Alibaba Cloud vs Google Compute Engine comparison

Alibaba and Google are both solutions in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category. Alibaba is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.5, while Google is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.6. Alibaba holds a 12.6% mindshare in ISI, compared to Google’s 0.7% mindshare. Additionally, 75% of Alibaba users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Google users who would recommend it.

Alibaba Cloud

Read 19 Alibaba Cloud reviews

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5,356 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

Google Compute Engine

Read 16 Google Compute Engine reviews

401 Views
240 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Alibaba Cloud

Google Compute Engine

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

Google Compute Engine and Alibaba Cloud are prominent competitors in the cloud services market. Google Compute Engine holds an advantage in customer satisfaction and seamless integration within the Google ecosystem, whereas Alibaba Cloud offers robust features and is favored for its cost-effectiveness in the Asia market.

Features: Google Compute Engine is notable for customizable virtual machines, ephemeral instances to save costs, and managed instance groups for high availability. It integrates seamlessly within the Google ecosystem. Alibaba Cloud provides user-friendly tools, a wider range of compute solutions suited for Asian markets, and flexibility in service offerings.

Room for Improvement: Google Compute Engine could enhance auto-scaling flexibility, multi-region support, and non-technical user accessibility. It also needs to improve licensing processes and quota management. Alibaba Cloud should bolster SDK support, API integration, and customer service responsiveness, especially outside Chinese regions.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Google Compute Engine, deployed as a public cloud solution, receives mixed feedback on customer support, though it remains efficient. Alibaba Cloud offers both public and private options but faces challenges in support efficiency outside its home regions, necessitating improvements in user support frameworks.

Pricing and ROI: Google Compute Engine operates on a cost-effective pay-as-you-go model with potential savings when efficiently used, yielding a solid ROI. Alibaba Cloud is generally more affordable than major competitors but lacks flexibility in region and currency-based price adjustments. ROI benefits from low regional pricing, but its overall pricing flexibility is limited.

To learn more, read our detailed Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Compute Engine Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Compute Engine

April 2025

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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)

8th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Google Compute Engine

Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

10th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 12.6%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Compute Engine is 0.7%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

Featured Reviews

Aderonke Adeyegbe

CEO at Comercio Limited

Good storage, great for smaller companies, and has impressive support

We're all aware that the pandemic accelerated digital transformation, and we believe that Alibaba, due to its pedigree, has what it takes to take small businesses to the cloud. It's a game-changer, for sure. The storage is very useful. It is easy to set up. Technical support is good. It is quite stable.

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Arundeep Veerabhadraiah

Associate Director - Cloud Infrastructure at Kyndryl

A highly scalable and seamless platform which is easily automated

One of GCE's best features is the managed instance groups. We typically use managed instance groups for high availability. You can set certain parameters for managed instance groups where if the load of the computer or server increases beyond 80%, for example, the solution will automatically spawn another instance, and the load will be automatically divided between two systems. If the load is 80% of one of the VMs or GCEs, once the load is divided, it comes down to 40%, so the availability of your systems goes up. However, that all depends on the parameters or configurations we put on the instance group. You also have regular health checks on these managed instance groups, which are configurable. If these health checks determine something wrong with the VM, they will automatically kick off or spawn a new GCE instance. This way, the outage time is less. Previously, on-premises, unless somebody reported the issue to the helpdesk saying that a particular service was unavailable, then a support team would need to troubleshoot what went wrong, which takes a long time. At least 30 minutes to one hour. But by using these managed instance groups, we can reduce the outage time, and second, we can configure them with minimal resources, bringing down our cost. And if the load increases, the managed instance groups automatically respond to new things. Subsequently, our costs decrease. We have a wide range of VMs. There are general-purpose VMs that can be used for hosting general-purpose applications. If some of our applications are memory intensive, then we have a lot of VMs in the M1 series. We can use a range of memory-optimized VMs for these things. We have C-series VMs for compute-intensive applications. If we use some mathematical formulas and require a very high throughput from that, there are GPU-optimized VMs used for machine learning or 3D visualizations in rendering software. GPU-enabled VMs are pretty powerful and responsive. Again, the best part is that we can spin them up when we need them, and once we're done with our work, we can shut them down, allowing tremendous cost savings for any customer. Previously, if we wanted a very high-configuration VM, we had to own the entire hardware and have it on our on-prem data center. And once we'd done with a particular activity, the system would just be lying there on our premises. That is not the case now. We use and decommission it, so we're only billed for the time we're using the product. One of the best things is the preemptible VMs or Spot VMs. These are the cheapest VMs in Google Cloud, but it has a string attached to it where Google can shut down these VMs whenever Google teams split. You only get about 90 seconds notice before they shut down this particular VM. There are scenarios where customers can use these preemptible VMs, for example, when running a batch job. Batch jobs are run once or twice daily, depending on the customer's requirement. Once we are done running these batches, we can decommission the VM. Even if, in the middle of this batch job, Google shuts down these VMs, we can pick up the processing from wherever the VM left off. These are some of the beautiful things we have on Google Cloud concerning the Compute Engine.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."

