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Alibaba Cloud vs VMware Cloud Foundation comparison

 

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 August 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 5.2%, down from 13.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Foundation is 2.2%, up from 1.3% 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%
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

"Alibaba Cloud has lower costs and good support."
"Alibaba also offers a lot of flexibility compared to Google Cloud, where you can only use Google's Tools."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"We use the solution's AI features for data analysis."
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"It is easy to set up."
"The cost of hosting the solution is very reasonable; it's quite inexpensive and the solution is very secure."
"Feature-wise, it provides many features, and ECS, VM, SP, bucket object storage, and databases are the most valuable."
"The ability to auto-scale is the most valuable feature."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The most valuable features in VMware Cloud Foundation are life cycle management and ease of use."
"The solution is very stable."
"If you want to reduce the operational overhead and manage your entire virtual infrastructure from a single pane of glass, then I would recommend VMware Cloud Foundation."
"They have in release 4.0 features from vSphere and Cloud Suite. It's a complete data center."
"Amongst everything that's out there, I would rate the product a nine out of ten."
"The fact that it automates a lot of manual processes in a net new environment build is most valuable."
 

Cons

"The solution’s user interface could be improved."
"If you want more accuracy, stability, and 24/7 customer support, primarily relying on the SDKs and APIs, you should think twice."
"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."
"I would not recommend the solution to others."
"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."
"I wouldn't recommend Alibaba. I think other companies should just use Azure instead, as it's a much simpler solution."
"VMware Cloud Foundation is complex, and there are always updates regarding security features, accessibility, and the user interface. Making changes isn't simple because there are a lot of tables to update. People in the field may not feel confident about managing it."
"Typically, the ABA in comparison to other products needs improvement, but it depends on the customer."
"The deployment is clumsy and complex. There are too many things that need to be done in order to deploy."
"They need to offer more support for Mac."
"The tool's price tag is high."
"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."
"Cost is a challenge when convincing clients, especially for large deals."
"VMware Cloud Foundation could be more flexible in terms of supporting other integration and components."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."
"The price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."
"The cost is better than similar solutions."
"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"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."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."
"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 pricing can be more competitive."
"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."
"If our customer has the option to buy a server for $4,000 or $5,000, but VMware asks for two-person licensing $7,000 to $8,000, which is more than the hardware price. So sometimes, the customer cannot pay for it because it's too expensive."
"It is quite expensive."
"This solutuion can be expensive for small and medium-sized companies."
"I rate the tool's pricing a seven out of ten."
"The licensing is expensive compared with Hyper V and Unitech's platform."
"There is an annual license required to use the solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
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: August 2026.
909,563 professionals have used our research since 2012.