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Amazon S3 vs IBM SoftLayer comparison

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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
19th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Amazon S3 is 14.0%, up from 13.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SoftLayer is 2.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon S314.0%
IBM SoftLayer2.0%
Other84.0%
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 is the automated replication of the data."
"We have cold storage here, and I think that's useful; when it comes to commercialization, it's cheaper to put data that you won't be using into the data storage, and you only use a little bit of the data needed each day for your transition, so you pay less."
"We can easily connect to the AWS resources."
"Our main corporate website is posted on Amazon S3 and our evaluations determined Amazon S3 was the best solution for our use case."
"The most valuable features of Amazon S3 are compatibility and reliability."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon S3 is storage, which provides a personal capacity."
"The most valuable features of Amazon S3 are the accuracy and the life cycle policies, which help when moving from Amazon S3 to Amazon Glacier."
"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."
"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 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 solution is highly stable."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
 

Cons

"The product should enable users to create their own shortcuts."
"The read drive speed is not as fast as it should be."
"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."
"The tool needs to improve its flexibility in support."
"Everything around visibility, dashboards, and all of the statistics through which the tool provides information 24 hours a day means that it is not done on a real-time basis."
"Sometimes we have to concentrate networks to a certain location, like the EU, for example. Therefore, if we set S3 in the EU region from the Middle East or Africa, the latency is an issue and we find it hard to connect to that S3."
"There are some scalability limitations."
"The query size in Amazon S3 has room for improvement because it's limited. Querying on Amazon S3 is also expensive with Amazon Athena, so that's another area for improvement in the solution."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon S3 depends on various variables. However, the price overall is fair."
"The pricing for Amazon S3 is reasonable, so price-wise, it's a seven out of ten."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly. I rate it a six to seven out of ten."
"It's worth the price considering its functionality."
"The cost of storage is cheap. However, the cost to have a better interface can get expensive. We are using Athena for this purpose and if we did some heavy queries the cost will start adding up. When the Athena query is running, it will scan the bucket and they charge for how many GBs we are going to scan. The function of scanning has a lot of costs attached to it, this is a negative point."
"I know it is very inexpensive compared to other solutions."
"The solution is fairly priced."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
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: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.