Amazon EC2 vs Zadara comparison

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Amazon EC2

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Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

Zadara and Amazon EC2 are leading cloud service providers in the market. Zadara's focus on storage flexibility and managed services gives it an edge in storage-related features, while Amazon EC2's scalability and integration with AWS services provide superiority in computational tasks.

Features: Zadara provides robust integration with cloud solutions, offering dedicated cores, memory, and a single-tenant experience essential for multi-organizational management. It supports dynamic storage management and major cloud vendors. Amazon EC2 is renowned for scalability, flexibility, and ease of resource deployment, emphasizing quick provisioning and autoscaling, with seamless integration with AWS services.

Room for Improvement: Zadara users seek faster feature development, better pricing, and enhancements in areas like auto-tiering and object replication. Amazon EC2 could improve with clearer pricing models, better service integration for enhanced usability, and proactive support for capacity management.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both Zadara and Amazon EC2 offer strong cloud deployment options and customer service across hybrid, public, and private environments. Zadara is noted for 24/7 management and proactive support, reducing infrastructure burdens. Amazon EC2 offers reliable support but requires better integration clarity and predictable support interactions for new users.

Pricing and ROI: Zadara's inclusive pricing, which covers all features and management costs, is beneficial for users valuing comprehensive coverage and stability. While its upfront costs might be higher, avoiding forklift upgrades leads to substantial ROI. Amazon EC2 offers cost-effectiveness for low-scale usage but can become expensive at scale due to complex pricing tiers. Its pay-as-you-go model needs more transparency to prevent unforeseen expenses and improve cost predictability.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon EC2 vs. Zadara Report (Updated: July 2025).

Amazon EC2 vs. Zadara

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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 EC2

Ranking in Compute Service

6th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Zadara

Ranking in Compute Service

10th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

All-Flash Storage (33rd), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (18th), Public Cloud Storage Services (15th), File and Object Storage (20th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 5.1%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zadara is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Compute Service

Featured Reviews

KatlegoMabila

Senior AWS Account Manager at Silicon Overdrive

Offers customization and flexibility with great support

Scalability depends on whether the client wants to scale up or scale down. It decreases resources based on demand. The great aspect of scalability is the flexibility to allow business success to optimize resource solutions and cost efficiency. Another crucial aspect of scalability is auto-scaling. When you have the opportunity to auto-scale, it can't always be available for everything. If you have chosen to integrate with auto-scaling, it's marvellous and doesn't require additional effort. Auto-scaling gives you the edge by using the capacity you have efficiently, scaling up or down as needed. These flexibilities within the EC2 feature instances of AWS play a crucial role in helping me utilize AWS EC2 Intelligent efficiently.

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Kirubel Behailu

Cloud System Engineer at cloud251

Enhancing storage management efficiency with user-friendly experience

Our customers are using Zadara for their research and development environments. We provide infrastructure for government projects, but we are often not fully aware of their specific usage. I typically use it for our infrastructure and offer both Zadara and Microsoft Azure to our customers Zadara…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Stable, scalable, and simple to implement."

"The ability to bring up servers and then do the computation and deposit means we don't have to maintain a data center. Everything is virtual and the security is also taken care of. It helps us to achieve compliance. Being a small startup with the security features that AWS provides helps us with compliance."

"EC2 instances on AWS allow users to run virtual servers based on the CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity."

"The platform has been quite stable and reliable."

"EC2 has the typical advantages of using the cloud. It's easy to provision and set up."

"The best features of Amazon EC2 are its high performance and security."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon EC2 is the virtual machines that are available."

"Amazon EC2 allows us to create different regions and availability zones based upon application needs."

More Amazon EC2 pros

"It's very easy to expand and compared to other storage systems that we've used, it's a lot more expandable and a lot more flexible in how it's deployed."

"The most valuable features of Zadara are its visibility and simplicity to use."

"Being able to scale on demand, and being able to get out of our security operation center, and not having to purchase hardware upfront, has drastically reduced the overhead that was required to maintain our information. We have also gained additional capabilities in terms of speed of replicating that information."

