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 #7 with an average rating of 7.4, while Google is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.5. Alibaba holds a 12.0% mindshare in ISI, compared to Google’s 1.0% 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

5,769 Views
5,769 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

Google Compute Engine

Read 16 Google Compute Engine reviews

662 Views
530 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: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Compute Engine

September 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)

7th

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)

13th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 12.0%, up from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Compute Engine is 1.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Alibaba Cloud	12.0%
Google Compute Engine	1.0%
Other	87.0%

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

Featured Reviews

Min HtetOo

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.

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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

"It's easy to use, cheaper than other solutions, and more secure."

"It is easy to set up."

"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."

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

"Feature-wise, it provides many features. ECS, VM, SP, bucket object storage, and databases are the most valuable."

"The most valuable feature of Alibaba Cloud is the communication it allows between two servers."

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

"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"

More Alibaba Cloud pros

"I recommend the tool to others since it has high availability features, scalability, and stability."

"The overall product rating is nine out of ten."

"The solution helps to direct SSH into the machine at the click of a button. It also helps to deploy container images right from the UI. There is no need to manage the containers on the machine. I also like the tool’s Spot provision model."

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

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

"The most valuable feature is auto-scaling."

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

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

More Google Compute Engine pros

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."

"The solution’s user interface could be improved."

"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 solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."

"The solution should have more integration."

"It is not robust."

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

"The user experience must be improved."

More Alibaba Cloud cons

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

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

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

"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."

"I would like to improve the solution’s UI while deploying a container. It is sometimes hard to figure out the container’s details and format that you want to deploy. The tool does not give you a guide to find out the error and why the container is not starting up which could be because you have configured it wrong. This is always a hit on the setup."

"It has some limitations. For example, you don't get through layer two connectivity. So I've had some difficulty deploying custom VMs. For example, you can't deploy a KVM file to file directly on GCP."

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

More Google Compute Engine cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is not that expensive."

"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 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."

"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."

"The cost is better than similar solutions."

"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."

"The price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."

More Alibaba Cloud pricing and cost advice

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

University

Manufacturing Company

25%

Computer Software Company

Performing Arts

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	7

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

Microsoft Azure vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 28% of the time

Google Cloud vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 21% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 21% of the time

Tencent Cloud vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 14% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 10% of the time

More Alibaba Cloud Competitors

VMware Cloud Foundation vs Google Compute Engine

Compared 38% of the time

Tencent Cloud vs Google Compute Engine

Compared 17% of the time

Joyent Triton Compute vs Google Compute Engine

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon EC2 vs Google Compute Engine

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Google Compute Engine

Compared 11% of the time

More Google Compute Engine Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Alibaba Cloud

October 2025

Download Alibaba Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Google Compute Engine

September 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

September 2025

Free Report: Alibaba Cloud vs. Google Compute Engine

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