Microsoft Azure and AWS are two of the biggest cloud providers on the web.
A lot of businesses, from solo projects to enterprises, rely on them to host, transfer and process data.
In this post, I compare these two services to help you decide which option is best for your needs.
Microsoft Azure vs AWS: A Summary
| Advantages | Disadvantages | |
| AWS | – Secure object and archive storage (S3) – Supports multiple database management systems, including MariaDB – Fast and secure compute servers (EC2) – Best solution for operating high-powered servers that receive a lot of traffic – Pay-as-you-go pricing with numerous pricing tiers – Makes up 30% of the global market share for cloud computing | – A little more expensive – UI has a steeper learning curve |
| Azure | – Secure object and archive storage (Blob) – Supports multiple database management systems – Fast and secure compute servers (virtual machines for Linux, Windows and SQL servers) – Supports hybrid cloud environments – Generally easier to use – Integrates with Microsoft and Office 365Investing a lot into AI – Best solution for enterprises – Pay-as-you-go pricing with multiple pricing tiers | – Doesn’t support as many database management systems – Not as many third-party integrations in general |
According to data conducted by Synergy Research Group and reported by Statista, Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes up 30% of the cloud computing market share while Azure makes up 20%.
The third biggest cloud provider is Google Cloud Platform at 13%.
Cloud computing is growing more and more popular, so these numbers are likely to grow.
According to Google Trends, interest in the topic “cloud computing” spiked several times in the United States throughout 2025.
Furthermore, the global cloud computing industry had an estimated market value of $752.44 billion in 2024, according to Grand View Research.
It’s expected to reach $2.39 trillion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.4%.
Amazon makes up about 14% of the market. According to their financial statement for 2024, the company’s revenue from AWS increased by 19% year-over-year, growing from $91 billion in 2023 to $108 billion in 2024.
This accounted for around 17% of Amazon’s revenue for that year, which was around $638 billion.
In Microsoft’s financial report for fiscal year 2025, they stated that revenue from intelligent cloud services amounted to more than $106 billion.
This accounted for around 38% of Microsoft’s revenue for that year, which was more than $281 billion.
This means that although AWS has a 10% lead over Azure in the global market share for cloud computing, Amazon and Microsoft earn a similar amount of revenue for their respective cloud services.
It also means that together, Azure and AWS make up 28% of the global market value for cloud computing.
What is Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft Azure, more commonly known as simply “Azure,” is a cloud computing platform that’s owned and operated by Microsoft.
The company offers dozens of cloud computing services to suit numerous needs, most notably object storage and database hosting.
The platform is divided up into categories like AI and machine learning, databases and analytics, compute (virtual machines and Windows servers), containers, and hybrid and multicloud systems.
Solutions for this platform include application hosting (DevOps is a popular solution for Azure), cloud migration and modernization, and cloud infrastructure for things like backup and recovery.
Microsoft is also investing a lot into AI-powered products available with Azure, including partnering with ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
At the same time, they’ve optimized their platform for developers interested in developing for AI.
Plus, because Microsoft also operates Microsoft and Office 365, they allow you to integrate both with Azure pretty easily.
Companies that have used Microsoft Azure include Walmart, Coca-Cola, Adobe, the NBA, BMW, Ralph Lauren and Audi.
What is AWS?
Amazon Web Services, more commonly known as “AWS,” is a cloud computing platform developed by Amazon.
AWS is a common solution for enterprises who operate high-powered web servers.
In fact, AWS runs many of the websites and services consumers use everyday. An outage in October of 2025 brought down websites and services like Bank of America, Venmo, Chime, Fortnite, Hulu, Apple TV, Reddit and, of course, Amazon itself.
CNN reported that the outage also led to delayed flights and prevented consumers from using certain payment methods.
Along with powering high-traffic servers, AWS is a popular solution for storing and transferring a lot of data in any industry.
Products include object storage, database hosting, DevOps tools, support for analytics workloads and more.
Storage
Microsoft Azure and AWS both offer a lot of different storage products, including object storage.
Each platform has different pricing structures based on how often data is accessed, ranging from “hot” for commonly-accessed storage and “archive” for files that are dormant and not as commonly accessed.
