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Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure comparison

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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 September 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 5.2%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.3%, down from 16.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure is 8.4%, down from 15.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Azure8.4%
Amazon AWS13.3%
Alibaba Cloud5.2%
Other73.1%
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.
reviewer2832981 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Cloud migration has reduced hardware dependency and supports secure global access to apps
The best features Microsoft Azure offers are cloud scalability, virtual machines, storage, networking, security, monitoring, and identity management. Scalability is the most valuable to our organization because Microsoft Azure allows businesses to scale resources up or down based on workload demand. This helps manage traffic spikes without buying permanent hardware. Virtual machines are also valuable as Microsoft Azure provides cloud-based Windows and Linux virtual machines to run applications, servers, and workloads. Identity and Access Management is important, as the integration with Microsoft Entra ID helps manage user authentication, role-based access, and MFA. For example, employees access business apps securely using single sign-on. Backup and disaster recovery are also important because they provide automated backups and failover options to ensure business continuity. Microsoft Azure positively impacts my organization by reducing infrastructure dependency, improving availability, and enabling remote access. Teams can access applications globally without on-premises server dependency, and in terms of cost, it is very low-cost.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"We use the product for storage and as a VPN."
"Otherwise, the cost of Alibaba Cloud is reasonable, and service-wise, it's also good because it has many available services worth trying."
"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy for me since I had a background in cloud products."
"The most valuable feature of Alibaba Cloud is the communication it allows between two servers."
"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."
"Provisioning and resource administration include billing dashboards, which are very extensive."
"The product is very easy to use, it's flexible, it's the leading cloud platform in the world with a very wide variety of services, it has a very good ecosystem of its own, it has proven itself to be very stable, the scalability is great, and technical support is quite helpful."
"The main feature that I like the most is the variety of solutions that it provides. It provides some analysis, business information and more. It provides a wide variety of services."
"AWS's containerization is the most useful feature for us."
"We are loving this solution so far, and it has certainly reduced the time it takes to stack up new applications."
"I'm just a customer and an end-user; I'd highly recommend the solution to other users as one of the best cloud options out there right now."
"The installation and initial setup are easy."
"Overall, the solution is quite complete."
"Microsoft Azure has all of the latest cloud services with all high availability and scalability."
"The most valuable aspect of Azure is the flexibility you have for all the services and solutions it offers, even if you use IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, you have the option to only pay for the services you use – pay as you go, in a Cloud that is compliant with most regulations, using this advantage you have a lot of options and technologies you can adopt, and easily integrate into your infrastructure, to accelerate your Digital Transformation journey."
"We are using it for disaster recovery and application hosting."
"This product is quite easy to use and is available on-demand."
"Its ability to scale is most valuable, as there are certain periods of the year when we are busier, and we are able to scale up and scale down with Azure depending upon our needs."
"The solution's technical support was very good."
"Technical support has been good over the years."
"There are multiple players in the market and this seems to be a good solution."
 

Cons

"Alibaba Cloud's initial setup is somewhat complex."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved."
"I would not recommend the solution to others."
"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"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."
"Alibaba Cloud needs to increase availability in Thailand."
"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."
"The user experience must be improved."
"It's a good cloud, however, if I compare it with Azure, Azure is more of a feature-rich cloud."
"Probably customer education and awareness, especially in the Cyber Security area."
"Amazon AWS should integrate AI capabilities."
"The overall convenience and the ease to use could be improved."
"Somehow Amazon associated their marketplace as a place to find images of various installs (preconfigured software) and was late in the game enabling and promoting SaaS-based solutions. Thus, the AWS marketplace has near zero awareness in the mind of the prospect to find solutions to various problems plaguing them."
"An area for improvement would be their technical support packages. They should improve the technical support packages for users on free trial."
"We would appreciate it if the product was cheaper."
"We have had several issues with the products and services but as of now, there are no good alternatives."
"There was a time when the solution was updated on their side and all of our functions stopped working. This issue could be worked on to prevent it from happening in the future. They must give us the information of when they are going to updates on the platform side so that we can take the appropriate measures on our side as well."
"Its subscription price could be cheaper."
"It could be cheaper."
"The documentation can be outdated and is not as clear in Microsoft Azure as it is in AWS or Google."
"Some of the dashboard features can be improved. Some of the backup solutions for SAP are not compatible."
"The solution should be more intuitive and provide better support. We often do not receive frequent updates or comprehensive support, even as partners."
"When we check with Microsoft, they tell us it is working as per design, and we have to work through various PowerShell scripts to get those details."
"We like that they have the new capabilities, but sometimes they're deprecating capabilities faster than we can handle. If we had to improve it, we would want to stay on some of these older capabilities a bit longer."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"From a cost perspective, Amazon AWS is excellent. You need to pay for a license to use AWS, and the license could be cheaper, but in each of the cases and instances I've used AWS, there has been a good chance to save money."
"The pricing is expensive."
"We are on an annual subscription for Amazon AWS."
"The solution is on a pay-as-use pricing model. The price of the solution could always be better but it is priced competitively."
"You are not paying a licensing fee, you pay for consumption."
"The prices are somewhat on the higher side. It would help if they can bring it down, especially for the sporting segment and for on-demand instances."
"The prices are a bit high."
"Amazon AWS could have more options and transparency in its pricing model. You need in-depth knowledge to adopt AWS. So someone without that knowledge base might not understand all of the costs associated with AWS."
"The product is expensive."
"Software licensing models can be expensive depending on what you need compared to open source solutions, for example. However, if you don't have the technical skills, you may be better off paying for a license and support instead of trying to use open source solutions."
"Its price should be optimized so that we can use more features."
"Be careful with Azure Cool storage accounts; if you are dealing with high object counts, then it can be more economical to use Hot storage because of the high storage access costs associated with Cool."
"The cost of Microsoft Azure depends on the services that are used and there can be a discount at a corporate level from Microsoft."
"With adequate knowledge, I think you can come up with a good model where the pricing won't be a constraint."
"In countries experiencing high inflation, the cost of Azure services can be significantly impacted. This can result in higher expenses compared to other regions."
"The pricing is cheap."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

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
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business141
Midsize Enterprise54
Large Enterprise153
 

Questions from the Community

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Also Known As

No data available
Amazon Web Services, AWS
Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: September 2026.
912,788 professionals have used our research since 2012.