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Amazon AWS vs Google App Engine vs Salesforce Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 12.9%, down from 17.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google App Engine is 2.3%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Salesforce Platform is 2.6%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Arun Srivastav - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows for automatic scaling of resources and provides built-in firewalls and security features, eliminating the need for external security solutions
One thing that's a bit different is that we're still accustomed to speaking to someone directly. AWS doesn't offer that kind of support. It's only through bots. You're speaking to chatbots, and that can sometimes be frustrating because there's no person on the other side. AI is not a substitute for a person. AWS marketplace is very strong, but somehow AWS doesn't promote it much. They have a huge customer base across the globe, and if products were launched in their marketplace, they could sell like hotcakes. They should improve their marketplace and promote the same product across the globe. They can take a cut, but they should promote it. That's something they don't do very much. So, AWS should promote its marketplace software. The company should promote it aggressively. Currently, they keep it very subtle. If you ask for it, they'll help you out. But they don't seem to advertise, "You're building a product on our platform? Why don't you sell it in our marketplace?" Improvement in AI: AWS is a little behind Microsoft Azure in terms of AI. AWS is still getting there, but the kind of examples and help files available in Azure for AI are much better. So AWS still needs to work on its AI functionality.
OmkarPatil - PeerSpot reviewer
Simplifies app development process for businesses
The product simplifies app development processes since once the local development is completed, my company has a common configuration in place where we can specify the requirements to run an application, after which we need to do a one-click GCP deployment for the entire application. In general, the two offer managed deployment options, so we don't have to worry about deployment. In my company, we just configure the servers and check if anything needs to be containerized, after which GCP handles everything for us. A project where Google App Engine scalability was essential was when, recently, my company was involved with Golang to build a web application, after which deploying that application on Google App Engine was really easy. In my company, we also had a Django application in Python, and it was easy to deploy. As my company deals with small-scale projects, the automated scaling feature of Google App Engine is not something we thought about. I wouldn't recommend the product to others unless the potential end users use GCP and have a word with their vendors about their plans. One specific recommendation from me would be that the product's potential uses should stick with a particular vendor. If someone wants a product that is easy to deploy and scalable, then multiple options are available in the market. The product integrates very well with other Google solutions. I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.
Yasser_Anter - PeerSpot reviewer
Has customization and integration capabilities which increase efficiency
Salesforce could improve by offering AI features or functionalities to help business decision-makers analyze business history, suggest forward strategies, and participate in events. The previous version had a complicated interface where multiple pages and data entries were required, which was not pleasant for sales teams or business users. Also, deploying Salesforce took a long time, about four to five months, which is not ideal for any business.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's a flexible solution."
"Elasticity has always been AWS's mandate. The flexibility of their platform from a systems perspective lives up to its claims."
"It offers durability, high availability, fault tolerance, and a high TCO benefit."
"The main feature that I like the most is the variety of solutions that it provides. It provides some analysis, business information and more. It provides a wide variety of services."
"The tool's most valuable features are AWS Security Hub and AWS GuardDuty."
"The environment is a rich playground, and if you tried to do the same things on-premises that you do on AWS, it would be a lot more challenging to execute. You can open up a virtual machine on AWS, run some experiments, and be done with it. It's much easier than buying new servers, provisioning them, etc"
"One of the most valuable features is that Amazon AWS has a lot of data centers and regions where we can position our virtual machines for leverage. Amazon AWS is also easy to use. You can quickly spin up something, use Explorer, building proofs of concept, things like that. Once the proof of concept is built once and we know how things are going to look from a production perspective, we try to move everything to the data centers. These features and the ease of use are the main reasons why we use AWS."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the S3."
"It is simple to use. It is much simpler than AWS. It is also very powerful."
"The product's setup and deployment phases are easy."
"Google App Engine's most valuable feature is self-management. You do not have to manage the infrastructure underneath where all the functions are happening, such as load balancing deployment and version management, they are managed by the system itself."
"Seurity features - unauthorized individuals are unable to access certain applications."
"The product's initial setup phase was straightforward, considering that there is good documentation explaining the implementation part of it."
"I've found that all of the features are valuable, especially the shared drive and the ability for multiple people to use their documents at the same time."
"The initial setup is okay. It's not too complex. Deployment took about one day."
"The solution is serverless, so we don't have to operate it."
"One of the main features of the solution is it is flexible."
"We use this solution to track customer activities, opportunities and contact information."
"I like it because of the fact that it lets me know what I'm working on and what I've recently worked on. It also helps me and allows me to do tracking. If I want to go out and find out how many times I've touched customers, I can find that information out. It tracks such information, and we use it. If we send any type of promotions out, it tracks who gets those promotions and how they've responded to those promotions."
"The reporting capabilities are pretty user-friendly."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten...I rate Salesforce Platform's technical support a ten out of ten."
"The solution scales extremely well."
"Salesforce provides customization that aligns with our organization's lifecycle management of opportunities. It integrates with our call records, meeting notes, and the Outlook calendar, which helps in mapping roles and managing opportunities effectively."
