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.
"I rate Alibaba Cloud's scalability an eight out of ten."
"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."
"Alibaba support is responsive. When we create tickets in the Alibaba portal, they usually respond online or call me in five minutes."
"It is easy to set up."
"The cost of hosting the solution is very reasonable. It's quite inexpensive."
"It is a scalable product. So, scaling up or scaling down is possible."
"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"
"Compute (App service, and virtual machine scale sets): The ability to manage Windows and Linus virtual machines."
"Azure has the best website amongst all cloud computing platforms. It is simple to utilize, and one can release nearly anything, from app services to host sites."
"I come from the DBA side so for me it's the easy maintenance; backups are very easy as well."
"It is a very straightforward solution that provides a wide range of services."
"Azure is very flexible."
"Infrastructure as a service is most valuable."
"The portal makes it easier to work with the solution."
"It's very easy to build a new service and get it into production."
"The flexibility of the solution could be improved."
"It is not robust."
"The solution needs to improve its graphical user interface."
"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."
"The solution should have more integration."
"The majority of the tools and processes, in general, have a lot of room for improvement."
"I think that sometimes the customer service for Alibaba Cloud is inefficient.... Sometimes it's hard to reach out to them."
"Alibaba Cloud's initial setup is somewhat complex."
"Integration with other cloud environments can be tricky at times."
"The biggest area needing improvement involves the licensing cost."
"Ease of use could be improved."
"It would be nice to have faster support."
"The solution could always work to reduce its costs."
"Potential improvements to the price calculator tool"
"The support, the cost, the way they have the tiers, this could all be improved."
"The cost of the product is too high. It would be ideal if they could lower it a bit for their customers."
Alibaba Cloud is ranked 9th in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) with 15 reviews while Microsoft Azure is ranked 1st in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) with 299 reviews. Alibaba Cloud is rated 7.2, while Microsoft Azure is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Alibaba Cloud writes "The solution is useful for application development, but the user interface and user experience must be improved". 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 Infrastructure (OCI), Google Firebase and DigitalOcean, whereas Microsoft Azure is most compared with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and OpenShift. 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