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Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 17, 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 EFS (Elastic File Sy...
Ranking in Cloud Storage
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (14th)
NetApp Cloud Volumes Servic...
Ranking in Cloud Storage
19th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
8.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (24th), Public Cloud Storage Services (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Storage category, the mindshare of Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is 3.2%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud is 2.2%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)3.2%
NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud2.2%
Other94.6%
Cloud Storage
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2784675 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Technical Account Manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Serverless file storage has simplified multi-tenant Linux workloads and supports effortless growth
When I started working with Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), I faced a few issues. One issue was around the number of IOPS limitation. Initially, the number of IOPS that could be performed on the Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) file system was quite low. Later on, it has been increased, and now I believe it is at a level where only very specific workloads might not perform optimally, but otherwise everything should work smoothly. By the time I was there, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) was supporting NFS version 4.1, not 4.2. Currently, it is supported up to NFS 4.1. A notable limitation of Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is that it does not support Windows. If your workload is running on a Linux operating system and you do not want to manage it or even understand NFS at all, you should still be able to use it fairly quickly. There are scenarios where Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) might not work effectively. For example, database-type workloads do not run properly on Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) because at the end of the day, it is a network file system and requests must travel from one place to another and then return. This process takes time, so if you are running a database-type workload, Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) might not be the right approach, and you would need to look elsewhere.
CC
Co-Founder at Atsign
Enables us to fine-tune storage and capacity on the fly as our needs grow or shrink over time
NetApp delivers High Availability. It's critical to our work. That was the main driver for using NetApp. We have a highly resilient service and if you have a highly resilient service, you are only as resilient as the least resilient part of your infrastructure. That's what we were having trouble with our file system before. It was becoming troublesome, so we needed to find something that was much more highly resilient so that's why we moved to NetApp. The complexity of moving large numbers of files to the cloud depends on what you're trying to do. But for us, it was really simple. I imagine for large enterprise customers it is probably pretty tricky. They're probably on all different technologies inside a large corporation and they may or may not have very large pipes going to them. So if you're in a data center to the cloud then it's going to be easy, but if you have hundreds of branches like if you're a bank and have lots of branch banks, they might have very small pipes out to the internet. It might take forever. In our use case everything's brand new files, so it was pretty trivial. We didn't migrate to the cloud, we were already on the cloud, so it was a nonissue for us. NetApp enables us to share data across VMs. It actually reduced the amount of data storage we need. We were having to have storage attached to each VM. And now we can aggregate that storage across multiple VMs, so that actually gave us a net reduction, which was a good thing. We switched from using block storage to file storage to share data between our VMs. It made it easier, frankly but I worry about the scalability in the future. For the moment it made life easier. We were using block and then we moved back to file with NetApp.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The platform is highly scalable."
"There are huge money savings, as we can save more than half of our costs."
"Amazon EFS is extremely stable, as it is managed by AWS."
"I appreciate Amazon's extensive range of services, which makes it a favorable choice."
"We need our storage to expand based on demand but storage is a bit costly, so we start with a smaller amount and, as we grow, we use EFS on demand and it manages our costs."
"Elastic File Systems allow me to share data, provision, and manage capacity and performance in AWS."
"The most beneficial feature of the product for data storage stems from the fact that it serves as a shared file storage."
"The automatic scaling functionality has helped manage fluctuating workloads because when we have 10 gigs of data and a customer needs to put even 10 times the data, no action is required as it will grow automatically."
"Overall, they have very impressive technologies."
"In terms of its storage snapshot efficiencies, the service is highly efficient. We are only doing things in small batches right now because we have not converted all of the data, but we have tested them in the Google Cloud and they work efficiently."
"Storage was taking up maybe 10 to 20% of my life at the startup, and now it takes up zero. I was personally running all the infrastructure for the company. Now that we've moved to NetApp, I don't have to worry about making sure it's up and running. It's made my life personally much better."
"Storage was taking up maybe 10 to 20% of my life at the startup, and now it takes up zero."
"High availability is very important to us because we have a production environment. High availability is the highest priority for us to continue keeping our systems running."
"It is a good service for high availability that is very easy to configure."
 

Cons

"I don't have notes on improvements."
"A notable limitation of Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is that it does not support Windows."
"The user activity needs to be more connected and not required to connect to a PC or a device."
"There are challenges related to AWS, such as ensuring proper security measures with IMS code and encryption."
"When we faced some issues, the support team took a lot of time to resolve them."
"The initial setup requires prior experience and technical skills."
"Initially, the cost of storage seems to be small, but customer cost for the storage is really very high and this doesn't work for India."
"It should be simplified. There are people who don't have cloud experience. It should be storage that we are able to just connect to."
"The user interface has room for improvement."
"I would like for the sales team to get in contact more often and let me know what I should be doing next, what we should be doing about new features. So it would be nice if I heard a little bit more from him. From a technology perspective, I have no complaints."
"It would help if they increased the area in which they employ artificial intelligence, by starting to do assessments on the environments, to project those. They're not using any AI tools, currently, on the administrative side."
"The user interface has room for improvement. We would like this service to be more integrated with Azure, which is very easy to manage and use. It was easy to create volumes and add capacity pools in Azure, but in Google Cloud, we can only create separate volumes. We need more management or configuration options in the user interface."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The main challenge with EFS is its cost, which is slightly higher compared to EBS or S3. For one GB or ten GB of data, S3 is much cheaper. EFS could cost around $30 to $50 per month for similar usage."
"The product's price depends on the services and the size and capacity at which it is used in a business environment."
"I would rate the pricing 7 out of 10."
"It has flexible pricing. You are charged based on your storage."
"The solution's price is mid-ranged."
"The product charges are based on the amount of data stored."
"Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) offers a pay-as-you-go model, so whenever you use its services, you need to pay."
"We don't need so much space, and there is no option to pay as we go or use just what we need. Also, the only way to increase performance is by increasing the level of the service."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Construction Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which file storage system is better - Amazon EFS (elastic file storage) or Azure File Storage?
Amazon EFS is easy to set up: you can use the AWS management console, API, or command-line. Amazon EFS can grow to petabytes and deliver consistent low latencies and high levels of throughput. This...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)?
We don't need to purchase it; we are just using it and paying Amazon as per the utilization. We make direct payments to Amazon based on our usage.
What needs improvement with Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)?
When I started working with Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), I faced a few issues. One issue was around the number of IOPS limitation. Initially, the number of IOPS that could be performed on the ...
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Also Known As

No data available
CVS for Google Cloud, NetApp CVS for Google Cloud, Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud, Cloud Volumes Service for GCP, NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for GCP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Arcesium, Atlassian, Seeking Alpha, Zend
Atos, Bandwidth, Wuxi NextCode
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,402 professionals have used our research since 2012.