Alibaba Cloud vs vCloud Air comparison

Alibaba and Virtustream are both solutions in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category. Alibaba is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.0, while Virtustream is ranked #23. Alibaba holds a 7.2% mindshare in ISI, compared to Virtustream’s 0.8% mindshare. Additionally, 75% of Alibaba users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Virtustream users who would recommend it.

Alibaba Cloud

Read 19 Alibaba Cloud reviews

5,710 Views
5,653 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

vCloud Air

Read 3 vCloud Air reviews

722 Views
462 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Alibaba Cloud

vCloud Air

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

vCloud Air and Alibaba Cloud are competing cloud service providers. Alibaba Cloud appears to have the upper hand due to its extensive service offerings and potential for high ROI despite higher costs.

Features: vCloud Air offers reliable disaster recovery, seamless VMware integration, and strong customer support. Alibaba Cloud features advanced storage solutions, machine learning capabilities, and a global network infrastructure.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: vCloud Air provides easy deployment with its VMware compatibility, allowing for a smooth business transition. Alibaba Cloud offers comprehensive documentation and support, though its broad ecosystem may present a learning curve for deployment.

Pricing and ROI: vCloud Air's pricing is straightforward and aligns with VMware integration value. Alibaba Cloud may have higher initial costs but is seen as offering better ROI through scalability and a vast service catalog.

To learn more, read our detailed Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

March 2026

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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

vCloud Air

Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

23rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS) (21st)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 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 vCloud Air is 0.8%, 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
Product	Mindshare (%)
Alibaba Cloud	7.2%
vCloud Air	0.8%
Other	92.0%

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

Featured Reviews

Salahuddin Shaikh

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.

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Saurabh Chandratre

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.

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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

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

"What's good about Alibaba Cloud is its database service. It's also good in the virtual machine area."

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

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

"The cost of hosting the solution is very reasonable; it's quite inexpensive and the solution is very secure."

"We use the solution to run VMs."

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

"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."

More Alibaba Cloud pros

"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."

"The Cloud DRaaS solution provided the organization with new levels of flexibility and cost control, together with rapid expansion capability."

"This is the part that should be making admins and CIOs smile."

Cons

"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."

"I would not recommend the solution to others."

"Alibaba Cloud needs to increase availability in Thailand."

"The support offered by the tool is ridiculous."

"A big area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is its support. Another area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is SDK-based service because sometimes, the SDKs don't work correctly. Support for API-based services also needs improvement in Alibaba Cloud because, at the moment, it's not that stable."

"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."

"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."

"I think that sometimes the customer service for Alibaba Cloud is inefficient.... Sometimes it's hard to reach out to them."

More Alibaba Cloud cons

"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."

"I feel the user interface/portal can be improved further. I did experience timeout issues and the UI was performing slowly at times."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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"

"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."

"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The cost is better than similar solutions."

More Alibaba Cloud pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

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.

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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,...

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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 client in the KSA, where I had utilized servers, storage accounts, email services, ...

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Comparisons

Amazon AWS vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 25% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 22% of the time

Google Cloud vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 17% of the time

Tencent Cloud vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon Bedrock vs Alibaba Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

More Alibaba Cloud Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs vCloud Air

Compared 32% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs vCloud Air

Compared 14% of the time

Amazon AWS vs vCloud Air

Compared 12% of the time

Cleura vs vCloud Air

Compared 11% of the time

Interoute vs vCloud Air

Compared 9% of the time

More vCloud Air Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Alibaba Cloud

March 2026

Download Alibaba Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

March 2026

Download vCloud Air 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

vCloud Air is a public cloud platform built on the trusted foundation of vSphere, compatible with your on-premises data center, that includes infrastructure, disaster recovery, and various applications as service offerings. vCloud Air allows you to extend your workloads into the cloud with ease. You can migrate existing onsite virtual machines (VMs) to the public cloud or start up new application VMs directly in the cloud.

Virtustream

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

Buyer's Guide

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

March 2026

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