Amazon AWS vs IBM Public Cloud comparison

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) Logo
31,029 views|26,409 comparisons
IBM Logo
9,891 views|7,136 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on May 15, 2022

We performed a comparison between Amazon AWS and IBM Public Cloud based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Users of both solutions tell us the deployment process is simple, easy, and straightforward.
  • Features: Amazon AWS users say the solution is very efficient in helping to move clients easily to the cloud and offers a wide range of cloud services within the growing AWS ecosystem. The solution interacts well with on-premise data centers too. Users can scale easily up to an unlimited number of processes very quickly. Some users feel that although AWS is available globally, not all service centers offer every service, causing some functionality issues across different markets.

    IBM Public Cloud users tell us the solution is very predictable and dependable, providing excellent performance and stability. Many users say they appreciate the flexibility of the solution, as they can choose the hardware they want. Users feel IBM Public Cloud should offer more computing on par with other offerings in the marketplace. Many users would like to see improved customized reporting capabilities and believe the solution could be more secure.
  • Pricing: Even though Amazon AWS is a pay-as-you-go, on-demand structure, users feel the solution can still be expensive. IBM Public Cloud users feel the solution is priced well, and say the solution is significantly cheaper than other solutions.
  • Service and Support: Users of both solutions are satisfied with the level of service and response received.

Comparison Results: Amazon AWS is the solution our users like best, due to its overall global reach and excellent responsive support. Additionally, the diversity of software tools available, lower operating costs, and excellent customer service make it a very complete solution.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon AWS vs. IBM Public Cloud Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Which would you prefer - Amazon AWS or IBM Public Cloud?
Answer: AWS, the main reason is the number of DC distributed arround the world
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Amazon AWS has good performance and easy management.""The product is highly scalable.""Very good automation and very stable.""Our primary use case is to use the solution for running many relatively small instances for back office applications and various other business important applications.""Cloud Management has been a valuable feature.""It is quite easy to provision new virtual services for our use. The procedures are quite straightforward and simple as compared to other competitors, such as Microsoft or Huawei. This is what we are happy about with Amazon AWS. It is pretty mature in terms of the availability of most of the infrastructure components. If you want to deploy a server on your platform, everything is already there in terms of the operating system, network components, securities, and data encryption. It is also quite scalable and stable.""AWS is easy to manage.""It has a dynamic scaling capacity which is very helpful."

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"For non-complex applications, the IBM Cloud works fine and the price is much lower than the competitors.""This product is very good because it is accessible in remote locations, and anyone can deploy from any place.""What I like most in IBM Public Cloud is how easy it is to create serverless functions. They are called IBM functions, but in AWS, they are called Lambda functions. Those are pretty standard, and another thing I like the most is that you have fewer restrictions on the amount of data you can transfer across those functions. IBM Public Cloud is way more flexible than AWS. I also like that IBM Public Cloud is pretty straightforward to integrate. As long as you have all the tools IBM provides you, getting everything up and running is straightforward.""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.""One of the features that I really like about IBM Cloud is the flexibility where you can order your own hardware.""It's straightforward, has a good environment and is cost-effective.""This is a predictable and dependable service.""The availability is second to none. Customer support is very good."

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Cons
"Scaling is an area that can be improved.""The response time of technical support could be better.""The initial setup is not easy at all.""The use of this tool should be extended to Google and Apple operating systems.""They can launch the Oracle service in Azure, and we expect that this should be possible in Amazon AWS as well.""In some areas, more transparency on what is persistent towards novice users.""There should be seminars and online training sessions available from AWS because a lot of people who are not using it would benefit from having the basic knowledge or basic hands-on experience.""We have had some difficulty figuring out how to monitor how many EC2 instances have been networked into our entire enterprise. We usually try to create a diagram outside of AWS. The types of information we are trying to determine are, for example, what hardware devices are interconnected, and when was the interconnection made."

