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Amazon AWS vs IBM SoftLayer 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon AWS
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
254
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd), PaaS Clouds (2nd)
IBM SoftLayer
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Public Cloud Storage Services (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Cloud Services solutions, they serve different purposes. Amazon AWS is designed for Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) and holds a mindshare of 15.3%, down 22.8% compared to last year.
IBM SoftLayer, on the other hand, focuses on Public Cloud Storage Services, holds 0.2% mindshare, up 0.2% since last year.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

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.
reviewer1032702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Stable with excellent speed and agility
The most valuable aspect of the solution is simply to have the ability to host in a cloud form and out of the data center - the IBM big iron solution. It's the speed and the agility that really sell SoftLayer. The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer. The ability to extract act from your current location, load into your future location, with limited change, and then be able to take the transfer actions slowly and methodically after you're in your new location is the part that really makes this awesome. The stability and scalability are quite good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Newly introduced features advance capabilities."
"It's highly scalable. It's guaranteed 99.99% uptime, and it shows you can scale up or scale out whenever you need more space."
"The cutting-edge design is valuable."
"The installation is quite straightforward."
"The product is reliable and quite stable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the S3."
"The features that I have found most valuable are their compute and their Relational Database Service."
"The installation and initial setup are easy."
"The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
 

Cons

"It's a good cloud, however, if I compare it with Azure, Azure is more of a feature-rich cloud."
"The dashboard can be improved a little bit to provide more information."
"Our use case is limited to virtual services and RPA development. We are not using it quite heavily, and there are not many issues or problems so far. However, it would be great if it could be integrated with more AI features and proactive monitoring. It could also have more automatic capacity expansion features. For example, when renting out some space, memory, or computing power, the service can have the capacity to expand by itself without being manually handled by us."
"Price is an area with a shortcoming in the solution that has a scope for improvement"
"I want to use AWS as a full solution for my website - for domain and website hosting, and everything in between - however, I was not able to find everything together."
"AWS support could be better."
"There are plenty of areas for improvement. For example, the ease of tagging could be improved. The tool could integrate AI tools to identify better and manage costs. Calculating the cost of some services could be more straightforward."
"The web console of AWS is not so user-friendly."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive compared to other providers because you need many of the services and it can add up fast."
"Pricing is good. It's average."
"Reasonably priced and comparable to similar services."
"There are many variables involved in pricing service in AWS and overall the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"One of the best thing in Amazon AWS is you are billed for the service you use."
"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."
"We have a monthly subscription for Amazon AWS."
"The price tends to be higher, but that is a usual case when prioritizing reliable backup solutions for servers and other infrastructure."
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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
30%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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Comparisons

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Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
CloudLayer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Whogohost Ltd., Skypicker, Infinity Computers and Communications Company, Grace Co. Ltd., Keyword, Uvionics Tech, Tennis Australia, immixGroup, Salesbox, Cxense ASA, Avnet Inc., Komsomolskaya Pravda, Seekr
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: January 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.