Azure
Azure offers several storage products, but these are the main ones customers are most interested:
- Azure Blob Storage – Object storage at massive scale
- Archive Storage – For files that are rarely accessed
- Azure Backup – Data protection designed to have built-in backup management at scale
- Azure Files – Built for serverless, enterprise-grade file sharing
- Azure Data Box – Data transfer solutions for Azure and edge compute
- Azure Disk Storage – High-performance block storage
- Azure Container Storage – Designed to manage persistent volumes for stateful applications
Blob storage is the most common storage product Azure offers.
The file size limit for blob storage is 4,000MiB per block within a block blob. This translates to 4TiB or 4.4TB.
Azure allows you to select between the following parameters while you set up your pricing plan for blob storage:
- File Structure
- Hierarchal namespace
- NFS v3.0, SFTP protocol
- Flat namespace
- Hierarchal namespace
- Redundancy
- Locally redundant storage (LRS)
- Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
- Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
- Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA GRS)
- Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS)
- Read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA GZRS)
- Region*
- 19 data centers in Europe
- 15 data centers in Asia
- 12 data centers in North America
- 5 data centers in Oceania
- 3 data centers in South America
- 2 data centers in Africa
- Currency
- 6 currencies for Europe
- 5 currencies for Asia
- 2 currencies for North America
- 2 currencies for Oceania
- 1 currency for South America
*Azure also has three data centers for the United States government, which are located in Arizona, Texas and Virginia.
AWS
AWS offers a lot of different storage products, but here are some of the most common ones:
- Amazon Simple Storage (S3) – Scalable object storage
- Elastic File System (EFS) – Serverless and fully-elastic file storage
- Amazon FSx – High-performance file storage for popular storage systems that’s fully managed
- Backup – Centralizes and automates data protection across all AWS products and services
- Elastic Block Store (EBS) – High-performance and scalable block storage
- Amazon File Cache – High-speed cache for datasets
- AWS DataSync – Data transfer service for transferring data between on-premises storage systems and AWS
- AWS Storage Gateway – Hybrid cloud storage that allows you to access to unlimited cloud storage through on-premises storage solutions
Amazon S3 is AWS’ most popular storage product.
The maximum file size limit of an object in an Amazon S3 bucket is 5TB, which is around 600GB more than Azure’s file size limit of 4.4TB.
You can purchase Amazon S3 services from the following categories:
- Storage and requests
- Tables
- Vectors
- Data transfer
- Security and buckets
- Management and insights
- Replication
- Transform and query
Amazon S3 has 14 data centers in Asia, 8 data centers in Europe, 7 data centers in North America, 3 data centers in Oceania, 1 data center in South America and 1 data center in Africa.
It also has two cloud data centers for the United States government: one on the west coast and another on the east.
Pricing
Both Microsoft Azure and AWS offer pay-as-you-go pricing available in a variety of different pricing plans with different services and products having different rates.
This means there are no set pricing plans for either platform, making comparing prices a bit difficult.
Here’s what each service charges for object storage.
| Azure (Hot*) | AWS (Standard**) | |
| First 50TB (TB/month) | $0.018/GB | $0.023/GB |
| Next 450TB/month | $0.0173/GB | $0.022/GB |
| Over 500TB/month | $0.0166/GB | $0.021/GB |
Keep in mind that these are each service’s most standard storage plans. They both have numerous storage plans that change depending on the type of storage you need, the region you want to store data in and more.
*Azure’s storage plans are based on how frequently data is accessed. It goes from Premium to Hot to Cool to Archive.
**AWS also offers storage plans whose pricing depends on how often data is accessed, but these are prices for the service’s Standard storage plan.
Unfortunately, while Azure and AWS offer the same services, they offer them in different ways. This makes pricing for other services very difficult to compare.
In general, prices for each service are comparable to one another with Azure being slightly cheaper than AWS.
For example, both services offer database storage for PostgreSQL.
Azure charges $14.72/month for 128GiB (137.439GB) of general purpose storage for PostgreSQL. AWS charges $15.81/month for this same service (charged at a rate of $0.115/GB).
Both of these prices are for each platform’s data centers in the eastern United States.