"Alibaba Cloud has lower costs and good support."

"The product's initial setup phase was easy for me since I had a background in cloud products."

"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."

"We use the product for storage and as a VPN."

"It is a scalable product. So, scaling up or scaling down is possible."

"The cost of hosting the solution is very reasonable. It's quite inexpensive."

"I rate Alibaba Cloud's scalability an eight out of ten."

More Alibaba Cloud pros

"The support for ephemeral instances has been particularly valuable for me. It allows me to significantly reduce costs for temporary virtual machines by automatically destroying them once they are no longer needed, which can result in cost savings of up to 90 percent. Additionally, the solution is easy to use."

"One of GCE's best features is the managed instance groups."

"The solution is readily available, and software engineers can provision it. It is scalable and allows self-service."

"The main motive for choosing Google Compute Engine is pricing."

"From a feature perspective, I find API integration, automation capabilities, and features like preemptive and Spot instances valuable. Migration tools have also been useful."

"Everything is simple and useful. The initial setup is not challenging."

"The initial setup is reasonably straightforward. It's a handful of networks and a handful of computers."

"The most valuable feature is auto-scaling."

More Google Compute Engine pros

Cons

"From a performance point of view, Huawei and Azure are faster. Alibaba isn't as good."

"The solution name is not favorable in some markets and could cause us some problems gaining customers."

"It is not robust."

"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."

"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."

"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 solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."

More Alibaba Cloud cons

"There have been instances when a customer has tried to deploy a certain number of VMs inside a project, and they come across quota issues."

"It is not very user-friendly for non-experienced users"

"The high availability features in Google are only available in Google Compute Engine in different regions. If I have another server outside Google, the high availability features in Google cannot synchronize with such a server."

"It would be better if there was an option to change the background. Like in Gmail, there's an option to change your theme."

"Google Compute Engine needs to have multi-region support. It would also be nice to have a tracking mechanism."

"I rate the product's stability around five to six out of ten."

"Google has a lack of focus on their products."

"The licensing process is not a very straightforward process."

More Google Compute Engine cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."

"The cost is better than similar solutions."

"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."

"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."

"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 don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."

"The product is not that expensive."

More Alibaba Cloud pricing and cost advice

"Google Compute Engine is not the least expensive solution. Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft One, are offering a less expensive solution. The price is based on usage. Whenever we use it, we have to pay for only usage. It is a pay-as-you-go model."

"Google Compute Engine's pricing is flexible and the best of all other alternatives."

"Google is providing money for learning Google Compute Engine. They offer a $300 free trial to new customers. Any beginner can easily get started."

"In terms of improvement, one is definitely the licensing piece. So there is a feature, the BYOL (Bring Your Own License) licensing piece, to bring your own license. It is not that straightforward. It requires some support from Google to get it sorted, access those licenses, and configure those licenses."

"The tool is reasonably priced, considering its scalability features. If we want to extend the server's capacity, we can do it, and I think it's reasonable."

"I rate GCE's pricing a five out of ten since it's affordable."

"It's $60,000 to $70,000 a month to replace about $10,000 a month in data center costs."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

23%

Computer Software Company

16%

University

Financial Services Firm

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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,...

See all answers

What do you like most about Google Compute Engine?

Everything is simple and useful. The initial setup is not challenging.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Compute Engine?

Google resources are cheaper compared to AWS and Microsoft Azure. Among the three, Google is the cheapest option.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Compute Engine?

Google has a lack of focus on their products. They have many products in various areas of the market, but they do not productize or appeal to the market effectively. They should concentrate on prod...

See all answers

Comparisons

Google Cloud vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 34% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 30% of the time

Tencent Cloud vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 7% of the time

More Alibaba Cloud Competitors

VMware Cloud Foundation vs Google Compute Engine

Compared 33% of the time

Amazon EC2 vs Google Compute Engine

Compared 25% of the time

Google Cloud vs Google Compute Engine

Compared 22% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Google Compute Engine

Compared 20% of the time

More Google Compute Engine Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Alibaba Cloud

April 2025

Download Alibaba Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Google Compute Engine

April 2025

Download Google Compute Engine product report

Overview

Alibaba Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to support growing enterprises worldwide, including data storage, relational databases, big-data processing, and content delivery networks.

Alibaba

Google Compute Engine delivers virtual machines running in Google's innovative data centers and worldwide fiber network. Compute Engine's tooling and workflow support enable scaling from single instances to global, load-balanced cloud computing.

Compute Engine's VMs boot quickly, come with persistent disk storage, and deliver consistent performance. Our virtual servers are available in many configurations including predefined sizes or the option to create Custom Machine Types optimized for your specific needs. Flexible pricing and automatic sustained use discounts make Compute Engine the leader in price/performance.

Google

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint

Allthecooks, BetterCloud, Bluecore, Cosentry, Evite, Ezakus, HTC, Infectious Media, iStreamPlanet, Mendelics, SageMathCloud, Sedex, Treeptik, Wibigoo, Wix, zulily, Zync

Buyer's Guide

Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Compute Engine

April 2025

Free Report: Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Compute Engine

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