"Zadara Storage Cloud having 24/7 management saves me support and engineering costs because the storage and computing are managed by a third-party. We are able to focus more attention on the customer, which is truly our core business. Even at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM at night, someone will answer, which is important."

"Zadara saves both time and money."

"One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage compute instances in there. Being able to integrate with compute, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections."

"Zadara is a fully-fledged platform, and our customers are happy with its use."

"The most valuable feature of Zadara is its ease of use and safety. Overall the solution is a complete package, it has all the features needed."

More Zadara pros

Cons

"Amazon EC2's pricing could be better."

"The tool’s stability could be better."

"I think the whole AWS stack is very disconnected from each other. in the .NET space, everything just works nicely together. In the AWS stack, there is a lot of head scratching."

"The only issue with EC2 is that it makes it difficult to install an LLS certificate on your WordPress website that you have deployed inside that virtual machine. That becomes complicated."

"The product could benefit from offering more mixed instance types that combine features from different series to suit diverse workload requirements better."

"Regional acceleration could improve. If I am hosting a website and I want the experience to be faster they should have this feature to allow for increased speeds."

"Pricing-wise, it is a bit high."

"They can build automatic features for ENSS or network drive. They have the Control-M feature. Similarly, they should have a feature for the network drive that can be mapped. I have not seen such a feature. They have a lot of products but those are quite costly. There is no cheaper option available for the EC2 instance for syncing two drives. If these features are available, it would be good."

More Amazon EC2 cons

"The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can also be complicated, especially when deeper troubleshooting requires navigating the CLI and searching for logs."

"The initial setup of the solution is complex."

"Currently, when we do firmware upgrades, it sometimes causes issues and is not as nondisruptive as desired."

"I would like to see them be a little bit more proactive in terms of the patches and updates that are available. I would like to see more disclosure and information around what fixes or what enhancements are available within a patch, and help in coordinating and scheduling that. Right now, it's driven more by the customer in reaching out via a support ticket."

"The cost is not favorable as Zadara does not provide competitive rates for regions like South Africa and Ethiopia."

"There are still some storage features that they lack. For example, other vendors implemented the auto-tiering feature a long time ago, while Zadara Storage Cloud is just coming out with this feature today. So, they are a little bit late compared to the market."

"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."

"The management interface is more geared towards end-users rather than a service partner like ourselves, and there are improvements that can be made around that."

More Zadara cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"EC2 pricing is somewhat transparent, in that AWS provides pricing for all instance types. However, the number of pricing options can be confusing."

"You pay as you use it."

"We are paying about $1,500 a month for one of the services."

"The price of Amazon EC2 could improve. The Google Cloud Platform is more cost-effective."

"Pricing appears to be cheap, however, it is extremely difficult in calculating what something will cost."

"The use of Amazon EC2 does not incur any licensing fees."

"There is a license required to use this solution and we pay on a monthly basis."

"The license fee for Amazon EC2 is higher than its competitors."

More Amazon EC2 pricing and cost advice

"For our use, it's appropriately priced and overall, it's proved to be very cost-effective against other tier-one vendors."

"The price of Zadara is very good and it covers everything. There is no subscription needed."

"The pricing and licensing are very simple and the cost is predictable, although, like everything that you pay for as you use, you have to be mindful of what you're using."

"One of the factors that ruled out several providers was cost. They were way too expensive for the volume of data that we needed and the speed at which we needed to be able to manage it. There aren't a lot of providers that can do that."

"The pricing is very competitive and the fact that they have very compelling discounts for multi-year commitments is great."

"If you just take the street price of Zadara Storage Cloud and look up the price or cost per hour, then you could think that Zadara Storage Cloud is extremely expensive or a solution only for enterprise use. That is not true. You need to compare the entire system. This means that you don't stop looking at just the street price, but you need to consider all the features, requirements, and costs of support as well as the extra cost that other vendors have. Other players just play with hidden, additional costs. Everything is included in Zadara Storage Cloud's licensing cost; what you get is what you pay for."

