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Alibaba Cloud vs VMware Cloud Foundation comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

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)
10th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Cloud Foundation
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th)
 

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 VMware Cloud Foundation is 2.2%, up from 1.4% 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%
VMware Cloud Foundation2.2%
Other92.6%
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.
MI
Cyber Security Analyst at Amdari
Has enabled reliable management of private and public environments with strong automation and integrated security
VMware Cloud Foundation can be used in either private or public environments, and its organization allows you to combine everything in the storage together with combined computer storage, network, visualization, management, and integrated stack, which makes it easier to run everything together. This is especially notable in the storage section. The automation capabilities of VMware Cloud Foundation demonstrate excellent performance because of the private cloud automation, where you can develop things and manage the software into the data section, which is the SDDC. It allows the organization to modernize their infrastructure and accelerate application delivery together with the support for both virtual machine and container. Regarding the impact of integrated security on data protection strategy, the product and management data varies in different ways, including collecting performance and configuration data, which enables monitoring of your product and platform to modernize the application. This includes handling data at rest and in motion to ensure data protection when disasters occur. This is achieved through gathering data at different intervals, ideally every five minutes, enabling recovery between VM and platform when something affects your data.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What's good about Alibaba Cloud is its database service. It's also good in the virtual machine area."
"We use the solution to run VMs."
"Feature-wise, it provides many features, and ECS, VM, SP, bucket object storage, and databases are the most valuable."
"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."
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"Otherwise, the cost of Alibaba Cloud is reasonable, and service-wise, it's also good because it has many available services worth trying."
"The installation is easy."
"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"
"The initial setup is straightforward and easy."
"VMware Cloud Foundation's best features include its advanced capabilities, security purposes, and performance levels."
"The tool's UI is great."
"All features of VMware Cloud Foundation are valuable to us, as it covers every industry standard protocol and requirement protocol, and it assists in meeting our requirements for host-level redundancy on both the primary site and the DR site."
"The main features are the separation between the management plane and the workload. You can use NSX to provision between the different areas of the network, like west-east or north-south."
"Overall, I rate VMware Cloud Foundation a nine out of ten."
"We use VMware Cloud Foundation mainly for the virtualization part, and because it's a suite where everything is combined, we have vSphere and vCenter."
"VMware Cloud Foundation's most valuable features are password and certificate management. The SDDC manager tool is the front tool we are using to manage the entire VCF stack. In the SDDC manager, we can able to rotate, and update the passwords of all users. Anything in the VMware portfolio, we can manage from a single dashboard and we have various data centers. We have connected everything into one Federation. From one single place, we are managing our entire virtual interactions."
 

Cons

"If you want more accuracy, stability, and 24/7 customer support, primarily relying on the SDKs and APIs, you should think twice."
"Regarding security issues, Alibaba Cloud is more complex and better suited for developers and R&D teams. On the other hand, Google Cloud is more convenient for new users."
"The solution should have more integration."
"The solution name is not favorable in some markets and could cause us some problems gaining customers."
"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."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved."
"I would not recommend the solution to others."
"There may be room for improvement in the resource allocation feature. VMware Broadcom needs to include auto resource allocation at the VM levels."
"In the early adoption of VMware Cloud Foundation, we have seen minor problems. For example, in our Federation, I see the single pane of glass where we need to manage everything, which is good, however, internally, we have a Kafka database that is distributed by the database used by the SDDC manager and during the distribution and synchronization, there is some issue and we need to stop the process."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"I would like to be able to connect the APIs."
"The maintenance cost has increased significantly, especially after Broadcom acquired VMware, with a shift from socket-based licensing to core-based licensing."
"If one component fails to operate in a timely manner, the entire infrastructure can go down because everything is interconnected. This is the biggest issue."
"Compared to Nutanix, which many people consider a better option due to its single platform approach, VMware Cloud Foundation operates on different platforms."
"After the acquisition, prices have been going up."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"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."
"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"
"The product is not that expensive."
"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 price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."
"It is quite expensive."
"The price of VMware Cloud Foundation is a bit high. However, it comes with a lot of useful features and can handle a lot of operational complexity. Overall the price can be seen as being fair for what it offers."
"VMware Cloud Foundation is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"The tool's price is slightly on the higher side, but I guess you think there is no one-to-one comparison with other tools. The licensing part has become easier, while earlier, it was quite complex."
"The pricing is moderate. I would rate it six out of ten."
"The pricing can be more competitive."
"The pricing of VMware Cloud Foundation could improve, it is expensive."
"VMware Cloud Foundation is overpriced, but I think we get what we pay for."
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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
15%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

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 Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

Which solution do you prefer: Alibaba Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
Thanks for sharing these insights! I completely agree that Microsoft Azure provides IT administrators with strong centralized management, robust security controls through RBAC, and tools for cost o...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Cloud Foundation?
The price for VMware Cloud Foundation is not cheap, as the market is competitive with AWS cloud. When comparing prices of both clouds, AWS is cheaper because they offer a free section for practice....
What needs improvement with VMware Cloud Foundation?
In VMware Cloud Foundation, areas that have room for improvement include the experience between VMware Cloud Foundation and the cloud. I prefer working with the cloud due to my study with the archi...
What is your primary use case for VMware Cloud Foundation?
Regarding my experience with application migration between on-premises and public clouds using VMware Cloud Foundation, I have used it for storage deployment.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
ricoh, dell technologies, sky
Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. VMware Cloud Foundation and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
912,930 professionals have used our research since 2012.