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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
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
86
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM SoftLayer
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
20th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Amazon S3 is 15.5%, up from 11.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SoftLayer is 1.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon S315.5%
IBM SoftLayer1.9%
Other82.6%
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

"The most valuable feature of Amazon S3 for me is static deployment; it doesn't charge much, and I can integrate CloudFront for DNS and routing. It is very useful and affordable."
"This solution can really scale according to demand and you pay according to your consumption."
"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 easily accessible, fast and effective. Its performance is good."
"This solution is managed fully, and there is no need for upgrades or anything."
"Amazon S3's best features are its reliability and capacity to expand."
"If users are looking for highly scalable, competent solutions, then Amazon S3 would be a good choice."
"Amazon S3 is very stable. I don't worry about data stored in the S3 bucket as it's safe."
"The solution is highly stable."
"The ability to extract 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 is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
"The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
 

Cons

"If a certain resource is left unchecked, you can easily use a lot of it and drive up costs."
"I would like there to be more support without needing to use Transfer Family."
"No direct connector is available to connect Amazon S3 with other tools like MicroStrategy."
"We need the mapping to Windows. That feature is needed in S3. That feature is in the Azure cloud where we can map it like a drive. We can map the cloud storage to the effort driving our Windows PC. But Amazon is not providing that feature for the S3 solution."
"Amazon S3 could improve by having more frequent updates."
"Amazon S3 could improve by providing some type of storage notification."
"Amazon S3 is a very scalable solution, though one setback is that a region should be established in the Philippines."
"There are some scalability limitations."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With S3 Standard, there is not a charge for deletion of objects."
"The price of Amazon S3 depends on various variables. However, the price overall is fair."
"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 price of the Amazon S3 is low. The license model is based on what you use."
"The cost is based on the amount of storage required and if we exceed the data transfer rate across regions."
"The cost of Amazon S3 could be better. As the number of data increases, you'll pay more for Amazon S3. It's around $200, which is okay, but my company uses it less often."
"The solution is very inexpensive at 50 cents per gigabyte, per month."
"Amazon S3 is a cost-effective solution compared to the others."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise39
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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?
I would appreciate Amazon expanding the available documentation to keep it as modern and up-to-date as possible.
What is your primary use case for Amazon S3?
I use Amazon S3 for storing images, uploading files like PDFs or PNGs, and other documents and images. I use Amazon S3's lifecycle management features for changing storage classes when the data nee...
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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: June 2026.
906,852 professionals have used our research since 2012.