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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 July 2026, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Amazon S3 is 15.5%, up from 11.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SoftLayer is 1.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon S315.5%
IBM SoftLayer1.9%
Other82.6%
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

"Amazon S3 is very flexible and provides high storage."
"Speed, size, and security are the most valuable features."
"Out of the features that I have used in Amazon S3, I liked the scalability and the disaster recovery planning the most."
"Technical support is excellent."
"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."
"Amazon S3 is easy to use and it is beneficial to use the CLI to make the backups. Since I use the CLI I do not have to do it on a web portal which is a big advantage because everything can be automatized. Automation can be done very well in Amazon S3."
"The initial setup is not difficult or overly complex. It's very straightforward and easy to implement."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon S3 is its flexibility as a solution to suit many different use cases."
"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 ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
 

Cons

"I would like there to be more support without needing to use Transfer Family."
"The upload speed for data and documents is sometimes slow."
"Amazon S3 is a very scalable solution, though one setback is that a region should be established in the Philippines."
"I would appreciate Amazon expanding the available documentation to keep it as modern and up-to-date as possible."
"The main pain point that I have faced is the need for faster restore times from Glacier tiers, which could definitely be improved."
"Regarding S3, S2, and E2, all I'd recommend is for pricing to be lower since we can easily overuse them."
"The solution needs to improve test recognition."
"The tool's speed is comparatively low, especially considering that there are some other services where we can store data, like EBS."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"For us, the versioning was an issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon S3 is a cost-effective solution compared to the others."
"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."
"The price of Amazon S3 depends on various variables. However, the price overall is fair."
"The price of Amazon S3 could be less expensive."
"While storing data in Amazon S3 is relatively inexpensive, there are costs associated with retrieving or transferring data across continents."
"I know it is very inexpensive compared to other solutions."
"The price of the Amazon S3 is reasonable. There are not any licensing costs, they have a pay-as-you-use model."
"Amazon S3 is a cheap solution."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
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?
The only downside is the scalability limitations. I don't know if that is from AWS or my subscription.
What is your primary use case for Amazon S3?
I use Amazon S3 mainly for backup purposes, specifically for the backup of the internal and user data of the end users or our customers.
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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.
904,973 professionals have used our research since 2012.