Amazon AWS vs Google Cloud comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google are both solutions in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1, while Google is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.3. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 18.8% mindshare in ISI, compared to Google’s 8.5% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Google users who would recommend it.

Amazon AWS

Read 254 Amazon AWS reviews

18,948 Views
16,386 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Google Cloud

Read 73 Google Cloud reviews

7,216 Views
5,253 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Amazon AWS

Google Cloud

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Amazon AWS and Google Cloud compete in the cloud services market. Amazon AWS has a slight advantage due to its extensive features and scalability, making it favorable for larger enterprises, while Google Cloud is appreciated for its simplicity and cost-effectiveness, often appealing to smaller businesses.

Features: Amazon AWS provides flexible computing power with EC2, diverse storage solutions with S3, and excellent database management with RDS. It excels in networking capabilities, persistent block storage, and offers a wide range of operating systems and virtual private cloud features. Google Cloud stands out for its straightforward setup and simplicity, often favored by users who prefer a less complex approach.

Room for Improvement: Amazon AWS could improve its user experience by simplifying billing, documentation, and security models. Its integration processes could also be streamlined. Google Cloud needs to enhance interoperability with other cloud services and improve usability for processing high-volume databases. Better UI and integration options have also been suggested by users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon AWS is praised for its robust deployment capabilities and extensive global infrastructure, although customer service quality varies with support tier. Google Cloud is commended for easy deployment solutions, efficient customer service, and is noted for having superior responsiveness in comparison to AWS.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon AWS offers adaptable pricing models like pay-as-you-go, suitable for scalable enterprises but can be complex. Google Cloud is often viewed as a cost-effective option for small to medium-sized businesses, with clear pricing and an inclusive licensing model. Despite this, users need to monitor costs to prevent unexpected escalations. Both platforms are recognized for strong ROI potential, with AWS favored for its scalability and Google's strength in initial cost savings.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon AWS vs. Google Cloud Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS vs. Google Cloud

January 2025

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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 AWS

Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

2nd

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

254

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Google Cloud

Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

5th

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

5th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 18.8%, down from 25.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud is 8.5%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)

Featured Reviews

Arun Srivastav

CEO at Planfirma Technologies Private Limited

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.

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Monirul Islam Khan

Data Specialist at a non-profit with 10,001+ employees

Great for big data with off-the-charts scalability for storage and databases

The solution should be more configurable for high-volume databases. The managed service does not allow flexible database configurations that are needed for better filter performance. We have a TPS first-grade, high-volume database using an ERC system. We are moving to Clarity for managed services and need more configurations to support it. The solution could improve its management services for MongoDB. The website's memory only allows one TB.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"They integrate well with various other solutions."

"Our primary use case is to use the solution for running many relatively small instances for back office applications and various other business important applications."

"I like the flexibility of this solution."

"Very good automation and very stable."

"It is flexible. It is quite comfortable to use for organizations."

"The scalability of the product is the solution's most valuable feature."

"We've built several AI ML solutions and done lots of work on the GPUs available on Amazon servers. We did a lot of work around web spidering, natural language processing, and machine learning or deep learning workloads."

"AWS is stable."

More Amazon AWS pros

"Google Cloud performs well."

"The customer service team for this solution is very knowledgeable."

"Google Cloud is user friendly and reliable. The most valuable feature is the security of Google Cloud."

"The solution is pretty stable."

"The solution is user-friendly and easy to spin."

"This platform is popular with technical users because of the abilities for customization and fine-tuning performance."

"I have found this solution to be a quick and advanced way to run my models through."

"The speed, security, and performance of Google Cloud are excellent."

More Google Cloud pros

Cons

"If you have not had previous training or studied guides it will be a little difficult to use the solution. However, the difficulty also depends on what you are using the solution for. They can improve by providing more documentation, such as tutorials and videos."

"The use of this tool should be extended to Google and Apple operating systems."

"Amazon AWS could improve by being more secure and adding more features."

