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Microsoft Azure vs Virtustream xStream comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Microsoft Azure
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
325
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (1st)
Virtustream xStream
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
27th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure is 8.6%, down from 13.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Virtustream xStream is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Azure8.6%
Virtustream xStream0.8%
Other90.6%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Rafath Noor - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Cloud platform has supported reliable growth and collaboration but customer support still needs improvement
In my opinion, the best features Microsoft Azure offers are the scalable solutions and serverless solution, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service. There are categorized services I can get. Based on my need, I can use and get most of those things. Regarding Microsoft Azure's AI capabilities, I think the governance and security are fine and the AI is consistent and I was able to get reliable outputs. Governance and security-wise, I was also satisfied with the performance, encryption-wise and the data transmission, transparency-wise. Regarding Microsoft Azure's AI capabilities, output-wise, the outputs are very much reliable, so I can depend on those things. There's nothing more to add and I am satisfied with the accuracy because it's more than 90% accuracy that I can find. That's fine for me.
RH
Business Systems Manager at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
Improves efficiencies, has encryption, and great mission-critical customer support
Previously we had an amateur solution where we were managing on our own data center but we had the management in-house. It was a strategic move to give people who were more competent and with business focus other core initiatives. It was a strategic outsource model. The equipment we were using was out date and at the end of its life cycle, we had to make some transitions, do a hardware replacement, or move on. We moved on to this solution.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I appreciate that everything is basically shift forward from a security standpoint."
"I like the familiarity of this solution."
"Some months ago, we started using Power BI embedded, which helped optimize the number of licenses for our company."
"The analytics services are the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"Microsoft Azure has been easy to use in my experience."
"Infrastructure as a service is most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure is the Area feature."
"Some features of Azure are very important for us. You can control access for your company, it's not complicated managing the solution either. I think the solution is very stable, secure and the documentation Microsoft has on their website is complete. You can use it to find the solution's problems or implement solutions."
"Once we made the move to this solution, we received efficiencies, 100%, 200%, even up to 1000%, depending on some processes."
"The solution has encryption which we did not have before."
 

Cons

"I would like to see better integration with other products."
"What we experienced after two years with an Azure subscription is that there is good knowledge in Microsoft Partners for Azure, but generally they are too specialized and could not cover everything, because they always miss something related for example to networking, database, web apps, security, or integration on Azure."
"The platform should be available at the same price worldwide."
"Viewing the expenses for each service in the Azure Portal is difficult for novices to understand; this could improve."
"It should have cost optimization tools. Customers are required to use third-party applications to avoid usage complications."
"From a technical point, it has very good features for Microsoft products, but for non-Microsoft products, it may have some limitations."
"Could be more user friendly; security features should be improved."
"The services from AWS are much more clearly separated. I'm not the best friend of Microsoft Azure."
"Our account representative was inexperienced, they could improve on how they are managing accounts."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Be careful with Azure Cool storage accounts; if you are dealing with high object counts, then it can be more economical to use Hot storage because of the high storage access costs associated with Cool."
"We have a subscription and the price is reasonable."
"We pay a monthly licensing fee for the solution, which could be cheaper."
"We're paying in dollars, and it's very expensive for us because of the exchange rates."
"Its price can be cheaper. Price is always an issue. We pay around $10,000 per month for all resources."
"Customers pay for our software and use our solution as a service through monthly payments. They don't pay the licensing fee directly to Microsoft."
"The subscription models can be confusing and it would be beneficial for them to simplify them. We are on an annual subscription."
"One piece of feedback from other users I have heard from is that Azure is somewhat expensive, so I would advise anyone thinking about this solution to be aware of the cost. You need to take into account the configuration you are going with or it could turn out to be a more expensive solution than you anticipated."
"The solution is a bit expensive, we are still negotiating the price."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Construction Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business142
Midsize Enterprise54
Large Enterprise153
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity ...
Which is better - SAP Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure?
One of the best features of SAP Cloud Platform is that it is web-based and you can log in from anywhere in the world. SAP Cloud Platform is suitable for companies of any size; it works well with bo...
How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?
I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. In particular, the Firebase library grants you access to a shared data structure...
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Also Known As

Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.
Continental, Domino Foods, Florida Crystals, Intel, Lanx, UOL Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Akamai and others in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS). Updated: October 2026.
921,338 professionals have used our research since 2012.