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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
7.2
Number of Reviews
256
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 15.1%, down 21.1% compared to last year.
IBM SoftLayer, on the other hand, focuses on Public Cloud Storage Services, holds 0.5% mindshare, up 0.2% since last year.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

Featured Reviews

HarishMahanta - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable cloud service enhances ERP management with advanced security features
I use Amazon AWS for ERP implementation. My responsibility is to integrate our application into the AWS cloud and provide AI solutions to the infrastructure AWS is stable and has provided a reliable infrastructure for my organization. AWS offers add-on services such as security and automated…
reviewer1032702 - PeerSpot reviewer
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 storage on offer is excellent."
"The most valuable feature is that it is simple."
"The tool's most valuable features are AWS Security Hub and AWS GuardDuty."
"It is very easy to set up. It is also easy to use. It has a lot of services and integrations. We've been able to integrate whatever we need until now."
"Amazon AWS is very stable."
"We can easily upgrade and downgrade the Instance."
"The most useful feature of Amazon AWS is it can be accessed from anywhere."
"The experience with Amazon AWS is error-free. That was also, of course, something that I really appreciate. That means it's really well-tested and, as published or as declared."
"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

"Scaling is an area that can be improved."
"I don't have complaints. Previously, we asked for more end-to-end workshops, examples, and tutorials and these have been added and improved."
"As far as the automation is concerned, the backups should be scaled."
"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."
"There are numerous use cases, and the setup varies from complicated to very simple in some cases."
"Some of the storage services could be cheaper."
"Many of our clients prefer in-house cloud rather than the application data sitting in the infrastructure owned and managed by Amazon."
"We like everything about the solution except for the general price."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It seems to be reasonable. It's the first one that I've used as a cloud platform, so they've set the benchmark for me, and now, I'm comparing everything else to them."
"It is comparable if you add in the price structure to an on-prem solution."
"We need to pay for everything. If someone is a personal user, they get one year free. But if you are using this as a professional or enterprise solution, then your company has to pay. The license pricing is comparable to that of competitors'."
"They have different pricing models for each suite of services."
"It's not very pricey, but it could be cheaper."
"The pricing depends on the workload. For example, if your workload involves Windows technologies, AWS may not be the most cost-effective option. In that case, you might be better off with Azure."
"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
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
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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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), Akamai and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: August 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.