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

Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 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

Alibaba Cloud
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
7th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon AWS
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
259
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 7.7%, down from 10.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon AWS is 17.1%, up from 15.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon AWS17.1%
Alibaba Cloud7.7%
Other75.2%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Min HtetOo - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Marketing Officer at Soft Intelligence
The solution is useful for application development, but the user interface and user experience must be improved
The product must be made easier to use. The design is a bit tricky. When we log in to the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace and browse products, they look very small. The user experience must be improved. Alibaba Cloud must increase its partner network and brand awareness in our country. It will give our customers more opportunities to scale and save in the long run.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The installation is easy."
"What's good about Alibaba Cloud is its database service. It's also good in the virtual machine area."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy for me since I had a background in cloud products."
"We use the solution to run VMs."
"I rate Alibaba Cloud's scalability an eight out of ten."
"We use the solution's AI features for data analysis."
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"The most useful feature of Amazon AWS is it can be accessed from anywhere."
"The solution also helps organizations to move applications to a containerized platform."
"We pretty much like everything and we are excited about the seamless capability the EC2 service is offering."
"AWS has a lot of flexibility, which is great."
"The solution can scale quite well."
"The technical support is good."
"It streamlines tasks like table creation and data loading into Redshift, making the process more efficient and manageable."
"This solution offers a very detailed dashboard that has some metrics, such as performance and budget."
 

Cons

"From the improvement point of view, there are lots of issues that we are facing. In all the areas, it seems like it is not mature. For example, a customer wants to provision some VM that has many configurations. If I want to show the price to the customer, it is very challenging. The SDK that Alibaba has provided is very limited. We can have the pricing for VM, but we cannot have pricing for RDS databases or some other services. This is a big concern area for us. They should put more effort into the SDKs or APIs that they provide, for example, pricing APIs or pricing SDK. They do not provide support for most of the services they provide. For example, if I want to get the price of MongoDB, that SDK is not available from Alibaba. Similarly, robust API support is required for S3, which is OSS or Object Storage, so that we can read the data in a faster manner, for example, in chunks. We have raised many issues with the Alibaba support team, and they have been fixing the issues after we report them."
"From a performance point of view, Huawei and Azure are faster. Alibaba isn't as good."
"Users use websites as a tutorial. However, the Alibaba Cloud website has the content, and the scripts are copied from Amazon Web Services. We had received customer feedback where the customer asked us to get formulate original content instead of copying from Amazon Web Services. It’s very odd and awkward."
"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."
"The majority of the tools and processes, in general, have a lot of room for improvement."
"The solution should have more integration."
"The user experience must be improved."
"Regarding security issues, Alibaba Cloud is more complex and better suited for developers and R&D teams. On the other hand, Google Cloud is more convenient for new users."
"The response time of technical support could be better."
"The pricing of AWS is very unclear. They make it quite confusing."
"We would appreciate it if the product was cheaper."
"We would like to see if AWS includes any inbuilt automation. Also, we are very interested in AWS's AI/ML features, as well as IoT, AR, and VR."
"Some services that are not used often have poor quality and need to be improved."
"Price can always be cheaper."
"The invoicing procedure of Amazon AWS needs to be improved. It can be difficult to manage."
"The pricing could be adjusted to provide more advantages versus current on-premise solutions for business applications."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."
"I don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."
"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"The cost is better than similar solutions."
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"I'm not sure about the exact pricing, but let's just say if it cost a dollar for Amazon AWS, it was closer to 70 to 80 cents for Alibaba Cloud."
"I noticed on the pricing that it's quite expensive. It is the price you pay for making a practical choice for enterprise-level companies since it has so many features and it fits an enterprise-level company just like our company right now."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"They have different pricing models for each suite of services."
"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."
"It's not very pricey, but it could be cheaper."
"The Oracle licensing is higher than it is with Amazon AWS."
"The pricing is fair."
"The solution is on a pay-as-use pricing model. The price of the solution could always be better but it is priced competitively."
"It could be cheaper, and Amazon could also be more transparent with its pricing. I would first expect any product vendor to give me the utmost transparency on pricing information. There shouldn't be any hidden costs. Their service offerings have a bit of segmentation, and they focus more on SMBs. They brought them onto the cloud and encouraged them to use solutions on the cloud. But strategically, they should probably improve that and offer some credits."
"Its price should be lower. Currently, the price is the same if you are working in-house or in production. If you have to do internal testing or you are checking if things are working in-house, you need to pay for that, and the price is the same. The price for in-house usage should be different from production usage."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) solutions are best for your needs.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
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
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business131
Midsize Enterprise48
Large Enterprise114
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Alibaba Cloud?
ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alibaba Cloud?
On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten.
What needs improvement with Alibaba Cloud?
Alibaba Cloud needs to improve emails. Its pricing can also be lower. Regarding security issues, Alibaba Cloud is more complex and better suited for developers and R&D teams. On the other hand,...
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...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Amazon Web Services, AWS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. Amazon AWS and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.