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Amazon S3 vs Google Cloud Storage comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 1, 2024

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 S3
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Google Cloud Storage
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Storage (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Amazon S3 is 11.7%, down from 14.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Storage is 10.2%, down from 11.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

Featured Reviews

Vagner Martins - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced data security with seamless integration and static website capabilities
S3 is a great service offering numerous possibilities. It allows for storing objects and files of various types. I appreciate its capability to create static websites and integrate with services like CloudFront, EC2, and DynamoDB. Despite being focused on security, I leverage features such as cryptography and integration with CloudTrail.
Naresh Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers great reliability to users
Protection is an area in the product where improvements are required. If big companies want to use the tool for protection purposes, like security, which is a big thing people are looking for nowadays. Sometimes, the tool's user interface automatically puts all the files in a different place, making it a bit difficult to go deep and figure out in which folder a file is present. I need to search for a file and drill down to be able to find it. There are a few bugs in the tool, as with all content management tools, since the solution is usually used to deal with huge amounts of content. If the flow of the documents is huge, the tool might get slow for the end users, or when the data is being migrated or imported into the tools.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's most valuable feature is its security, as it does not provide public access."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that I mostly used the tool's free tier version, so I like the fact that its cost is very low."
"Amazon S3 is very flexible and provides high storage."
"We can store incremental data and get high availability and fault tolerance."
"The scalability of Amazon S3 is good."
"Feature-wise, Amazon S3 is the cheapest and it's reliable."
"S3 is well suited for both big and little data repositories of objects ranging from backup to archive to active video images and much more."
"The solution's peak-up time is good."
"I would recommend Google Cloud Storage based on our experience, as it is fully reliable."
"Google Cloud is handy and easy to use."
"The solution is scalable."
"Google Cloud Storage's most valuable feature is the native algorithms are available. Some of the algorithms are not available for the use cases that we had in Microsoft Azure. We didn't find any native algorithms and that's the reason why we decided to use the machine learning algorithms in GCP."
"The most valuable feature of Google Cloud Storage is the filter option. You can search with some artificial intelligence kinds of features. For example, if I search for a beach, it'll show me all the beach-related pictures, which I took five or ten years before. So this is a cool feature that I've seen. They give as many features as they can to make it better, so I'm happy with this solution."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"The combination of Firebase features, including storage, the Firebase database, and authentication, has been the most valuable. Firebase offers Google authentication, which is convenient for our needs. Additionally, Firebase provides email authentication and Gmail authentication, which are easy to set up and integrate into our applications."
"Google Cloud Storage has proven most valuable for our data management needs due to its bandwidth speed for backing up and restoring data."
 

Cons

"If a certain resource is left unchecked, you can easily use a lot of it and drive up costs."
"You need to fully understand the solution's best practices to get the most out of its security features."
"They should improve in the area of metadata curation."
"Amazon S3 could improve the load balancers. They are very basic compared to other solutions in the industry, such as F5. It has to be able to be analyzed up to a certain level."
"There are some scalability limitations."
"The upload speed for data and documents is sometimes slow."
"I encountered some issues with the data lifecycle. Transitioning between S3 storage classes, like moving data from the standard class to Glacier or Glacier Deep Archive, has been challenging."
"Technical support could have a faster response time."
"Its security should be better from the data security point of view. It should be more secure, and it should get tightly integrated with products such as Google Docs and Google Sheets. Microsoft covers different kinds of tools such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel."
"The user interface could be more intuitive."
"One area for product improvement would be better synchronization across regions."
"Additional cost for more storage"
"The solution should have two factor authentication."
"Google Cloud Storage can improve by having better integration and migration tools."
"Google Cloud Storage could improve the integrations in a way Microsoft Azure is going about it. For Data Lake integrations, Microsoft Azure has a bunch of native pipelines available. All Google needs to do is add the same set or maybe even improve on the sets that they have. All the analytics, including the Data Lake, would then be able to sit in Google Cloud Storage."
"I want the product to be available at a cheaper cost."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is reasonably priced."
"The tool's licensing costs are monthly and cheap."
"For pricing, I would give it a six or seven out of ten."
"I use the tool's free tier. I believe that there is a need to make annual payments towards the licensing charges associated with the product."
"One can manage the price of the tool. The tool is worth the money if we want to store the data in Amazon S3."
"The cost depends on the data we access."
"While storing data in Amazon S3 is relatively inexpensive, there are costs associated with retrieving or transferring data across continents."
"The solution is cost-effective because it is based on a pay-as-you-go model, where I can purchase and use it according to my needs."
"The solution is free unless you want to increase the GB data allowance. There is a cost if you want to increase the size of storage space which is expensive."
"The solution is free."
"The price of the license could be cheaper. We are on an annual subscription."
"It provides a very limited amount of storage because it's free."
"The price could be cheaper."
"I pay monthly for Google Cloud Storage. It could be cheaper, but for now, it's okay."
"It's about nearly $10,000 USD to use the services on GCP, however, Google gave us a good deal which is why we originally went with them."
"There is a license needed to use Google Cloud Storage at our university."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
78%
Computer Software Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
3%
Manufacturing Company
2%
Educational Organization
74%
Computer Software Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
3%
Comms Service Provider
2%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon S3?
We can easily connect to the AWS resources.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon S3?
S3 offers multiple classes, allowing you to move data to cheaper classes for cost savings. AWS provides solutions to monitor your budget.
What needs improvement with Amazon S3?
In terms of security, I struggled with setting permissions and access control initially.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud Storage?
Depending on your setup, Google Cloud Storage is economical, especially if you do not need high stability and scalability. We use it for backup, so the storage that is not used often is affordable.
What needs improvement with Google Cloud Storage?
So far, when it comes to security, it meets our needs and requirements, so I have nothing to say about improvements to their services. I do not find any areas needing improvement currently.
 

Also Known As

S3, Simple Storage Service
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Airbnb, Thomson Reuters, Zillow, Alert Logic
1. Adobe 2. Airbnb 3. Amazon 4. Apple 5. AT&T 6. Baidu 7. Cisco 8. Coca-Cola 9. Dell 10. eBay 11. Facebook 12. Ford 13. Google 13. HP 14. IBM 15. Intel 16. JPMorgan Chase 17. LinkedIn 18. Lyft 19. Microsoft 20. Netflix 21. Nike 22. Oracle 23. PayPal 24. Pinterest 25. Qualcomm 26. SAP 27. Spotify 28. Tesla 29. Toyota 30. Twitter 31. Visa 32. Walmart 33. WeWork
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon S3 vs. Google Cloud Storage and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.