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"There is not a lot of support for this solution, which is something that needs to be improved.""The solution needs to be more autonomous. It should let the DL go to allow for more jobs on the cloud. It could have a better interface as well.""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.""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.""Normally, for any cloud, we get a lot of information on the web, but that is missing in the case of IBM Public Cloud. We need some technical support documents. That is the only thing missing in IBM Public Cloud.""The initial setup and the pricing are areas that need improvement.""The deployment can be a bit of a pain. There are a lot of packages and a lot of options and it can require complex configuration to get it right.""The solution’s pricing could be improved."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Be careful with your consumption, especially when you are testing things. Costs can creep up on you relatively fast, without even noticing."
  • "AWS is scalable depending on your needs so pricing is dependant on what you use."
  • "It is decently priced. The competition is also bringing its own cloud offerings, such as from Oracle."
  • "When we shifted the load to AWS we paid a high cost as the mail stores were hosted on EBS. The storage cost drastically reduced after moving to S3."
  • "If you can plan capacity for one or three years, you can use the upfront payment option which allows you to save up to 50%."
  • "One of the best thing in Amazon AWS is you are billed for the service you use."
  • "We are reducing costs year-over-year."
  • "Much faster than other solutions at a super low cost."
  • More Amazon AWS Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "We are using the trial version of this solution, so we have not paid anything."
  • "The price of IBM Cloud is very cheap compared to competitors AWS and Azure."
  • "The licensing fees are straightforward and predictable."
  • "Pricing is not as fair as Amazon or Azure."
  • "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 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."
  • "It pretty much has a standard price. There is no hidden price with IBM Public Cloud."
  • "IBM has a lesser price compared to other cloud service providers like Azure and AWS."
  • More IBM Public Cloud Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    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 alluring IT customers. This article give brief history of these cloud hosting service providers and compares the cloud services provided by them. -- Amazon Web Services -- It's hard to find someone who doesn't agree that Amazon Web Services is the market leader in IaaS cloud computing. The company has one of the widest breadths of cloud services - including compute, storage, networking, databases, load balancers, applications and application development platforms all delivered as a cloud service. Amazon has dropped its prices 21 times since it debuted its cloud six years ago and fairly consistently fills whatever gaps it has in the size of virtual machine instances on its platform - the company recently rolled out new high-memory instances, for example. There are some cautions for Amazon though. Namely, its cloud has experienced three major outages in two years. One analyst, Jillian Mirandi of Technology Business Researcher, has suggested that continued outages could eventually start hindering businesses' willingness to invest in Amazon infrastructure. That sentiment gets to a larger point about AWS though - the service seems to be popular in the startup community, providing the IT… Read more →
    Answers from the Community
    Netanya Carmi
    Ariful Mondal - PeerSpot reviewerAriful Mondal (FH)
    Real User

    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. 

    Vik Devdas - PeerSpot reviewerVik Devdas
    Real User

    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. 

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or is… more »
    Top Answer:How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can be… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:The front end is not pervasive, so it is very difficult get the status of your current services or account from a mobile device. 
    Top Answer:The most valuable feature of IBM Public Cloud is the AI integrations.
    Ranking
    2nd
    out of 33 in PaaS Clouds
    Views
    31,029
    Comparisons
    26,409
    Reviews
    25
    Average Words per Review
    531
    Rating
    7.8
    9th
    out of 33 in PaaS Clouds
    Views
    9,891
    Comparisons
    7,136
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    742
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Amazon Web Services, AWS
    IBM Bluemix
    Learn More
    Overview

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an adopted cloud platform that offers more than 200 fully featured services from data centers located across the globe. This is a scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that is utilized by thousands of businesses of different sizes around the world. The product offers a wide variety of solutions for its customers, which allows them to launch applications regardless of their industry.

    The most common use cases for AWS are:

    • Application hosting: Clients can take advantage of on-demand infrastructure to power their applications. The product supports multiple types of apps, varying from hosted internal applications to software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

    • Websites: With AWS, clients can satisfy their web hosting needs through a scalable platform for their websites.

    • Backup and storage: AWS offers reliable data storage services, which allow clients to store their data and build dependable backups for all of their valuable information.

    • Enterprise IT: The product allows companies to host internal- or external-facing IT applications in a highly secure environment.

    • Content delivery: Users who want to distribute content to end users worldwide can do so quickly and easily through the high data transfer speeds of this solution.

    • Databases: AWS offers a variety of database solutions, which include hosted enterprise database software as well as non-relational database solutions.