"Customer access to APIs is limited so that logs cannot be checked properly."

"There is room for improvement in cost. Everyone complains about AWS being expensive. The initial cost starts small but can skyrocket unexpectedly."

"There are some limitations for certain applications that happen regionally and it is an issue for us."

"One problem is that the AWS public cloud doesn't have shared storage capabilities. The second thing is the cloud performance versus on-prem."

"The pricing is expensive"

More Amazon AWS cons

"The Spanish version is in beta. It needs to be farther along."

"I think one area that could be improved in Google Cloud is the customer support. Sometimes the integration process can be a bit complex due to format errors.Also having clearer documentation or a larger support team could really help users like me understand and resolve issues more effectively."

"The storage available for this solution could be improved, especially compared to a solution like Microsoft which offers 1 TB of storage. Google cloud offers only 30 GB."

"The ease-of-use could be improved for less technical users."

"Uploading documents could be simplified."

"Google Cloud could improve the integration with other solutions."

"It could have a reporting tool included."

"Monitoring and usage reporting could be improved."

More Google Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing depends on the workload. For example, if your workload involves Windows technologies, AWS may not be the most cost-effective option. In that case, you might be better off with Azure."

"It is decently priced. The competition is also bringing its own cloud offerings, such as from Oracle."

"We pay a monthly licensing fee. It's below $100 a month."

"When it comes to professional certification in AWS, I implore others to study hard before your exams because $300 is a painful waste of money if you fail."

"The Oracle licensing is higher than it is with Amazon AWS."

"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."

"We need to pay for everything. If someone is a personal user, they get one year free. But if you are using this as a professional or enterprise solution, then your company has to pay. The license pricing is comparable to that of competitors'."

"This solution offers good pricing."

More Amazon AWS pricing and cost advice

"They provide user-based licensing plans. Its plan could be less expensive."

"For commercial purposes, users need to pay for the products they use on a workload basis, not a license basis. There are two pricing models: fixed monthly and pay-as-you-go. In the pay-as-you-go model, users pay for the resources they use, while in the fixed monthly model, they have 24/7 access to resources for a set monthly fee."

"We pay for a license."

"For the license, we didn't have to pay for any additional fees."

"This solution is worth the money we are paying. I would rate the pricing a three out of five."

"Pricing for Google Cloud could be improved. It would be better if it were lower."

"Its cost depends on specific use cases."

"The pricing is rated a six out of ten."

More Google Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user8586

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…

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Answers from the Community

ikextian

Head, IT at Mega Labourers Limited

Jul 9, 2022

Which IaaS platform would you choose for an SMB: Google Cloud services, Amazon AWS, or Microsoft Azure?

I have worked with AWS for 4 years now and I agree with the recommendation. If you make some research AWS will be shown as the top solution in many white papers. We made an evaluation to compare it with Google and Azure. In our case, AWS is the most cost-effective. Depending on the solution you are running you need to check the license cost for your servers. If you have a lot of Windows soluti...

See 2 answers

Sergio Zuastegui

Gerente regional de tecnologÃa at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Jul 5, 2022

Read full answer

Wallace Hugh

Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Jul 9, 2022

I would like to recommend MS Azure to start with. The reasons are: 1. I bet you're using many Microsoft tools, like Office 365, Team, etc. so you're pretty familiar with the MS UX which is excellent. 2. It's easy to start/learn Azure and configurations, they have very detailed documentation online. 3. It's relatively cheaper with Azure IaaS with good starting numbers of notes/services.

Read full answer

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

29%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

52%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

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 wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Google Cloud?

Google Cloud is perceived as a cost-effective and user-friendly option, especially compared to AWS. The current affordability and ease of use make it suitable for medium-sized companies. While the ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Cloud?

The performance after long-term use shows the storage is too full, and I cannot add more storage without paying for it. I want to migrate to another solution if I need to pay for additional storage...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Google Cloud?

For personal storage, Google Workspace, Google portal, Google video, Google file, and Google Cloud Shell for programming language.

