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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
7.1
Number of Reviews
258
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
15th
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 May 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.5%, up from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 5.1%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon AWS13.5%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry5.1%
Other81.4%
PaaS Clouds
 

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.
reviewer2263239 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
PCF allows for fine-grained configuration, especially regarding scaling but routing limitations
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. A few things, such as what OpenShift does better are cluster management. Like, you can manage the entire thing together. Currently, it's possible to manage all the clusters, especially when it comes to cluster management using straightforward configuration. As of now, we have to handle each application instance individually, which means servicing them one by one. It would be better if we could perform these actions as a group or in a more streamlined manner. One more downside is actually the cost of this environment. So, major downside of Pivotal, it's the cost. So, the runtime running costs are very high. Extremely high.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloud Management has been a valuable feature."
"We use the solution only internally as a private cloud to store our files, our projects, and to keep our servers running."
"The solution offers a low footprint; we don't have to come up with a data center ourselves, we basically don't have to own any hardware, and by just renting a slice of their platform we have everything we need."
"The whole solution is well designed and AWS has decent documentation, which is not to be taken for granted, and I've also found that AWS is easy to use."
"The monitoring is the most valuable aspect of the product."
"Amazon AWS has proven itself as the market leader in the cloud solution environment and is highly stable."
"AWS has improved our organization by driving efficiency in our product development cycles."
"For testing, it is a cheap alternative to having to build your own labs."
"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 features are the monitoring and that the deployment is easier."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to scale. The services that connect to the database are also very good."
 

Cons

"There have been some issues in the past when it comes to file integrations in AWS's cloud products. However, there are now alternative solutions out there that are helping to integrate them all."
"This solution could offer more security."
"If you have not had previous training or studied guides it will be a little difficult to use the solution. However, the difficulty also depends on what you are using the solution for. They can improve by providing more documentation, such as tutorials and videos."
"Like anything, Amazon AWS has room for improvement, but it's not bad."
"We would like the system documentation for configuring this solution to be improved, in order to provide better process clarity."
"It just needs to be improved from the security perspective."
"Customer access to APIs is limited so that logs cannot be checked properly."
"The overall convenience and the ease to use could be improved."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale."
"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."
"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features and they should be included."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."
"It should offer more security features."
"Scalability is terrible. So far we have not been able to scale it up."
"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an expensive product."
"I find that Amazon AWS is expensive."
"Maintain a good budget, plan the consumption"
"AWS is expensive and the cost should be reduced."
"We pay a monthly licensing fee. It's below $100 a month."
"Pricing is an area that can be improved because it is very complicated. It considers the number of processes, bandwidth, and different kinds of usage. This makes it difficult to predict."
"Amazon AWS is really cost-effective."
"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."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."
"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."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Educational Organization
6%
Financial Services Firm
35%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Insurance Company
4%
University
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business132
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise117
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

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How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
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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...
 

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: April 2026.
893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.