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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
7.0
Number of Reviews
260
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 (20th)
 

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 14.3%, down 15.1% compared to last year.
IBM SoftLayer, on the other hand, focuses on Public Cloud Storage Services, holds 1.9% mindshare, up 0.5% since last year.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS14.3%
Microsoft Azure8.7%
Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode)7.1%
Other69.9%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM SoftLayer1.9%
Amazon S315.8%
Amazon S3 Glacier10.3%
Other72.0%
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

"The payment structure is very good."
"The solution scales very nicely."
"It's very reliable."
"We have been very, very happy with the capabilities we have been able to experience so far."
"It improves the speed for us to access vendors, etc."
"This tool is indispensable, and must be taken into account when designing."
"Having a cloud available has been great; it makes things faster and easier and the deployment is pretty quick and very straightforward."
"The interface of the solution is good."
"The solution is highly stable."
"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."
"The ability to extract 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."
 

Cons

"When the solution faces downtime, it can be for hours or half a day."
"The difficulty of the implementation depends on the project. We have a lot of very complicated and complex project which make the implementation more difficult. However, a small project can be very simple to implement. In general, over 90% of the project tend to be complex implementations."
"We have had several issues with the products and services but as of now, there are no good alternatives."
"The console's UI could be a little better, a fluid User Experience is missing."
"An area for improvement would be their technical support packages. They should improve the technical support packages for users on free trial."
"IaaS is sometimes way too complicated to complete one task."
"However a catch with the above mentioned tools (among others) and approaches is that to replicate your data (e.g. objects in a bucket) can involve other AWS S3 fees."
"The price could be better."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be lower."
"With Amazon AWS, you pay as you go."
"It is much more expensive than any other cloud provider."
"It is quite expensive in my very personal opinion. Going on-prem in a data center is, for sure, not as expensive as going to AWS, but when it comes to a point where you are raising and growing, it simply makes a lot of sense to stay in AWS. It is awesome in that way. I am not aware of any extra costs."
"There are many variables involved in pricing service in AWS and overall the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"Amazon AWS is a bit more expensive than Oracle."
"The solution's pricing depends on your traffic since they charge you based on the traffic, not the servers. The price can go into many, many thousands depending on the traffic."
"Reasonably priced and comparable to similar services."
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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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise120
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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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), Google and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: August 2026.
909,701 professionals have used our research since 2012.