See all answers

Comparisons

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Amazon AWS

Compared 21% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Amazon AWS

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Amazon AWS

Compared 9% of the time

Dell ECS vs Amazon AWS

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon AWS Competitors

Alibaba Cloud vs Google Cloud

Compared 27% of the time

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Google Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Google Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Google Cloud

Compared 11% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Google Cloud

Compared 10% of the time

More Google Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS

January 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Google Cloud

January 2025

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Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS

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Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Google

Overview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an adopted cloud platform that offers more than 200 fully featured services from data centers located across the globe. This is a scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that is utilized by thousands of businesses of different sizes around the world. The product offers a wide variety of solutions for its customers, which allows them to launch applications regardless of their industry.

The most common use cases for AWS are:

Application hosting: Clients can take advantage of on-demand infrastructure to power their applications. The product supports multiple types of apps, varying from hosted internal applications to software as a service (SaaS) offerings.
Websites: With AWS, clients can satisfy their web hosting needs through a scalable platform for their websites.
Backup and storage: AWS offers reliable data storage services, which allow clients to store their data and build dependable backups for all of their valuable information.
Enterprise IT: The product allows companies to host internal- or external-facing IT applications in a highly secure environment.
Content delivery: Users who want to distribute content to end users worldwide can do so quickly and easily through the high data transfer speeds of this solution.
Databases: AWS offers a variety of database solutions, which include hosted enterprise database software as well as non-relational database solutions.

Amazon AWS supports a global cloud infrastructure with AWS Region and Availability Zone models, which contribute to the high availability of enterprise applications running on the solution. Amazon AWS has an extensive array of products that serve different purposes, including:

Analytics
Application integration
Blockchain
Business applications
Cloud financial management
Compute
Contact center
Containers
Database
Developer tools
End-user computing
Front-end web and mobile
Games
Internet of Things (IoT)
Machine learning
Management and governance
Quantum technologies
Robotics
Satellite
Security, identity and compliance, and others

The products and services that Amazon AWS delivers to these sectors provide a large computing capacity which is quicker and cheaper compared to building a physical server farm. Among the most popular services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2," and Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as "S3."

Amazon AWS Features

The wide array of products that Amazon AWS offers consist of different functions that utilize cloud computing across different sectors. The features of this solution can be categorized in the following ways:

Data and relationship management: With Amazon AWS, companies can manage multiple hierarchies of directory data, they can define attributes for objects and relationships, set custom inheritance rules for directories, and create multiple schemas.
Schema management: This group of features allows users to extend their directory schema according to their needs. They can extend it through multiple applications that share a single directory while avoiding duplication of data.
Fully managed infrastructure: This feature decreases time and costs for administrative tasks for companies regarding scaling infrastructure and managing servers.
Searching feature: The Cloud Directory feature of AWS offers built-in search capabilities which can cover sets of highly connected data and eliminate the need of creating nested queries.
Built-in data encryption: Users can benefit from high levels of protection of their data with AWS's products. The data in the cloud is automatically encrypted at rest and in transit through 256-bit encryption keys, managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
Object policies: This feature allows Amazon AWS users to organize objects in different hierarchies by providing a framework for applications to evaluate policy assignments.

Amazon AWS Benefits

This product delivers various benefits across all industries that utilize its services. The greatest advantages of using Amazon AWS include:

High product functionality is supported by machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, data lakes, and analytics.
The solution has a high level of security, which is backed by a deep set ofmore than 100 cloud security tools.
Amazon AWS has an easy-to-use interface that makes it possible for clients to host applications.
The product is very flexible in terms of which operating system, programming language, web app platform, and database clients can use.
AWS is a scalable and highly secure global computing infrastructure, supported by the reliability of Amazon.com.
Clients can utilize the Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing tools to personally scale up or down applications, depending on their demand.
Users can choose from an array of payment options, including paying for only the services they need, as well as a free trial to select the ones most useful for them.