    Amazon AWS supports a global cloud infrastructure with AWS Region and Availability Zone models, which contribute to the high availability of enterprise applications running on the solution. Amazon AWS has an extensive array of products that serve different purposes, including:

    • Analytics
    • Application integration
    • Blockchain
    • Business applications
    • Cloud financial management
    • Compute
    • Contact center
    • Containers
    • Database
    • Developer tools
    • End-user computing
    • Front-end web and mobile
    • Games
    • Internet of Things (IoT)
    • Machine learning
    • Management and governance
    • Quantum technologies
    • Robotics
    • Satellite
    • Security, identity and compliance, and others

    The products and services that Amazon AWS delivers to these sectors provide a large computing capacity which is quicker and cheaper compared to building a physical server farm. Among the most popular services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2," and Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as "S3."

    Amazon AWS Features

    The wide array of products that Amazon AWS offers consist of different functions that utilize cloud computing across different sectors. The features of this solution can be categorized in the following ways:

    • Data and relationship management: With Amazon AWS, companies can manage multiple hierarchies of directory data, they can define attributes for objects and relationships, set custom inheritance rules for directories, and create multiple schemas.

    • Schema management: This group of features allows users to extend their directory schema according to their needs. They can extend it through multiple applications that share a single directory while avoiding duplication of data.

    • Fully managed infrastructure: This feature decreases time and costs for administrative tasks for companies regarding scaling infrastructure and managing servers.

    • Searching feature: The Cloud Directory feature of AWS offers built-in search capabilities which can cover sets of highly connected data and eliminate the need of creating nested queries.

    • Built-in data encryption: Users can benefit from high levels of protection of their data with AWS's products. The data in the cloud is automatically encrypted at rest and in transit through 256-bit encryption keys, managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

    • Object policies: This feature allows Amazon AWS users to organize objects in different hierarchies by providing a framework for applications to evaluate policy assignments.

    Amazon AWS Benefits

    This product delivers various benefits across all industries that utilize its services. The greatest advantages of using Amazon AWS include:

    • High product functionality is supported by machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, data lakes, and analytics.

    • The solution has a high level of security, which is backed by a deep set ofmore than 100 cloud security tools.

    • Amazon AWS has an easy-to-use interface that makes it possible for clients to host applications.

    • The product is very flexible in terms of which operating system, programming language, web app platform, and database clients can use.

    • AWS is a scalable and highly secure global computing infrastructure, supported by the reliability of Amazon.com.

    • Clients can utilize the Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing tools to personally scale up or down applications, depending on their demand.

    • Users can choose from an array of payment options, including paying for only the services they need, as well as a free trial to select the ones most useful for them.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Greg G., a chief executive officer at a tech services company, ranks Amazon AWS highly, as he states that the solution is flexible, scales well, and offers good stability.

    A technology manager technology at a computer software company values Amazon AWS because it is extremely cost-efficient, easy to upgrade and expand storage with greatly improved interfaces.

    IBM Cloud is a full-stack cloud platform that spans public, private and hybrid environments. Build with a robust suite of advanced data and AI tools, and draw on deep industry expertise to help you on your journey to the cloud.

    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
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company31%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Educational Organization6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization22%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Program Development Consultancy13%
    Political Organization13%
    Computer Software Company13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company13%
    University11%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Educational Organization9%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business44%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise38%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise28%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business63%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise25%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise62%
    Buyer's Guide
    Amazon AWS vs. IBM Public Cloud
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS vs. IBM Public Cloud and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Amazon AWS is ranked 2nd in PaaS Clouds with 250 reviews while IBM Public Cloud is ranked 9th in PaaS Clouds with 16 reviews. Amazon AWS is rated 8.4, while IBM Public Cloud is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Amazon AWS writes "Reliable with good security but is difficult to set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Public Cloud writes "Reliable, easy to set up, and has helpful support". Amazon AWS is most compared with Linode, OpenShift, Microsoft Azure, SAP Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud, whereas IBM Public Cloud is most compared with Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Google Cloud, Heroku and Salesforce Platform. See our Amazon AWS vs. IBM Public Cloud report.

    See our list of best PaaS Clouds vendors.

    We monitor all PaaS Clouds reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.