We compared Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
Microsoft Azure is praised for its scalability, reliability, and extensive range of services, while users appreciate its customer service and support. On the other hand, Alibaba Cloud stands out for its security measures, efficient data management, and competitive pricing options. Both platforms offer positive returns on investment, but Alibaba Cloud users mention the need for improvements in customer support and service reliability.
Features: Microsoft Azure is praised for its scalability, versatility, reliability, and extensive range of services. In contrast, Alibaba Cloud is valued for its excellent scalability, robust security measures, reliable performance, extensive resource options, efficient data management, and friendly customer support.
Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure's setup cost has been praised for its ease and simplicity, with users appreciating the reasonable and competitive pricing. In contrast, Alibaba Cloud offers manageable setup costs, allowing customers to choose a suitable plan. The licensing process is smooth and straightforward., Microsoft Azure has been praised for its cost savings, increased efficiency, and improved scalability. Its wide range of services and tools streamlines operations and reduces infrastructure costs. Alibaba Cloud is highly regarded for its cost-effective cloud services, offering excellent value for money. It enhances efficiency, scalability, and reliability and provides extensive features and functionalities for overall business performance.
Room for Improvement: Microsoft Azure has received feedback regarding areas that need improvement, while Alibaba Cloud could benefit from enhancements in several aspects, including its interface, stability, reliability, customer support, and response times.
Deployment and customer support: Based on user feedback, there are differences in the duration required to establish a new tech solution between Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud. Some Azure users mention a three-month deployment period with an additional week for setup, while Alibaba Cloud users mention both deployment and setup taking just one week. Context and usage of these terms must be considered in evaluating the overall duration., Microsoft Azure's customer service and support receive positive remarks for their responsiveness and expertise, offering prompt and helpful assistance. Users appreciate comprehensive documentation. In comparison, Alibaba Cloud's customer service is also praised for being attentive and helpful, with extensive documentation, but some users have expressed dissatisfaction with response time and expertise.
The summary above is based on 32 interviews we conducted recently with Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Flexibility and costs were probably the most important thing for us. The cost was one of the big factors for choosing Alibaba Cloud relative to other cloud solutions, especially in Asia"
"It is a scalable product. So, scaling up or scaling down is possible."
"What's good about Alibaba Cloud is its database service. It's also good in the virtual machine area."
"The most valuable feature of Alibaba Cloud is the communication it allows between two servers."
"The cost of hosting the solution is very reasonable. It's quite inexpensive."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"I rate Alibaba Cloud's scalability an eight out of ten."
"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"I get all the features under one roof."
"The product brings a lot of value to our business and customers."
"User interface and portal are great."
"Microsoft Azure is flexible and the performance is great."
"It is stable and collaborative."
"The automated connectors to some of our critical enterprise systems are an important feature. These are very large, critical, global HCM systems."
"The solution has given us more agility, scalability and opportunity to optimize the cost."
"In terms of managing and configuring infrastructures, Azure is fairly good."
"The solution should have more integration."
"Alibaba Cloud's initial setup is somewhat complex."
"Alibaba Cloud has some problems related to latency and connection issues. If you go for a cloud solution provider, you will need to access the Internet, which may result in latency and bandwidth issues, leading to slowness in operations."
"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"Users use websites as a tutorial. However, the Alibaba Cloud website has the content, and the scripts are copied from Amazon Web Services. We had received customer feedback where the customer asked us to get formulate original content instead of copying from Amazon Web Services. It’s very odd and awkward."
"The solution name is not favorable in some markets and could cause us some problems gaining customers."
"From the improvement point of view, there are lots of issues that we are facing. In all the areas, it seems like it is not mature. For example, a customer wants to provision some VM that has many configurations. If I want to show the price to the customer, it is very challenging. The SDK that Alibaba has provided is very limited. We can have the pricing for VM, but we cannot have pricing for RDS databases or some other services. This is a big concern area for us. They should put more effort into the SDKs or APIs that they provide, for example, pricing APIs or pricing SDK. They do not provide support for most of the services they provide. For example, if I want to get the price of MongoDB, that SDK is not available from Alibaba. Similarly, robust API support is required for S3, which is OSS or Object Storage, so that we can read the data in a faster manner, for example, in chunks. We have raised many issues with the Alibaba support team, and they have been fixing the issues after we report them."
"It is not robust."
"There are so many services available that the interface is a little bit messy, and when you're looking for a specific service, you have to know exactly where to search."
"The solution could improve the stability. However, this could be a configuration issue that we are not been trained."
"It would be beneficial if Microsoft could enhance the free version to allow for more exploration and development. That's my only suggestion regarding Azure."
"Establishing the account in the beginning was very difficult."
"One area where Microsoft Azure could improve is in offering a broader range of pre-built plugins and tools compared to AWS."
"They should create integrations with more platforms."
"I think Azure Active Directory and also the backup solutions provided in Azure need to be improved by Microsoft. The backup solution is not a very enterprise solution, and it is very simple. I think in comparison with other backup solutions like Nakivo and Veeam Backup, it can be improved to have a lot of options."
"I would like to see more automation and AI with the cloud to help the clients understand more about their clients, their history data, and their predictive analytics. This would help them better manage their clients."
Alibaba Cloud is ranked 9th in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) with 10 reviews while Microsoft Azure is ranked 2nd in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) with 40 reviews. Alibaba Cloud is rated 7.2, while Microsoft Azure is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Alibaba Cloud writes "Good storage, great for smaller companies, and has impressive support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Azure writes "Promotes clear, logical structures preventing impractical configurations and offers seamless integration ". Alibaba Cloud is most compared with Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, Oracle Cloud, Google Firebase and DigitalOcean, whereas Microsoft Azure is most compared with Oracle Cloud Platform, Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and IBM Public Cloud. See our Alibaba Cloud vs. Microsoft Azure report.
See our list of best Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) vendors.
We monitor all Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
I believe that with Microsoft Azure you will have a bigger advantage due to the amount of partners that there are in the market. If you need support from Partner one and you don't get it, it's easy to switch to another partner to get help.
Further to this Microsoft Azure now has datacentres worldwide which makes it easier to deploy anywhere.
Microsoft Azure