Reviews from Real Users

Greg G., a chief executive officer at a tech services company, ranks Amazon AWS highly, as he states that the solution is flexible, scales well, and offers good stability.

A technology manager technology at a computer software company values Amazon AWS because it is extremely cost-efficient, easy to upgrade and expand storage with greatly improved interfaces.

Google Cloud is an Infrastructure as a Service Cloud (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that provides infrastructure tools and services for building applications on top of a public cloud computing platform. As one of the leading global infrastructures, this product allows users to securely manage enterprise data, receive valuable insights, and store documents. Google Cloud provides its various services through tools and services for data warehousing, security key enforcement, application programming interface (API) management, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).

The use cases of Google Cloud can be divided into four main categories:

Big data
Compute
Services
Storage

The solution is utilized by organizations of all sizes and industries, as it is suitable for the following purposes:

Running and building applications: Google Cloud lets businesses run and build their applications anywhere because of its commitment to open-source, hybrid, and multi-cloud. This can accelerate development time as businesses avoid vendor lock-in.
Data insight: Google Cloud provides companies with advanced ML and analytics for their data. This can facilitate business decisions and improve work processes, as every team member can have access to data reports via this solution.
Security: Utilizing Google's technology, this solution helps users protect and defend their data and applications against threats and harmful activities.
Team collaboration: Google Cloud offers companies advanced collaboration features. They can integrate email, chat, video calling, and document collaboration all in one place when using this platform.

Google Cloud Features

Google Cloud offers multiple features for its clients. Some of these include:

Big data features: The solution offers full big data services through tools such as BigQuery and Google Cloud Dataflow. These tools allow users to process large data queries as well as create, monitor, and receive reports from data processing pipelines.
Containers: The solution offers containers, which allow users to speed up deployment and scale applications.
Cloud debugger: This feature allows users to debug code during the production process. In this way, businesses are able to locate issues early in the code and fix them before deploying the application.
Cloud save: This feature provides the ability to synchronize cloud-stored data across all devices an organization is supporting. Through it, users can save and retrieve information and maintain all data copies up to date.
Cloud trace: This Google Cloud feature allows users to detect the reasons for performance bottlenecks and fix the issues. It also provides users with information on the time their product takes to process certain requests, allowing them to follow performance more closely.
Hosting features: The solution offers two hosting options. App Engine is the PaaS of Google Cloud and Computes Engine is their IaaS.
Load balancing: This feature balances the traffic of multiple compute instances across various geographic regions.
Maintenance: Users receive frequent insight into the performance of their applications and through automations, Google Cloud lets them know of any issues that need to be fixed.

Google Cloud Benefits

Google Cloud brings various benefits to its users. Some of these include the following:

The pricing model of Google Cloud allows users to pay only for the selected features and tools they wish to use, which saves their organizations money.
Users can rely on accelerated content delivery through Google Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Google Cloud offers a wide variety of tools and libraries, which assist users in the development of cloud applications.
The tool has an advanced admin control that allows users to easily add or remove new users and maintain the security of business platforms.
Google Cloud offers consulting services whereby experts provide assistance with cloud strategy development.
The platform is updated on a frequent basis, which can increase companies' productivity through consistent innovations.
Google Cloud offers remote access from anywhere at all times via Google's web applications.
The solution reduces the risks of data breaches as it offers minimal storage of offline data.
Users can expect support not only from the platform but from the growing online community as well, where their questions can be answered in a timely manner.
The product provides detailed documentation for its clients, allowing them to benefit from tutorials and other samples, in order to learn to work with it in the most efficient way.

Reviews from Real Users

Isuru P., an assistant vice president at a tech services company, likes Google Cloud because it is easy to deploy next-generation applications using it.

An IT solutions consultant at a tech services company rates Google Cloud highly because they find the solution stable with a good user experience and a straightforward setup.

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS vs. Google Cloud

January 2025

Free Report: Amazon AWS vs. Google Cloud

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