Alibaba Cloud needs to increase availability in Thailand."
"It is not robust."
"Customer support has a lot of room for improvement. There's just general documentation, general customer support, and general maturity of the processes are all lacking when compared to Amazon or Google."
"There have been some issues in the past when it comes to file integrations in AWS's cloud products."
"There is a bit of a learning curve. That said, it's likely no different than learning any other cloud."
"Instead of using some third-party solutions, Amazon should include them as part of its offering."
"The response time of technical support could be better. It is not so good."
"The product is a bit costly."
"They could lower the cost. The setup could also be easier."
"The solution can get to be a little expensive."
"The web console of AWS is not so user-friendly."
"Scheduling the import was very difficult with Firestore; we had to use a couple of other tools to create schedulers to import, but the import on the Google BigQuery and the Firestore component was still a manual process, which was a bit annoying."
"They have discontinued some very valuable features, including the Firebase UI that I used to log in."
"The product is complicated for beginners to understand."
"In terms of DevOps, such as CI/CD deployments and integrating webhooks with GitHub, GitLab, or other platforms, Firebase does not offer those capabilities at that level."
"Firebase uses JSON, and the storage format is very different to that of SQL. This does not allow for easy migrations."
"The initial setup is not exactly straightforward."
"What I hate most about Google Firebase is that it has many different versions and releases new ones frequently."
"You can use this solution for lightweight use but I would not recommend being dependant on it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"The product is not that expensive."
"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 price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."
"It's pay-as-you-go... but I think the pricing becomes a problem as the IT organization grows. They need to give better pricing when companies grow."
"For the initial 12 months, the solution is reasonably priced. On enterprise license contracts where you negotiate, have been reasonable too."
"AWS is expensive and the cost should be reduced."
"It is subscription-based, and we are happy with its pricing."
"Reasonably priced and comparable to similar services."
"Monthly licensing fee."
"The license for Amazon AWS is expensive. I am currently using the free version."
"The pricing of Amazon AWS is high compared to any other cloud provider."
"We are using the free version of Google Firebase."
"Google Firebase’s pricing needs improvement."
"It is not easy to calculate the cost per copy, use or if the load rose dramatically we did not know how that would impact the final price."
"Pricing for Google Firebase is not so expensive, and if you're a start-up with a small amount of data, it will be quite cheap, and there's even a free tier that you can use. If you're doing a pilot with a reasonable amount of data, for example, just a few gigabytes, it's still on the free tier. If you increase the amount of data, Google Firebase pricing is still reasonable."
"The monthly cost is based on writing data and queries to the database."
"The moment you go into volumes, then you work on a pay-per-volume basis."
"The pricing plans indicate it can get very expensive."
"The pricing component is a bit confusing when it comes to what exactly you'll pay for, but I wouldn't say it's expensive."
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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
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Educational Organization
6%
University
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise114
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise8
 

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 mor...
What is your primary use case for Alibaba Cloud?
I was using Alibaba Cloud for the deployment of one of the products that my previous company was developing for a cli...
How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderfu...
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 expand...
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 fle...
How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?
I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. ...
What do you like most about Google Firebase?
Google Analytics for Firebase is the best feature of the solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Firebase?
The pricing structure needs improvement since it uses cloud billing. We do not know how the pricing is calculated as ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Amazon Web Services, AWS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Fabulous, Pic Collage, Shazam, SkyScanner
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Akamai and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: March 2026.
885,789 professionals have used our research since 2012.