"Its stability, performance, and usability are most valuable."
 

Cons

"Amazon AWS could improve on security."
"The price could be better."
"One thing that's a bit different is that we're still accustomed to speaking to someone directly. AWS doesn't offer that kind of support. It's only through bots."
"This solution could offer more security."
"Its subscription model or pricing model is too complex, which should be improved."
"There should be seminars and online training sessions available from AWS because a lot of people who are not using it would benefit from having the basic knowledge or basic hands-on experience."
"The solution could offer better integration capabilities."
"They could lower the cost. The setup could also be easier."
"I am limited to sending a photo to five people. I want to be able to send a photo to many people, not just five."
"I think there's still a lot that can be done with Google Meet and the video conferencing part of it. It could be more dynamic in terms of what can be done with it."
"Difficult to assess how pricing is managed."
"The documentation and community are lacking for this product."
"Data consumption of the device could be improved."
"Some features of runtime don't work well in App Engine."
"I would like a simpler deployment tool on laptops. It is a bit complicated at the moment. We know how to do it, but it could be easier to deploy it on laptops."
"The only concern is that there is a number of the offerings which are built on their own proprietary technologies. With some of the offerings in Google Cloud, it's difficult to have a path to migrate to other cloud providers."
"Areas of improvement can be around Engagement of Customers feature and approvals of transactional records."
"Its documentation and price should be better."
"I have found it takes an exceedingly long time to put opportunities or clients in the system. If I have an opportunity that I need to put in the system it could take approximately 10 minutes. This is a lot of time when you have multiple opportunities to put in. There are other tasks to do that are required by supervisors, such as forecasts. What I have done to save time is I did not input as much detail as I could have because I knew it was going to take me an hour to get five leads in."
"It would be better if they can add more from the pricing and functionality perspective. It is very expensive. I would be more than happy if they drop the prices. From the licensing perspective, if they can add more functionality, I would be more than happy."
"It could have a lot more customization options in terms of fonts and reports. There should be an even lighter version with just two or three fields. It could be a bit more light if the field guys want to use it on a mobile phone on the road. For deploying it for CRM, maybe we can have our customer database, project funnels, and projects to help us in managing our supply chain business."
"Better flexibility in editing emails created from templates would be great, and being able to add hyperlinks in emails for scheduling meetings would allow us to automate more."
"One area that could use improvement is the approval mechanism in the authenticator, which is unstable."
"There is a considerable effort required to load the data, involving processes like XML connections."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of AWS was attractive for us, so that's something that's okay at least for this transaction-based system. However, we still have some concerns about more data-driven applications or those that involve a lot of heavy uploading and downloading. So our whole data warehouse is still something that would not go into the cloud because of the pricing model."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"When we shifted the load to AWS we paid a high cost as the mail stores were hosted on EBS. The storage cost drastically reduced after moving to S3."
"The solution is on a pay-as-use pricing model. The price of the solution could always be better but it is priced competitively."
"For our infrastructure, the cost is approximately $25 per device, and you have to include the other tools that we have in the cloud, for a total of approximately $200,000 per year."
"Billing for cloud services can be difficult at times."
"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."
"The tool is expensive."
"We pay the license yearly. It's about $6 a month, which is $72 a year per person, so it's about $500."
"I would like to have more free application with it. Some of the applications, I am paying more for them. I think that they must be free."
"If we don't know how to work with the tool, we might have some spikes in price."
"It is very expensive. Its licensing is on a monthly basis."
"Salesforce is cheap."
"It is a fair price for what it's offering, in comparison with other solutions that are available on the market."
"It is expensive."
"I don't know anything about its cost, but I'm sure it has got a nice little price tag that goes along with it."
"The solution is fairly priced."
"Pricing and license differ and depend on how much license you are purchasing from them."
"The price varies depending on the cloud."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Educational Organization
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Educational Organization
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderfu...
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 expand...
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 fle...
What do you like most about Google App Engine?
The product's setup and deployment phases are easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google App Engine?
The pricing is a pay-as-you-go model. For F1 usage with 256 MB, it is free. F2 with 512 MB costs approximately 0.05 U...
What needs improvement with Google App Engine?
There is limited customization because the sandbox environment restricts it. There are issues with cold starting; app...
How would you choose between Microsoft PowerApps and Salesforce Platform?
I think it depends on your use case. If your organization uses Microsoft Enterprise products, PowerApps will work be...
How does Salesforce Platform compare with Azure?
Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform is not easy or intuitive to deploy. The difficulty will be impacted by the type of...
Do you build applications using low-code or pro-code builders on Salesforce Platform?
At my organization, we have only used Salesforce Platform's low-code builder. The reason for this is not because we d...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
No data available
Salesforce1, Force.com, Salesforce App Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Khan Academy, Best Buy, Gigya, MetOffice, Getaround, Mimiboard, NewsLimited, WebFilings, and CloudLock.
ADP
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Red Hat and others in PaaS Clouds. Updated: April 2025.
849,210 professionals have used our research since 2012.