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Amazon AWS vs IBM Public Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 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

Amazon AWS
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
260
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)
IBM Public Cloud
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
18th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
IoT Platforms (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.8%, up from 12.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Public Cloud is 3.6%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS13.8%
IBM Public Cloud3.6%
Other82.6%
PaaS Clouds
 

Q&A Highlights

NC
Content Manager at PeerSpot
Oct 16, 2021
 

Featured Reviews

Asif  Meem - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet
Managed cloud services have helped accelerate experiments with flexible configuration options
Sometimes the costs associated with spinning up a service, especially managed services, have implications. For example, if I create a Glue job, that will create S3 buckets and other resources that have cost implications, but once I clean up a Glue job, it does not delete the other accessory resources. Sometimes, I have to go hunting for what resources Amazon AWS might have provisioned and how it is costing behind the scenes. It can be complex depending on your level of expertise. It is not as easy to get started, especially when it comes to secure practices. Amazon AWS is more hands-on than other platforms.
Premnath Jaganathan - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at Uop Ipl
Affordability and security improve our cloud experience while learning new systems
I'm not working with any AI features in IBM Public Cloud, but they are in the process of building it.I am very satisfied with the security that IBM Public Cloud provides. I would rate IBM Public Cloud eight out of ten, where one is worst and ten is the best.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Almost everything is good. It is a whole ecosystem. It is not only the storage, computing, or networking. It is interesting in the way all things are combined to form this ecosystem. It is a very well-built and logical ecosystem that has some small building blocks. These building blocks can be used in the right way to build a much bigger ecosystem that is robust, secure, scalable."
"Amazon AWS contains a lot of helpful services."
"The impact of Amazon AWS is evident in every organization that uses cloud-based applications, making data storage, processing, and analysis more efficient and scalable while enabling faster decision-making with real-time access to analytics and dashboards."
"I think Amazon AWS is easy to use, and it's a good service. I also like Amazon EKS because it's good."
"Easy to deploy through the channel model for serverless architecture and easy to integrate through the organization model."
"It is flexible, and it is quite comfortable to use for organizations."
"The product is nice and stable. Its performance is great."
"Before AWS, the time for availability of a new server would be more than a week, and currently, it can be measured in minutes."
"This product is very good because it is accessible in remote locations, and anyone can deploy from any place."
"I don't have much experience with this solution, but I would recommend it to others."
"It is a scalable product. You can scale it up and down."
"For non-complex applications, the IBM Cloud works fine and the price is much lower than the competitors."
"Anytime I need something they are dependable and willing to help me out."
"I've found the stability to be excellent. The performance is good."
"An advantage of IBM Public Cloud is the bare metal server. We can take the bare metal server. It's not shared with anyone. We can deploy our applications without sharing them with anyone. That is an advantage of IBM Public Cloud."
"It is easy to deploy what you need for the initial setup"
 

Cons

"The pricing of AWS is very unclear; they make it quite confusing, and sometimes there are hidden charges."
"There are some limitations for certain applications that happen regionally and it is an issue for us."
"The problem with AWS is you have to keep up with the technology. If you don't stay up to date with the technology and its latest changes then you won't know what to use in your infrastructure."
"More complete and specific training for many of the technologies, specifically with Python Django and the CMS (Mezzanine)."
"There is room for improvement in cost. Everyone complains about AWS being expensive. The initial cost starts small but can skyrocket unexpectedly."
"There are plenty of areas for improvement. For example, the ease of tagging could be improved. The tool could integrate AI tools to identify better and manage costs. Calculating the cost of some services could be more straightforward."
"It's sometimes a challenge to manage billing on this platform. It takes a lot of labor to generate billing for our customers from the service on the cloud."
"One of the issues I'm facing is that my RDS SQL Server version 5.8 is reaching its end of life, and I need to upgrade it to a customer-wanted version. I want to do this on Graviton instances, but Graviton only starts with version 8.0 and currently doesn't support the 5.8 series. We've raised a Priority Feature Request (PFR) with AWS to have this functionality added for at least three months. This would give us enough time to upgrade our database to the 8.0 version without any issues."
"An area for improvement in IBM Public Cloud is getting up-to-date information on how to set up everything. It's hard to find new documentation."
"They do not have a very good virtual network implemented, and the VPC is the most important feature that needs to be improved."
"There is not a lot of support for this solution, which is something that needs to be improved."
"This solution can be very slow, which was a big problem for us."
"While they have about 99% of what we need, the only exception, perhaps, was the push notification feature that was discontinued. They delayed the replacement product."
"The initial setup and the pricing are areas that need improvement."
"They could improve on customizing reporting capabilities."
"Support needs some improvement. Basically, you are doing it all on your own, and it's not easy."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS is cost-effective because it saves time. Faster deployments and testing make it very valuable."
"We are happy with the pricing."
"Be careful with your consumption, especially when you are testing things. Costs can creep up on you relatively fast, without even noticing."
"It's a pay-per-use model."
"I find Amazon AWS very expensive compare to Microsoft Azure."
"The solution is on a subscription-based model, and it is pay-as-you-go. The price could be cheaper."
"The prices are somewhat on the higher side. It would help if they can bring it down, especially for the sporting segment and for on-demand instances."
"We have a monthly subscription for Amazon AWS."
"The licensing fees are straightforward and predictable."
"IBM Public Cloud is pretty cheap. They have an ongoing free tier that basically won't expire, so as long as your solution is small enough, you can have a test set that you can use for demos, which will cost you almost nothing."
"We are using the trial version of this solution, so we have not paid anything."
"Pricing is not as fair as Amazon or Azure."
"It pretty much has a standard price. There is no hidden price with IBM Public Cloud."
"In order to be competitive, you have to commit to a contract for at least one year, but you pay a fixed monthly fee."
"IBM has a lesser price compared to other cloud service providers like Azure and AWS."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Answers from the Community

NC
Content Manager at PeerSpot
Oct 16, 2021
Oct 16, 2021
I agree with Vik and Marcelo. AWS cloud is more matured, but you would like to run some specific IBM business tools like document management, IBM Watson for AI, SPSS analytics then IBM Cloud should be preferred.
2 out of 3 answers
VD
CEO at a tech company with 11-50 employees
Oct 12, 2021
Amazon AWS is superior to IBM public for several reasons.  The most important reason is the diversity of software tools, the geographic diversity and availability, lower operating costs and excellent customer service. All cloud companies are simply playing catch-up to AWS. 
MJ
Works at SoftwareONE
Oct 14, 2021
AWS, the main reason is the number of DC distributed arround the world
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
11%
University
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise120
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

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How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
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Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure
We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...
Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Public Cloud?
The prices are relatively lower compared to others. It is a good option for medium-sized businesses. However, businesses should also consider other vendors to ensure they meet their specific securi...
What needs improvement with IBM Public Cloud?
The connectivity and speed of IBM Public Cloud are much lower compared to the competition.
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
IBM Bluemix
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Uvionics Tech, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Alpha Modus, Inventive, Web Business Consulting, FindBrok, SilverHook Powerboats, United Way of Allegheny County
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS vs. IBM Public Cloud and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.