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Alibaba Cloud vs Microsoft Azure comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

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

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.
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

"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"Flexibility and costs were probably the most important thing for us. The cost was one of the big factors for choosing Alibaba Cloud relative to other cloud solutions, especially in Asia"
"Alibaba Cloud has lower costs and good support."
"It's easy to use, cheaper than other solutions, and more secure."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"We use the solution to run VMs."
"The cost of hosting the solution is very reasonable. It's quite inexpensive."
"If you have large traffic amounts, Microsoft Azure will continue to provide our customers with the best storage experience."
"I appreciate that everything is basically shift forward from a security standpoint."
"Microsoft Azure has proven to be beneficial for our organization due to its quick deployment capabilities. Setting up virtual machines or any required infrastructure is fast."
"Great features at a good price."
"Being cloud-based saves the provisioning aspect of an on-premises solution."
"It is so huge and so powerful. The best thing is the possibilities of things that you can actually do with it. If you do it right, you can work or host your stuff a lot cheaper than traditionally. Its security is good, and it also reduces the strain on internal IT."
"The solution provides multiple well integrated services which happen to work together seamlessly and provide flexibility and scalability for use cases all around the industry."
"The tool's most valuable aspect is the account management side. This involves tasks such as assigning credentials to different individuals, managing user accounts, and implementing Privileged Access Management."
 

Cons

"I think that sometimes the customer service for Alibaba Cloud is inefficient.... Sometimes it's hard to reach out to them."
"Alibaba Cloud has some problems related to latency and connection issues. If you go for a cloud solution provider, you will need to access the Internet, which may result in latency and bandwidth issues, leading to slowness in operations."
"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."
"A big area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is its support. Another area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is SDK-based service because sometimes, the SDKs don't work correctly. Support for API-based services also needs improvement in Alibaba Cloud because, at the moment, it's not that stable."
"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."
"The solution should have more integration."
"From a performance point of view, Huawei and Azure are faster. Alibaba isn't as good."
"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"Technical support is lacking right now. It needs to be better."
"Specifically, I would like to see better Azure Data Analytics and monitoring RF."
"The solution could be easier to use. However, when comparing it to AWS it is a bit easier."
"There could be more documentation and video tutorials to incorporate each and every feature. This way one can easily get the knowledge and implement it."
"There are multiple DevOps solutions and tools available in Microsoft Azure, but most of the time they are either in the build mode, meaning you don't get complete support for them because they are either making changes, or changing the names of the particular services. Sometimes, services vanish from the portal. We are not able to see that. I think they actually change the names of the services."
"The price should be lower."
"It is pretty secure, but it can always be more secure."
"Pricing is high if you plan to use it on a larger scale."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is not that expensive."
"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."
"The cost of Alibaba Cloud is lower than that of AWS, but I feel that its price is on the higher end of the spectrum. Alibaba Cloud charges its users a price in dollars"
"Alibaba Cloud is cheaper."
"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."
"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."
"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'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."
"It's an OPEX model, you pay as you go, or you can reserve funds."
"The cost of the solution could be reduced. However, I am using the free version."
"We pay a monthly licensing fee for the solution, which could be cheaper."
"We are on an annual subscription. However, there are other options available."
"The pricing is fine."
"Customers need to purchase additional services because of the complexity of it."
"I pay a yearly subscription fee for the solution."
"We pay yearly for the license."
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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
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…
 

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%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
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.
881,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.