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Amazon EC2 vs Zadara 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 EC2
Ranking in Compute Service
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zadara
Ranking in Compute Service
11th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (32nd), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (17th), Public Cloud Storage Services (15th), File and Object Storage (20th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 6.4%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zadara is 0.7%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

Prapoj Chipat - PeerSpot reviewer
You only pay for what you use, and you can scale up or scale down without any issues; has good stability and connectivity
My company uses AWS products, including cloud services. Amazon EC2 is being used within the company as well. My company has about ten thousand employees that use Amazon EC2 because everybody connects to the internet. For example, employees use the mail service from the console and Outlook service on the cloud. Everyone uses the internet within the company, so that means Amazon EC2 is being used as well, especially in this COVID situation. Right now, employees use more applications such as streaming and video services which require more connectivity and cloud capacity, so there's a plan to increase usage for Amazon EC2. In terms of how much staff is required for the deployment and maintenance of Amazon EC2, I'm not quite sure how much technical staff my company has because some of the technical staff was outsourced. There's no permanent IT staff in the office. I'm recommending Amazon EC2 to other people because it's a critical product that has more reliability. It has good quality, and it also has many features, so if the features support your use cases, then Amazon EC2 would be a good product for you. My rating for Amazon EC2 is nine out of ten.
Kirubel Behailu - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhancing storage management efficiency with user-friendly experience
Our customers are using Zadara for their research and development environments. We provide infrastructure for government projects, but we are often not fully aware of their specific usage.  I typically use it for our infrastructure and offer both Zadara and Microsoft Azure to our customers Zadara…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Stable, scalable, and simple to implement."
"Amazon EC2 is highly scalable."
"I like EC2 because of its simple workload and the ability to configure VPCs and security groups."
"The product is very mature and organized."
"The most valuable features are the scalability options, low maintenance, and options to upgrade. AWS support is also pretty good. The generation upgrade is pretty simple and standardized."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon EC2 is its ability to spin a new virtual machine in a few seconds."
"The platform has been quite stable and reliable."
"Its ease of use is valuable."
"It provides very satisfactory storage performance."
"It's very easy to expand and compared to other storage systems that we've used, it's a lot more expandable and a lot more flexible in how it's deployed."
"The most valuable features of Zadara are its visibility and simplicity to use."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options."
"One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service."
"I find Zadara's user-friendliness from both the customer and engineering perspectives highly appreciated."
"Being able to scale on demand, and being able to get out of our security operation center, and not having to purchase hardware upfront, has drastically reduced the overhead that was required to maintain our information. We have also gained additional capabilities in terms of speed of replicating that information."
"The most valuable feature of Zadara is its ease of use and safety. Overall the solution is a complete package, it has all the features needed."
 

Cons

"The availability and response time of the free technical support can be improved."
"The price could be better, and it could be more affordable. Because I run my own servers, the prices are quite high."
"One of the challenges is the AMI upgrades."
"Technical itself could be a bit more helpful, especially when it comes to integration assistance. When we talk to the technical team, often it's some issue with integration and they'll tell us to talk to the other company. Often, the other company will look at everything and not see an issue from their end and then we are at an impasse."
"An area needing improvement is the time limitations when accessing EC2 instances."
"The scalability could improve."
"Regarding availability, a noticeable improvement would be the possibility of more load balancing configurations and the deployment of more datacenters, mainly in Latin America."
"The process of detaching EC2 instances to avoid billing could be less complex."
"The management interface is more geared towards end-users rather than a service partner like ourselves, and there are improvements that can be made around that."
"In the next release, there can be some improvements to the web console by adding more features because the console is simple. Additionally, the calculator could improve."
"I would like to see them be a little bit more proactive in terms of the patches and updates that are available. I would like to see more disclosure and information around what fixes or what enhancements are available within a patch, and help in coordinating and scheduling that. Right now, it's driven more by the customer in reaching out via a support ticket."
"The cost is not favorable as Zadara does not provide competitive rates for regions like South Africa and Ethiopia."
"There are still some storage features that they lack. For example, other vendors implemented the auto-tiering feature a long time ago, while Zadara Storage Cloud is just coming out with this feature today. So, they are a little bit late compared to the market."
"Currently, when we do firmware upgrades, it sometimes causes issues and is not as nondisruptive as desired."
"The initial setup of the solution is complex."
"The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not an expensive solution."
"Amazon EC2 has a pay-as-you-use cost model."
"It's competitive but can vary based on instance types and usage patterns."
"Reducing the price of the solution could lead to an improvement."
"The pricing of this solution is variable. There is an open-source variant that is accessible via the public cloud, and then tiers that range in price depending on the level and amount of usage that is required."
"The license fee for Amazon EC2 is higher than its competitors."
"We are paying about $1,500 a month for one of the services."
"The clients have found the billing of Amazon EC2 good, but the price could be less high. There is a monthly subscription to use the solution."
"The price of Zadara is very good and it covers everything. There is no subscription needed."
"The pricing is very competitive and the fact that they have very compelling discounts for multi-year commitments is great."
"For our use, it's appropriately priced and overall, it's proved to be very cost-effective against other tier-one vendors."
"The pricing and licensing are very simple and the cost is predictable, although, like everything that you pay for as you use, you have to be mindful of what you're using."
"If you just take the street price of Zadara Storage Cloud and look up the price or cost per hour, then you could think that Zadara Storage Cloud is extremely expensive or a solution only for enterprise use. That is not true. You need to compare the entire system. This means that you don't stop looking at just the street price, but you need to consider all the features, requirements, and costs of support as well as the extra cost that other vendors have. Other players just play with hidden, additional costs. Everything is included in Zadara Storage Cloud's licensing cost; what you get is what you pay for."
"It is a nice licensing model and it makes it quite simple because we just pay for what we use, and the bill that comes shows us exactly what customers are using what resources."
"One of the factors that ruled out several providers was cost. They were way too expensive for the volume of data that we needed and the speed at which we needed to be able to manage it. There aren't a lot of providers that can do that."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Retailer
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
22%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EC2?
The scalability and elasticity are helpful.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2?
The pricing of EC2 can vary depending on workloads. It can be expensive for high workloads but more cost-effective for smaller applications. AWS provides various services at competitive pricing, ma...
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?
An area needing improvement is the time limitations when accessing EC2 instances. When accessing the server, sometimes PeerSpot can fail, making it difficult to access multiple servers simultaneous...
What needs improvement with Zadara?
There is room for improvement in pricing as it is currently quite expensive. Adding AI capabilities could enhance the offering as well.
What is your primary use case for Zadara?
Our customers are using Zadara for their research and development environments. We provide infrastructure for government projects, but we are often not fully aware of their specific usage. I typica...
What advice do you have for others considering Zadara?
If companies have the budget, I recommend Zadara for small business classes due to its robust performance and user-friendliness. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Time, Inc. A&E Network, The Washington Post, News UK, McGraw Hill, Gilt, Toshiba, Deloitte, VMware
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EC2 vs. Zadara and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.