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Amazon S3 Glacier vs IBM SoftLayer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 1, 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 S3 Glacier
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM SoftLayer
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
20th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Amazon S3 Glacier is 9.9%, down from 16.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SoftLayer is 1.9%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon S3 Glacier9.9%
IBM SoftLayer1.9%
Other88.2%
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

Featured Reviews

PF
Project Engineer at Astellas Pharma US
Archiving data has reduced storage costs and provides reliable long‑term retention
We have not really come across any downsides for us. It is possible that the retrieval of data may be expensive, which could be an issue, but we have not experienced that in fairness. Integration with our policies would be beneficial. We have policies for our systems where we delete data after a certain number of years, and having integration with Amazon S3 Glacier would be good. Having a guarantee that Amazon S3 Glacier would persist for the amount of time that we require in our archives would be valuable. In other words, Amazon would need to commit to support for the period we need. We could be talking about 20 years or longer. We cannot always move to the next version because we need to maintain old systems and legacy systems in order to maintain archives. A guarantee around support would be a good thing to have.
reviewer1032702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Principal Cloud Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
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

"Amazon S3 Glacier is a highly scalable and available solution."
"Amazon S3 Glacier offers robust security features and practically infinite storage, where we can store all kinds of media swiftly."
"Hopefully this helps to fill in some gaps giving more information addressing questions, along with generating new ones to prepare for your journey with clouds."
"The most valuable feature of Glacier is its storage capability and cost benefit."
"The data archive feature is valuable."
"Amazon S3 Glacier is easy to use. The platform is straightforward, and the interfaces are user-friendly and responsive. Even with a limited budget, you can train someone without an AWS certification to use it. With on-the-job training, you can ensure they understand what needs to be done to use the service."
"The solution’s storage management is good and dynamic. The product is highly stable. The solution is highly scalable. The customer service and support is good. The initial setup is straightforward. I recommend the solution."
"Amazon S3 Glacier is very simple and very easy to implement, with extensive AWS documentation and a free tier that lets you test a minimum solution in their environment before putting it into production or making a big purchase."
"The ability to extract 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 ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
"The solution is highly stable."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
 

Cons

"Amazon S3 Glacier could be more secure."
"There is room for improvement in terms of support"
"A couple of times, we faced outage issues that caused us problems."
"I would like to see the retrieval time reduced. You have to wait a day to get your data."
"There is room for improvement in handling GDPR compliance better. GDPR is about personal data protection and retention. It would be great if S3 Glacier could handle compliance items related to this, especially with upcoming legislation like the California law, which restricts data storage time and allows users to request data deletion."
"The response times could be faster. When you are with Amazon and use Glacier, you expect a response time between four to seven hours to retrieve the data."
"Amazon S3 Glacier's data retrieval time is slow compared to other AWS storage services and should be improved."
"However, when you want to retrieve the data, it is a little bit time consuming because it specifies to retrieve the data it is going to take time, so you must make sure you log store the data which you will be accessing or which you will need very frequently."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon S3 Glacier is much cheaper than competing products."
"Amazon S3 Glacier has good pricing."
"There is no license, you pay for what you use."
"The pricing is average and reasonable. It varies depending on the region."
"Amazon S3 Glacier is expensive."
"Customers prefer Amazon S3 Glacier because it is a cheap and pay-as-you-go solution."
"Amazon S3 Glacier is very cheap, but the cost becomes a concern when you have a very large amount of data."
"The tool is too expensive."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise17
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Amazon's S3 Glacier or EBS (Elastic Block Store)?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon's S3 Glacier or Elastic Block Store data storage software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Amazon's S3 Glacier, whi...
What needs improvement with Amazon S3 Glacier?
We have not really come across any downsides for us. It is possible that the retrieval of data may be expensive, which could be an issue, but we have not experienced that in fairness. Integration w...
What is your primary use case for Amazon S3 Glacier?
We were using Amazon S3 Glacier, and I have experience with this solution. We had an S3 bucket that we were using about a year ago. We just started using Amazon S3 Glacier, and overall, I have been...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Amazon Glacier
CloudLayer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

King Cpunty, Illumina, Backupify, Nearmap.com, Scribd, Baylor College of Medicine, SoundCloud
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 Amazon S3 Glacier vs. IBM SoftLayer and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.