Alibaba Cloud vs Microsoft Azure comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Mar 6, 2024

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.

To learn more, read our detailed Alibaba Cloud vs. Microsoft Azure Report (Updated: March 2024).
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Which solution do you prefer: Alibaba Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
Answer: I believe Microsoft Azure is good as many companies are going by Azure, and moreover, Azure is best because many services that Microsoft corporates are used in the market.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"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."

More Alibaba Cloud Pros →

"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."

More Microsoft Azure Pros →

Cons
"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."

More Alibaba Cloud Cons →

"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."

More Microsoft Azure Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "I don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."
  • "I'm not sure about the exact pricing, but let's just say if it cost a dollar for Amazon AWS, it was closer to 70 to 80 cents for Alibaba Cloud."
  • "We cut our costs significantly by migrating our infrastructure to the cloud. Alibaba Cloud employs a pay-as-you-go model, so that minimizes many costs for us."
  • "The cost is better than similar solutions."
  • "Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."
  • "The price of Alibaba Cloud is good. If I was to use Microsoft Azure I would have to pay 30 percent more."
  • "The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
  • "I noticed on the pricing that it's quite expensive. It is the price you pay for making a practical choice for enterprise-level companies since it has so many features and it fits an enterprise-level company just like our company right now."
  • More Alibaba Cloud Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Related to pricing and licensing, you have to be careful how you operate with the concept."
  • "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."
  • "Make use of Azure pricing calculator and you will find out that Azure Is still more reasonable that the competition and do your research, when unclear speak with your MS support."
  • "It’s necessary to use third party products or to use good self-management economic tools"
  • "Keep to PaaS to gain the optimal benefits from an OPEX finance and resource perspective."
  • "Several thousand dollars and counting, we haven't needed to upgrade on premises hardware (In fact we eliminated all of the old on-premises hardware and run 100% on Azure) or pay for it's maintenance, power etc."
  • "If you are not aware of costs, pricing, etc., you can end up with a hefty bill. However, I found that the Azure price calculator is a valuable tool to use before starting to deploy VMs in Azure. This tool will give you an overview of the costs you should expect on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis."
  • "Pricing is very difficult to guesstimate. With so many a la carte options and individual pricing it can be a hassle to understand."
  • More Microsoft Azure Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    Nattaphat Narapimsakul
    Patrick Cutajar - PeerSpot reviewerPatrick Cutajar
    Real User

    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.







    DJIBRINE AGADJI - PeerSpot reviewerDJIBRINE AGADJI
    Real User

    Microsoft Azure

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution.
    Top Answer:The product is not that expensive. It is more affordable than Google. However, customers are not that comfortable with the product’s price.
    Top Answer:The product must be made easier to use. The design is a bit tricky. When we log in to the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace and browse products, they look very small. The user experience must be improved… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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 both… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    7,406
    Comparisons
    5,108
    Reviews
    9
    Average Words per Review
    409
    Rating
    7.7
    Views
    22,105
    Comparisons
    17,805
    Reviews
    27
    Average Words per Review
    417
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure
    Learn More
    Overview

    Alibaba Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to support growing enterprises worldwide, including data storage, relational databases, big-data processing, and content delivery networks.

    Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform, where developers can create, deploy, and maintain their apps. This cloud application platform allows developers to concentrate on the actual applications, while it takes care of all the elements behind the apps.

    Windows Azure works across multiple frameworks and languages. It is fully scalable, localized in that it is hosted globally in many datacenters, and has widespread capabilities with elements of application development, deployment, and management.

    Azure is comprised of several different service modules, including Infrastructure; Web; Mobile; Dev & Test; Big Data; Media;Storage, Backup & Recovery; and Identity & Access Management.

    Microsoft Azure works as a:

    1. Platform as a service (PaaS)
    2. Software as a service (SaaS)
    3. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

    Microsoft Azure is available:

    • On-premises
    • Hybrid
    • Multi-cloud
    • At the edge

    Compared to its competitors, Microsoft Azure:

    • Has more affordable features
    • Has easier migration for organizations already using other Microsoft tools
    • Has several educational resources available
    • Provides robust support
    • Is ideal for small and large businesses

    Microsoft Azure Features:

    • Scalability
    • Stability
    • Flexibility
    • Azure Site Recovery
    • Active Directory
    • Monitoring features
    • Cloud-based
    • Automated tasks
    • Change capability cadence
    • Showback capabilities
    • Information protection
    • Azure Data Lake
    • Excellent portal
    • Intuitive user interface
    • Remote desktop
    • Fast provisioning
    • Data security
    • Data resiliency
    • Speed of service
    • Integrated delivery pipeline
    • Disaster recovery
    • Robust templates
    • Flexible coding languages
    • Virtual systems testing

    Benefits of Microsoft Azure:

    • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Because Microsoft Azure is an IaaS, organizations can deploy as well as manage applications easily and quickly. Azure also provides you with the ability to customize the cloud software to meet your specific business needs.
    • Seamless integration: Microsoft Azure is built to seamlessly integrate with existing IT departments via hybrid databases, secure private connections, and storage solutions.
    • Cost-effective: Because Azure can harmoniously exist in your business environment with your data center, it is a very cost-effective solution.
    • Analytics support: Azure is designed with built-in support that is used to analyze data and provide key insights. Azure offers Cortana Analytics, Stream Analytics, Machine Learning, and SQL services.
    • Unique storage system: Compared to other cloud services, Microsoft Azure has more data centers and delivery points, which helps create an optimal user experience and also helps deliver content faster. In addition, Microsoft Azure makes it possible for organizations to exchange content across several virtual machines.
    • Enhanced flexibility: Azure provides extreme flexibility by allowing you to choose any level of functionality you require. It also supports many of the same technologies IT teams and developers usually depend on, making it easier for them to manage.
    • Easy implementation: Microsoft Azure is easy and quick to deploy. If necessary, you can change web apps to Azure with almost zero downtime.

    Reviews from Real Users:

    "It is a flexible solution that is straightforward to use," says the principal consultant at a computer software company.

    OmarJ., future datacenter consultant: Microsoft Azure Cloud at a tech company, adds that "The user interface is very nice and makes everything easy to use."

    You can build an environment in minutes. It's very good in terms of being an infrastructure as a service, and I found that really fascinating,” says an information technology consultant at a computer software company.

    "I think Azure's level of automation to achieve efficiency or agility is valuable. I also like the change capability cadence, the showback capabilities, and understanding what our costs are," says an enterprise architect at an energy/utilities company.

    Marco C., Ing. at Wolters Kluwer, says "The valuable features of Microsoft Azure are that it is cloud-based and has good storage. The storage is completely managed by Azure. We do not need to do any patching of security because it is handled by Azure which is a benefit. The solution is fully compatible with the Microsoft technology stack and is very scalable."

    "The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure is it has everything together in one place. It is one large tool with lots of small tools that are updated often," says the owner of a media company.



    Sample Customers
    Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
    BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company45%
    Comms Service Provider18%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company13%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    University8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company22%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization35%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise38%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise62%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise44%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise46%
    Buyer's Guide
    Alibaba Cloud vs. Microsoft Azure
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. Microsoft Azure and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    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.