Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Amazon AWS vs IBM SoftLayer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon AWS
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
253
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 (22nd)
 

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 20.6%, down 25.0% compared to last year.
IBM SoftLayer, on the other hand, focuses on Public Cloud Storage Services, holds 0.2% mindshare, down 0.3% since last year.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

Featured Reviews

Arun Srivastav - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 20, 2024
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.
AH
Nov 19, 2021
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

"The most valuable features of Amazon AWS are the EC2 instance for web applications with CDN Networks."
"The most valuable features of Amazon AWS are ease of use, deployment, and short lead time. If you are using an on-premise solution, you need to wait for the hardware, and nowadays it is very difficult, the lead time becomes very long. We propose to our customers to use Amazon AWS because it is very easy, no need to wait for hardware delivery."
"The initial setup is not difficult and it did not take us more than one day."
"The features with Amazon AWS that I have found most valuable are its flexibility and high availability. These are the most important and attractive points for me."
"The features that I have found most valuable are their compute and their Relational Database Service."
"I have found the trusted advisor tool works well, we are using it to get some insight into the security status and the processing of the applications."
"The solution has very good Lambda functions within AWS."
"AWS's security model, including IAM or security groups, has contributed to our organization's compliance. It manages authentication, permissions, and overall security posture, which helps us maintain compliance."
"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

"Some of the storage services could be cheaper."
"You'll probably experience some sticker shock with AWS. You attempt to understand the cost, but you don't realize what you're paying until you get your first bill. I don't know if Amazon does that on purpose, but costs can get out of control quickly if you don't have someone who specializes in AWS cost management."
"The price could be better. Support for data analytics could be better. I don't see much support for data analytics. They have a lot of support in Azure, but I don't see a lot of innovation on the data analytics side in AWS."
"The feedback we are getting from our customers, especially here in Turkey where the exchange rate fluctuates regularly, is that the solution is quite expensive."
"The pricing could be adjusted to provide more advantages versus current on-premise solutions for business applications."
"I have trouble with the AWS command-line interface."
"Integration with in-house applications could be simplified."
"The dashboard and interface need improvement."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price, in general, could be better."
"Maintain a good budget, plan the consumption"
"The prices are a bit high."
"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."
"The price is quite good; it is a pay-as-you-go option."
"You are not paying a licensing fee, you pay for consumption."
"Licensing is on a yearly basis. I believe we are satisfied with the current pricing. Otherwise, we would have switched to another vendor."
"It can get quite pricey at times."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) solutions are best for your needs.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
27%
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
 

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 ...
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 ...
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

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: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.