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Alibaba Cloud vs Microsoft Azure comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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
Microsoft Azure
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
323
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (1st)
 

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 Microsoft Azure is 10.2%, down from 19.3% 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 (%)
Microsoft Azure10.2%
Alibaba Cloud7.7%
Other82.1%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Q&A Highlights

NN
Manager, Cloud Solution at Ascend Group Co., Ltd.
Sep 19, 2023
 

Featured Reviews

Salahuddin Shaikh - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at EPAM Systems
Alibaba Cloud has evolved a lot in all specially in AI space, but still needs to improve the support offered to users.
The part where the product lacks is not because of the services it offers. The support offered by the tool is ridiculous. Whenever you raise the support ticket, someone from China comes over the phone. When I used to raise a ticket for support, some person from China came along with another English-speaking person to whom I had to explain my issues, after which the English-speaking individual used to translate it into Mandarin for the person from China. The Chinese person used to explain something in Mandarin to the English-speaking person, and it used to keep happening continuously, making it a hectic support service from Alibaba Cloud. The support was time-consuming, and it was also frustrating. As a technical person, if you are someone who is expecting something to be done as soon as possible and the support services offered to you turn out to be time-consuming and frustrating, then it won't be a great experience for the users.
Syed Abid  - PeerSpot reviewer
Snr. Infrastructure Architect (Data Centre) at LogicEra
Versatile integrations and reliable customer satisfaction elevate cloud service experience
For Microsoft Azure improvement, they need to enhance their support system. The first level of support should be improved in terms of quality and response time. They need more technical support at the first level, as there are currently only one or two technical people among five to ten staff members at this level. They should ensure that the first level support is more technical because we normally provide services to technical users ourselves. When an issue arises, it usually escalates to the second or third level. When facing first level support, they may have limited knowledge and only collect screenshots to forward to their seniors. They should ensure that the first level support is aligned with L2 and L3 to better assist us, especially since we mention in the ticket that our issues are related to specific problems and require that sort of support.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Feature-wise, it provides many features. ECS, VM, SP, bucket object storage, and databases are the most valuable."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"What's good about Alibaba Cloud is its database service. It's also good in the virtual machine area."
"It's easy to use, cheaper than other solutions, and more secure."
"I rate Alibaba Cloud's scalability an eight out of ten."
"The installation is easy."
"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"It is a scalable product. So, scaling up or scaling down is possible."
"The solution is secure and easy to use."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is its ease of use."
"The product is a cloud solution."
"Azure Active Directory: Has powerful security and auditing capabilities that we use to secure all our apps."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure is the Area feature. Additionally, the SQL Server DB as a serverless pool is useful, storage-wide external tables are helpful, and PolyBase is very good at reading external data. The capacity of Synapse to analyze in analytics is very good and it supports a range of data."
"The design of Microsoft Azure is for it to be scalable and it is scalable."
"We have found the scalability to be good."
"Feature-wise, I like its stability. Also, it is easy to access the solution and its options."
 

Cons

"The solution should have more integration."
"The user experience must be improved."
"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"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."
"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."
"The solution name is not favorable in some markets and could cause us some problems gaining customers."
"I think that sometimes the customer service for Alibaba Cloud is inefficient.... Sometimes it's hard to reach out to them."
"The tool needs to improve its navigation."
"The cost calculation for the services can be an unclear aspect which makes it difficult to estimate the expenses incurred accurately."
"They should include a cybersecurity feature to improve the protection of the systems. They could do better in terms of the pricing model. Its price keeps on changing. Their technical support can also be better."
"Technical support is lacking right now. It needs to be better."
"One area where Microsoft Azure could improve is in offering a broader range of pre-built plugins and tools compared to AWS."
"The cost management and billing section features could be improved."
"The design could be a little bit better, the technical support could be better, and the price could be even cheaper."
"For deploying multiple resources in a big number, such as in hundreds, we need a streamlined process and more user-friendly scrips. The scripts have to be more user-friendly, and they should also supply some standard templates to deploy multiple resources at a time. Currently, it is very easy to deploy a couple of resources, but if you want to deploy multiple resources, it becomes complex. The material that they provide for integration with an existing on-prem data center is complex. They have to make them user-friendly. The scripts related to resource management need to be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is better than similar solutions."
"We cut our costs significantly by migrating our infrastructure to the cloud. Alibaba Cloud employs a pay-as-you-go model, so that minimizes many costs for us."
"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."
"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"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."
"I don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."
"The price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."
"I rate the product price a seven or eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price."
"The solution does not offer very many free services which can become expensive. We are on an annual license."
"The pricing of Microsoft Azure is not very flexible."
"I would like to see it more easily accessible."
"The cost is something that could be improved."
"Price could always be cheaper. Its licensing and usage aren't always cheap. We pay monthly."
"There are added costs to the company or for scaling for most premium products."
"The cost-benefit equation for Azure is very good, particularly for small applications. However, Microsoft should do much, much more to improve how costs are communicated and how to forecast them. The Azure Pricing Calculator is not useful."
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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
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Answers from the Community

NN
Manager, Cloud Solution at Ascend Group Co., Ltd.
Sep 19, 2023
Sep 19, 2023
I believe that with Microsoft Azure you will have a bigger advantage due to the amount of partners that there are in the market. If you need support from Partner one and you don't get it, it's easy to switch to another partner to get help. Further to this Microsoft Azure now has datacentres worldwide which makes it easier to deploy anywhere.
2 out of 3 answers
DJIBRINE AGADJI - PeerSpot reviewer
Ingénieur systèmes et réseaux at e-services
Sep 1, 2023
Microsoft Azure
Sathish-Holla - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at a real estate/law firm with 51-200 employees
Sep 4, 2023
I believe Microsoft Azure is good as many companies are going by Azure, and moreover, Azure is best because many services that Microsoft corporates are used in the market.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
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 Business140
Midsize Enterprise53
Large Enterprise150
 

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,...
Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity ...
Which is better - SAP Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure?
One of the best features of SAP Cloud Platform is that it is web-based and you can log in from anywhere in the world. SAP Cloud Platform is suitable for companies of any size; it works well with bo...
How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?
I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. In particular, the Firebase library grants you access to a shared data structure...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.
Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. Microsoft Azure and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,594 professionals have used our research since 2012.