No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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

"The most valuable features of Amazon S3 are its storage capabilities, security, and integration."
"Amazon S3's best features are its reliability and capacity to expand."
"The product is easy to use."
"The product is easy to use, very intuitive, fast and quite flexible."
"It's very well secured. We have S3 policies that allow you to write custom policies."
"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 are VNet, virtual machines, and Elastic Kubernetes Service."
"The solution is easy to use for anyone with minimal technical knowledge."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
"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 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."
 

Cons

"Sometimes, there is latency in getting data, especially if the file size is large. This could be improved."
"Regarding S3, S2, and E2, all I'd recommend is for pricing to be lower since we can easily overuse them."
"One aspect I would mention is the naming in Amazon S3. If I create an S3 bucket with a specific name, such as 'Roberto bucket,' I cannot create it in another account with the same name."
"The naming conventions require unique global names, which can be cumbersome."
"Amazon S3 could improve some of the features, such as indexing, or we should have more information about all the data stored in a single place. This way we can see what data resides where instead of going in different buckets, file locations manually, or searching. An index would be nice, allowing us to directly go to a location to use the date."
"The solution's pricing should be modified to automatically expand storage based on prior usage."
"File versioning could be improved and I'd like to see some additional security features."
"I would like to see the API for beginners improved because it is hard to understand."
"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."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of Amazon S3 is good. The pricing model is based on the usage of the solution."
"The tool's price is a little bit high, but it is reasonable."
"The tool is not too expensive considering the various pros."
"The price is okay."
"I know it is very inexpensive compared to other solutions."
"The licensing model is complex."
"There is a license to use Amazon S3."
"The cost depends on the data we access."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Public Cloud Storage Services solutions are best for your needs.
886,906 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

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.
886,906 professionals have used our research since 2012.