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

Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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
7.2
Number of Reviews
256
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
11th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 12.3%, down from 17.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 10.1%, up from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Arun Srivastav - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows for automatic scaling of resources and provides built-in firewalls and security features, eliminating the need for external security solutions
One thing that's a bit different is that we're still accustomed to speaking to someone directly. AWS doesn't offer that kind of support. It's only through bots. You're speaking to chatbots, and that can sometimes be frustrating because there's no person on the other side. AI is not a substitute for a person. AWS marketplace is very strong, but somehow AWS doesn't promote it much. They have a huge customer base across the globe, and if products were launched in their marketplace, they could sell like hotcakes. They should improve their marketplace and promote the same product across the globe. They can take a cut, but they should promote it. That's something they don't do very much. So, AWS should promote its marketplace software. The company should promote it aggressively. Currently, they keep it very subtle. If you ask for it, they'll help you out. But they don't seem to advertise, "You're building a product on our platform? Why don't you sell it in our marketplace?" Improvement in AI: AWS is a little behind Microsoft Azure in terms of AI. AWS is still getting there, but the kind of examples and help files available in Azure for AI are much better. So AWS still needs to work on its AI functionality.
Stephen  Hack - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use, simple to sign-in, but lacking graphical interface
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is used as a cloud platform Pivotal Cloud Foundry has helped our organization by the way we've set it up, it's easy to sign in, bind services, push services, and create YAML files. The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"They provide cutting-edge features compared to other cloud vendors."
"We have many projects where we can resolve a lot of issues with Amazon AWS. It has given customers a lot of visibility with their data. Many customers do not know what they can learn from their data and I provide them with this using useful information using Amazon AWS."
"We've built several AI ML solutions and done lots of work on the GPUs available on Amazon servers. We did a lot of work around web spidering, natural language processing, and machine learning or deep learning workloads."
"AWS has large community support."
"As a service vendor, we have helped clients to achieve faster "go to market" on their products, and have provided highly flexible cost-effective system management solutions."
"AWS's containerization is the most useful feature for us."
"The most valuable features are load balancers, databases, and S3 buckets."
"AWS is stable."
"I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities."
"The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line interface has the ability to push instances to the cloud easily."
"Stability is not a concern with this product."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"It is a scalable product...We are not facing any particular issues since most of the applications in our company are written in Java and .NET."
"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."
 

Cons

"In some areas, more transparency on what is persistent towards novice users."
"The pricing of the solution could be better. It's a little pricey."
"The solution can get to be a little expensive."
"AWS should reduce its cost to become more affordable for small-scale organizations."
"The price needs improvement."
"The billing should be more competitive."
"The dashboard can be improved a little bit to provide more information."
"You'll probably experience some sticker shock with AWS. You attempt to understand the cost, but you don't realize what you're paying until you get your first bill. I don't know if Amazon does that on purpose, but costs can get out of control quickly if you don't have someone who specializes in AWS cost management."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale. It's easy to scale on an application level, but not it is not similar to if you were using Amazon. Amazon you can scale thousands of applications."
"I'd like to see a larger service offering."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."
"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."
"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."
"It should offer more security features."
"Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice."
"Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you compare Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure, the pricing of both is almost the same. There are some instances when one is cheaper than the other in one area but it is difficult to pinpoint which one is cheaper because it depends upon a lot of factors, such as the use case. However, the overall price of both solutions could be reduced."
"AWS is scalable depending on your needs so pricing is dependant on what you use."
"Amazon AWS is on the cheaper side, as their pricing is more competitive. There are no additional costs besides the license. However, Azure sells Microsoft licenses, so they have an advantage."
"Pricing is good. It's average."
"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'."
"Looking at the primary market for AWS, I see that there's a lot of customers who have only mid-level performance requirements, because you will have all these normal applications such as online auction websites, gaming applications, voice applications, and so on. These are not, for example, large monitoring applications, financial independents, or brick and mortar companies. So AWS caters to about 40% of the market when it comes to general applications. As it happens, in many cases, you simply don't need the high-performance offerings from AWS, nor the innovative products from Google Cloud Platform, which can come with large price tags."
"The solution should improve the pricing."
"It's paid on a monthly basis and you have to pay for the resources that you use."
"We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market."
"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which PaaS Clouds solutions are best for your needs.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
37%
Manufacturing Company
18%
Insurance Company
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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...
Which would you recommend - Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift?
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native application platform to simplify app delivery. It is efficient and effective. The best feature is how easy it is to handle external services such as database...
What do you like most about Pivotal Cloud Foundry?
I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pivotal Cloud Foundry?
I would say it is around a nine out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. Just short of Oracle. It's sort of Oracle cloud.
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Humana, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Liberty Mutual, The Home Depot, GE, West Corp, Merrill Corporation, CoreLogic, Orange, Dish Network, Comcast, Bloomberg, Internal Revenue Service, Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Volkswagen, Solera, Allstate, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ScotiaBank
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.