"It is a nice licensing model and it makes it quite simple because we just pay for what we use, and the bill that comes shows us exactly what customers are using what resources."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

22%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EC2?

The scalability and elasticity are helpful.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 is a bit expensive.

What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?

The main thing that needs improvement is the cost. Other than that, there is nothing that needs improvement.

What needs improvement with Zadara?

The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can also be complicated, especially when deeper troubleshooting requires navigating ...

What is your primary use case for Zadara?

I use this product as storage. Specifically, I use it as big storage. That's the main use case for Zadara ( /products/zadara-reviews ).

What advice do you have for others considering Zadara?

As for the pros and cons, the main concerns are the complexity of the initial installation and the complicated maintenance due to the CLI usage. Overall, I do not have other complaints. My overall ...

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 18% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Zadara

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon S3 vs Zadara

Compared 16% of the time

Wasabi vs Zadara

Compared 9% of the time

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Product Reports

Amazon EC2

Download Amazon EC2 product report

Download Zadara product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2

No data available

Overview

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate them from common failure scenarios.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Zadara is a powerful enterprise-level storage solution whose design enables it to handle every aspect of a user’s data storage needs. It can be deployed in any location, using any protocol, and storing any data type that an organization requires. With Zadara, organizations can do everything that they were able to do with more traditional systems in a cheaper and more efficient way.

Zadara Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Zadara include:

Security. Zadara is built with data security in mind. All of a user’s data is heavily encrypted by Zadara’s software so that it is safe both while it is in storage and while it is being transferred somewhere else. It comes with role-based access controls that prevent a user’s data from being seen by those who lack the proper level of authorization. It also comes with dual-factor authentication and other similar methods of identity management.

Reduced costs. While Zadara offers enterprise-level storage capabilities, the costs associated with utilizing it are far less than those of similar solutions. Some of the resources that it offers are totally free of cost. The model that it utilizes is a pay-as-you-go model. Organizations only pay for the resources that they use and nothing more. Users are not required to sign up for any particular period of time. They are in complete and total control of what they spend on the solution.

Storage efficiency. Zadara ensures that users are able to store their data in the most efficient way possible. It takes a number of approaches that prevent insufficient data storage. These approaches are:

1. Thin-provision volumes. This method only allows actually written data to be counted toward the storage capacity that is consumed.

2. Pattern removal. Zadara searches a user’s stored data for repetitive binary sequences. Once it identifies the repetitive binary sequences, it deletes them.

3. Inline deduplication (all-flash only). This method ensures that Zadara only stores unique data blocks in its system.

4. Inline compression. Zadara takes data that is stored in its system and compresses it. This keeps larger blocks of data from taking up too much room.

Zadara Features

Centralized management. Zadara comes with a centralized dashboard that enables organizations to monitor and control their storage operations from a single location.

File analytics. Organizations can leverage a powerful analytics package that can provide them with critical insights. These tools can help users sort through their data and make more informed data management decisions.

Remote mirroring. This feature enables users to replicate data in two remote locations at the same time. This makes it easy for data to be recovered in the event of an unexpected loss. It also aids remote teams in their collaboration efforts by giving them access to the same data at the same time.

Reviews from Real Users

Zadara is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its extensive suite of cloud solution integrations and its object storage capability.

Steve H., the chief technology officer at Pratum, writes, “One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage computer instances there. Being able to integrate with computing, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections.”

Mauro R., the CEO of Momit SRL, says, “The object storage feature is wonderful. With traditional storage, you have a cost per gigabyte that is extremely high or related to the number of disks. With Zadara Storage Cloud, you have a cost per gigabyte that you can cut and tailor to your needs independent of the number or size of the disks.”

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini

Time, Inc. A&E Network, The Washington Post, News UK, McGraw Hill, Gilt, Toshiba, Deloitte, VMware

Amazon EC2 vs. Zadara