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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 April 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

"Overall, I rate Amazon S3 a ten out of ten."
"My company uses Amazon S3 by default for every single project. I like that you can use it for storing different file formats. Amazon S3 is also the easiest to use compared to other solutions."
"I used Amazon AWS/S3 solution to prove my concept before deploying it on real hardware. It was a great experience and was really scalable."
"Amazon CloudFront is way faster, and the websites are loading way faster than when you do it on Azure CDN."
"Easy to use, very intuitive, fast, and quite flexible."
"My advice is to use it, because the storage factor and data extraction are faster since we can use Redshift for extraction, and it has very low latency, which is beneficial for our organization even for data maintenance."
"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 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 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."
"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."
 

Cons

"There could be more flexibility in configuration to allow more ways to connect to outside the PPC."
"We would like Amazon to reduce the price of storage."
"The upload speed for data and documents is sometimes slow."
"They could always increase object storage ability."
"Regarding S3, S2, and E2, all I'd recommend is for pricing to be lower since we can easily overuse them."
"Technical support could have a faster response time."
"I would also like S3 to have the ability to do dynamic websites without the need to do reconfigurations outside of S3. You should be able to switch on dynamic websites in S3, and then it works. I shouldn't need to go elsewhere within Amazon Web Services to get a dynamic website to work."
"The console could be improved - it's not very user friendly for non-technical guys."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"While storing data in Amazon S3 is relatively inexpensive, there are costs associated with retrieving or transferring data across continents."
"The price of the Amazon S3 is low. The license model is based on what you use."
"The solution is very inexpensive at 50 cents per gigabyte, per month."
"The price is okay."
"The license of Amazon S3 is based on volume, capacity, and time. The overall price of the solution could improve. The support has to be added if you want it at an additional cost."
"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 of Amazon S3 is low. For R & D purposes there is a free option available. There is a license needed to use the solution."
"This solution has reasonable pricing and a low cost."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
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.
885,444 professionals have used our research since 2012.