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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 August 2026, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Amazon S3 is 15.8%, up from 12.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SoftLayer is 1.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon S315.8%
IBM SoftLayer1.9%
Other82.3%
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 storage."
"The solution easily connects with the cloud, hardware, or other services to move data."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon S3 is the data transfer acceleration because it can enable fast, easy, and secure data transfer."
"Amazon S3 is highly stable."
"Amazon S3 is easily accessible, fast and effective. Its performance is good."
"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 support from Amazon S3 has been knowledgable and responsive."
"The stability is very good."
"The solution is highly stable."
"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 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

"When we need to find the queries there is no user interface, it is the only textual format that is bulky. If we need some data we will use Athena for queries and we will get results. When comparing this solution to others, such as DataDog, they provide a wonderful UI, and user-friendly dashboards, and many other features that this solution is lacking."
"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."
"One of the issues we face is that it is a developer's environment."
"I encountered some issues with the data lifecycle. Transitioning between S3 storage classes, like moving data from the standard class to Glacier or Glacier Deep Archive, has been challenging."
"We have used the support from Amazon S3. The support is expensive and could be reduced."
"The process needed to show updates immediately is a problem."
"Sometimes, there is latency in getting data, especially if the file size is large. This could be improved."
"There could be more flexibility in configuration to allow more ways to connect to outside the PPC."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of Amazon S3 is good. The pricing model is based on the usage of the solution."
"The cost varies based on the type of subscription you chose."
"The cost is based on the amount of storage required and if we exceed the data transfer rate across regions."
"The price of Amazon S3 should be reduced."
"Not many products in the market beat the solution in terms of quality or price."
"The pricing for Amazon S3 is reasonable, so price-wise, it's a seven out of ten."
"The solution is very inexpensive at 50 cents per gigabyte, per month."
"I know it is very inexpensive compared to other solutions."
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.
907,768 professionals have used our research since 2012.