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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
85
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM SoftLayer
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
21st
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 14.3%, up from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SoftLayer is 1.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon S314.3%
IBM SoftLayer1.8%
Other83.9%
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

"I used Amazon AWS/S3 solution to prove my concept before deploying it on real hardware, and it was a great experience and was really scalable."
"It's good for starting up because you only pay for what you use."
"Uploads are secure and occur instantly."
"The scalability of Amazon S3 is good."
"The price and the quality are very good."
"Set up a performance and stress-based test suite to measure the endurance of a web application on Amazon AWS cloud system using S3 as the back-end storage infrastructure."
"We find the archival capabilities of this solution quite valuable, because we can have set policies of exactly when, and what to archive."
"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."
"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

"Amazon S3 could improve the performance reports. It would be a benefit if they were more comprehensive."
"It is expensive for storing."
"I would like a batch downloading option added to the AWS console."
"Sometimes, there is latency in getting data, especially if the file size is large. This could be improved."
"You do need to get training on the setup process."
"A feature that should be included is to find and provide a HIPPA compliant solution for the Presigned URL."
"The console could be improved - it's not very user friendly for non-technical guys and the cost has to improve."
"Enhancements in security features might be beneficial."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I know it is very inexpensive compared to other solutions."
"I have seen the pricing on AWS, but I believe it's a discount price for organizations."
"I would rate the pricing a nine out of ten. Pricing depends on a particular class where you want save your objects. There are different classes when it comes to storage in 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."
"The price of the Amazon S3 is reasonable. There are not any licensing costs, they have a pay-as-you-use model."
"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."
"This solution has reasonable pricing and a low cost."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
University
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: April 2026.
890,071 professionals have used our research since 2012.