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Amazon S3 vs IBM SoftLayer 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
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
85
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM SoftLayer
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
23rd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Amazon S3 is 13.8%, up from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SoftLayer is 1.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon S313.8%
IBM SoftLayer1.4%
Other84.8%
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2774889 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has reduced storage costs and improved data management through automated lifecycle and seamless service integration
The best features that Amazon S3 offers are high durability and availability with virtually unlimited storage, lifecycle management for automated tiering and cost control, versioning to retain and recover data changes, and integration with services such as Glue, Athena, EMR, Lambda, along with strong security via IAM roles, bucket policies, and encryption. These features help by ensuring data is always available, securely stored, and easily accessible for pipelines. Lifecycle policies reduce manual cleanup, versioning safeguards against accidental deletions, and integrations allow us to directly run analytics or trigger workflows without moving data around. Amazon S3 event notifications help automate tasks such as triggering ETL jobs or Lambda functions on new data arrivals, and features such as cross-region replication ensure data redundancy and compliance, while fine-grained access control makes it easy to manage permissions across teams securely. My organization has seen improvements in data accessibility, reduced infrastructure costs, and simplified data management through Amazon S3. We now have a unified scalable storage layer that supports analytics, backups, and migrations seamlessly, leading to faster workflows and better decision-making.
reviewer1032702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Principal Cloud Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
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

"Uploads are secure and occur instantly."
"It's reliable and stable."
"Easy to use, very intuitive, fast, and quite flexible."
"Technical support is excellent."
"The most useful features of Amazon S3 are the intelligent multipart upload."
"Some of the most valuable features are how convenient and easy to use S3 is. It's nicely integrated with AWS and is available on the AWS console."
"My organization has seen improvements in data accessibility, reduced infrastructure costs, and simplified data management through Amazon S3, resulting in a unified scalable storage layer that supports analytics, backups, and migrations seamlessly, leading to faster workflows and better decision-making."
"Amazon S3 has multiple types of data detection. You can store data on a monthly basis, yearly basis, and long term basis."
"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

"There is a limitation with the data upload size, such as the five terabytes restriction. I would like to see an increase in the data upload limit, similar to DynamoDB, where there is no data limit."
"The installation could be more straightforward for inexperienced users."
"The solution could improve by having a simpler way to have the detail size of a file in the CLI to be read or understood easier. Today, it's a little raw in the way the details are presented. You have to make some scripts and some modifications to be able to see the information properly of the size of a given bucket or the size of a file."
"Could include some additional security features."
"You do need to get training on the setup process."
"The service could improve by offering mobile backups, which would be great since using Google Backup is costly."
"They should improve in the area of metadata curation."
"Amazon S3 could improve by having more frequent updates."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is pay as you go, and I'm happy with the pricing."
"While storing data in Amazon S3 is relatively inexpensive, there are costs associated with retrieving or transferring data across continents."
"Amazon S3 is a cheap solution."
"The price is okay."
"The cost depends on the data we access."
"The price of the Amazon S3 is reasonable. There are not any licensing costs, they have a pay-as-you-use model."
"The cost is based on the amount of storage required and if we exceed the data transfer rate across regions."
"For pricing, I would give it a six or seven out of ten."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise39
No data available
 

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?
Since using Amazon S3, storage costs have reduced by around 35% to 40% through lifecycle tiering, data availability improved to 99.9% which minimizes downtime, ETL processing time decreased by appr...
What needs improvement with Amazon S3?
The only downside is the scalability limitations. I don't know if that is from AWS or my subscription.
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Also Known As

S3, Simple Storage Service
CloudLayer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Airbnb, Thomson Reuters, Zillow, Alert Logic
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 Amazon S3 vs. IBM SoftLayer and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,328 professionals have used our research since 2012.