Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Amazon AWS vs IBM SoftLayer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
258
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd), PaaS Clouds (2nd)
IBM SoftLayer
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Public Cloud Storage Services (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Cloud Services solutions, they serve different purposes. Amazon AWS is designed for Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) and holds a mindshare of 17.2%, up 16.2% compared to last year.
IBM SoftLayer, on the other hand, focuses on Public Cloud Storage Services, holds 1.2% mindshare, up 0.2% since last year.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon AWS17.2%
Microsoft Azure10.8%
Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode)9.5%
Other62.5%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
Public Cloud Storage Services Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM SoftLayer1.2%
Amazon S313.2%
Amazon S3 Glacier11.5%
Other74.1%
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

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.
reviewer1032702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Principal Cloud Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Stable with excellent speed and agility
The most valuable aspect of the solution is simply to have the ability to host in a cloud form and out of the data center - the IBM big iron solution. It's the speed and the agility that really sell SoftLayer. The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer. The ability to extract act from your current location, load into your future location, with limited change, and then be able to take the transfer actions slowly and methodically after you're in your new location is the part that really makes this awesome. The stability and scalability are quite good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is intuitive, easy to deploy, and rather quick to deploy and set up. There are a number of native services in the ecosystem. These services are built into the cloud and are mature enough to support you in many ways."
"A scalable and secure product"
"Amazon has a much better understanding of the workflow of data scientists and machine learning processes. This is seen by their SageMaker which offers different versions of the models to be used."
"It is easy to use."
"The storage on offer is excellent."
"This solution is stable and reliable."
"This solution offers a very detailed dashboard that has some metrics, such as performance and budget."
"It improves the speed for us to access vendors."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
"The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
 

Cons

"The price of the solution is comparatively quite high in comparison with that of Azure."
"I have been using Amazon AWS for approximately one year."
"If Amazon AWS can offer more self-paced learning tools, on their website, on CBT, it'll be easier for more people to familiarize themselves with their service. Especially when they are delivering new services from time to time. Educational tools that can help users familiarize themselves with their service. It would be great."
"There should be improvement in terms of creating databases of varying sizes which would provide flexibility."
"I think that the interface could be improved."
"Amazon needs to develop better tools for troubleshooting network traffic, application insights, performance, and even some aspects of integration mapping. I'm hoping AWS implements something like Azure's Network Watcher and a log analytics solution where a can pull logs from various services and present them in a single dashboard. I want to summarize the performance and usage of every service and application."
"The price could be better."
"The feedback we are getting from our customers, especially here in Turkey where the exchange rate fluctuates regularly, is that the solution is quite expensive."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The Oracle licensing is higher than it is with Amazon AWS."
"Licensing is on a yearly basis. I believe we are satisfied with the current pricing. Otherwise, we would have switched to another vendor."
"For our infrastructure, the cost is approximately $25 per device, and you have to include the other tools that we have in the cloud, for a total of approximately $200,000 per year."
"AWS is scalable depending on your needs so pricing is dependant on what you use."
"It's expensive."
"As a startup business, it's very well priced, but if a number of transactions go up, clients have voiced that they are in a situation and feel a type of pressure and desire to move out of AWS."
"Billing for cloud services can be difficult at times."
"It could be cheaper, and Amazon could also be more transparent with its pricing. I would first expect any product vendor to give me the utmost transparency on pricing information. There shouldn't be any hidden costs. Their service offerings have a bit of segmentation, and they focus more on SMBs. They brought them onto the cloud and encouraged them to use solutions on the cloud. But strategically, they should probably improve that and offer some credits."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) solutions are best for your needs.
879,371 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise113
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
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 ...
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
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 ...
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
CloudLayer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Whogohost Ltd., Skypicker, Infinity Computers and Communications Company, Grace Co. Ltd., Keyword, Uvionics Tech, Tennis Australia, immixGroup, Salesbox, Cxense ASA, Avnet Inc., Komsomolskaya Pravda, Seekr
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Akamai and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: November 2025.
879,371 professionals have used our research since 2012.