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Alibaba Cloud vs vCloud Air comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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)
11th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
vCloud Air
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 5.2%, down from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vCloud Air is 1.1%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alibaba Cloud5.2%
vCloud Air1.1%
Other93.7%
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.
it_user613995 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Solutions Architect - EMEA & APAC at Blue Medora
With the VPC, you can run your workloads in an active state, use it for development work and for hosting SQL/Exchange Servers in IaaS; RaaS/DaaS for DR activities.
All three components of the vCloud Air are equally valuable and important, i.e., IaaS, DaaS and RaaS. I like the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering compared to the Dedicated Cloud. It gives me the flexibility to utilize the pay-as-you-go option. You can run your workloads in an active state at reasonable prices. I have seen lots of companies use it for their development work, as well as for hosting SQL and Exchange Servers, i.e., in the active-passive mode instead of Replication (RaaS). Disaster Recovery is also a great feature that is affordable and easy to use. Disaster Recovery is a great component of the vCloud Air, where you can protect the on-premises cloud infrastructure, by providing self-service recovery options using the vSphere Replication. Some of the features that really stand out and I have used in my projects are: * Direct Connect: It provides high speed and private line connectivity. * Offline Data Transfer: For encrypted bulk data transport.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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"
"It is easy to set up."
"We cut our costs significantly by migrating our infrastructure to the cloud, and Alibaba Cloud employs a pay-as-you-go model, so that minimizes many costs for us."
"The cost of hosting the solution is very reasonable; it's quite inexpensive and the solution is very secure."
"It's easy to use, cheaper than other solutions, and more secure."
"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"We use the solution's AI features for data analysis."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"This is the part that should be making admins and CIOs smile."
"The Cloud DRaaS solution provided the organization with new levels of flexibility and cost control, together with rapid expansion capability."
"VMware Workstation has an interesting feature to manage vSphere infrastructure (and also stand-alone ESXi hosts) that is really powerful and useful, for example to avoid to install the vSphere client (or the integration plugin) just to open one VM console or to change the power status for some VM."
 

Cons

"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."
"If you want more accuracy, stability, and 24/7 customer support, primarily relying on the SDKs and APIs, you should think twice."
"It is not robust."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved."
"Alibaba Cloud needs to increase availability in Thailand."
"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."
"From a performance point of view, Huawei and Azure are faster. Alibaba isn't as good."
"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."
"I feel the user interface/portal can be improved further. I did experience timeout issues and the UI was performing slowly at times."
"I don’t think it is quite where EC2 is with regard to capabilities and features but VMware is investing a lot in vCloud Air."
"It’s a really good idea, but the current implementation is very limited: you can simply see your VMs and just open the VM console."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is better than similar solutions."
"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'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."
"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."
"The product is not that expensive."
"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
No data available
 

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 more complex and better suited for developers and R&D teams. On the other hand,...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
Lumeta, LifeSite, Clear Tec Solutions, National Physician Services, Queens University of Charlotte, California Natural Resources Agency, Pacific Disaster Center, Seventy Seven Energy Inc., Columbia Sportswear , CSS Corp
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: June 2026.
902,495 professionals have used our research since 2012.