Amazon CloudWatch vs Avalara | TrustRadius

What users are saying about

Score 8.5 out of 10

Based on 108 reviews and ratings

Read the Use Case

Score 8.8 out of 10

Based on 525 reviews and ratings

Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

Sales and Use Taxes

Cross-border Taxes

VAT / GST Taxes

Energy and Fuel Taxes

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

Geolocation for Tax Assessment

3rd-Party Software Integrations

Tax Data Reporting

Compliance Administration Management

Tax Exemption Processing

Tax Document Management

Complex Tax Scenario Management

Pros

Managing log retention periods is very simple with CloudWatch, and can be configured on a per-group basis.
Monitoring host performance is very easy when coupled with the CloudWatch Agent on an EC2 instance. A simple installation and configuration replaces an entire 3rd-party host monitoring stack.
CloudWatch is flexible enough for not just host monitoring, but application monitoring as well. It's easy to pipe local logs up to CloudWatch and extract structured data in order to monitor and set alerts on custom app metrics.

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Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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Avatax stays current with all the changes in rates and does an excellent job of calculating the correct sales tax to charge.
The reporting interface for sales tax reports is easy to use and once you set up a report you can save it as a favorite and rerun it any time with one click. Their UI on the reporting is simple and provides a minimum number of clicks to get the data you want and export it to Excel where every number lives whether it belongs there or not!

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Chief Financial Officer

US DigitalElectrical & Electronic Manufacturing, 51-200 employees

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Cons

CloudWatch doesn't monitor things outside of the cloud, it's not what it is intended for.
Billing is confusing as it bills on Dashboard, metrics called, custom metrics, etc. Hard to forecast the charge.
Paradigm is confusing sometimes and difficult to learn.

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Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology

Retail Company, 1001-5000 employees

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CertCapture can take many days to validate a certificate, and/or does not provide explanation as to why a certificate was not validated.
Submitting cases to Avalara is not helpful. Once an answer has been provided, the case is immediately closed and no helpful dialogue is allowed.
When a mistake on return filing occurs, whether customer or Avalara's, correction of the error takes far too long.

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Verified User

Manager in Finance and Accounting

Non-profit Organization Management Company, 51-200 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Avalara 9.5

Based on 18 answers

Nothing is perfect, so I suppose I would not give it a 10, but it has earned a high rating because it really does work well. Also, if any issues have arose, avalara has many ways to be contacted for assistance and has always helped in a timely manner

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Matt Farmer, CPA, CGMA

Controller

Keypoint IntelligenceInformation Services, 51-200 employees

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Usability

Amazon CloudWatch 7.0

Based on 2 answers

The tool collects a great deal of data, and data that's not available many other places. But the data is hidden in obscure places, and the logs are hard to read and follow. The user interface could use a heavy rework, and several companies have made a business out of scraping the data and presenting it better.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 employees

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Avalara 8.8

Based on 286 answers

Once integrated and properly set up, the software does most of the work for you. There are occasional hiccups, but that is true of all software. A lot of the ease depends on to what extent you let the platform do for you versus what you take on. For us, it decides which transaction to tax, assesses the tax rate based on the specific jurisdiction (and any changes in the tax rate), stores the exemption certificates and files the returns. Mostly what we are responsible for is reconciling the ledgers to the tax liability worksheets. It turns a complex and long set of tasks into a fairly simple and quick process

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CFO (Chief Financial Officer)

The Lab Depot IncConsumer Goods, 11-50 employees

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Reliability and Availability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Avalara 8.7

Based on 13 answers

I have been using Avalara for years and do not remember ever having an outage during working hours. The service is accurate and dependable.

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Accounting Ma

Digital Ally IncElectrical/Electronic Manufacturing, 51-200 employees

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Performance

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Avalara 8.9

Based on 13 answers

For the most part don't have a problem with Avalara performance. On the few occasions I've had a issue isn't has been resolved quickly and usually without having to contact support.

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Sr. Accountant

DVL Group IncEnvironmental Services, 51-200 employees

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Support Rating

Amazon CloudWatch 7.6

Based on 16 answers

Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

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Ramindu Deshapriya

Lead Consultant - Technology

VirtusaComputer Software, 10,001+ employees

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Avalara 7.2

Based on 20 answers

Avalara is not consistent in giving us information timely. For instance, right now, we have a help desk ticket with them that's been open since October. They are still trying to figure it out and we haven't gotten any feedback on where they are at or what is going on. That seems to me a very excessive amount of time to be working on a problem. Was it forgotten? Is there something bigger going on? Do they need something from us? An update would be helpful.

Also, many times when we call with an issue or concern (wrong tax rate for instance) we generally feel like the help desk assumes it's of our doing instead of theirs and doesn't truely listen when we explain the problem because we end up repeating it over and over as well as sending examples. We expect more respect on our end.

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Verified User

Manager in Finance and Accounting

Veterinary Company, 201-500 employees

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In-Person Training

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Avalara 8.0

Based on 2 answers

not applicable

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Tax Analyst

Core-MarkTobacco, 1001-5000 employees

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Online Training

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Avalara 7.3

Based on 3 answers

The videos go too fast; I kept having to pause them and go back. They don't allow for any practice transactions or provide training materials.

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Sr. Accountant

DVL Group IncEnvironmental Services, 51-200 employees

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Implementation Rating

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Avalara 8.0

Based on 363 answers

The implementation team from Avalara was very knowledgable and did a good job of passing along information so that we could maintain the system and be able to make future changes ourselves. We had asked for some custom tax setup and they worked with us to get additional taxes set up that they didn't previously have. They worked with us to pull our documentation on tax rules and make sure those were included. I had hoped more scenarios would be there out of the box to cut down on the configuration time.

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Verified User

Manager in Human Resources

Wholesale Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Alternatives Considered

I can only speak to how it's positively benefited my organization. The problem was that hosting in-house servers is no longer a cost-effective solution vs. containerization in the cloud. But once you rely on hosting servers in the cloud you need a tool to manage every aspect of that including log monitoring, resource utilization, and application performance. Amazon CloudWatch is exactly the tool you need.

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Verified User

Employee in Engineering

Information Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

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We have looked at TaxJar as an alternative to Avalara. TaxJar is significantly less expensive than Avalara, but what we ran into during our evaluation was TaxJar did not have the needed connectors with NetSuite/SuiteCommerce. Also since Shopify is natively connected to Avalara, TaxJar was not able to connect with Shopify, but would have to have orders exported to NetSuite to be run by TaxJar after the customer had been charged tax in Shopify based on the Avalara calculations.

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Financial Controller

Seeking Health, LLCRetail, 11-50 employees

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Scalability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Avalara 9.0

Based on 6 answers

There is no change that has to happen as your company grows, Avalara continues to do it's job for any size company

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Verified User

Employee in Finance and Accounting

Building Materials Company, 501-1000 employees

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Return on Investment

Scalability. Saving us cost when we can downgrade underperforming instances.
Great monitoring and peace of mine without always having to check logs to any services failure.
Support cost is high. It would be nicer if documentation would be easier to follow.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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It saved me about half a day's work each month, as well as probably 2-3 days of work for the financial analyst per month.
Having nexus in only 4 states still required a lot of manual calculations each month, so saves many hours of work for the team each month.

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Verified User

Analyst in Finance and Accounting

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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Screenshots

See All (5) Amazon CloudWatch Screenshots

See All (5) Avalara Screenshots

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Amazon CloudWatch Editions & Modules

Edition

First 10,000 Metrics	$0.30¹
Next 240,000 Metrics	$0.10¹
Next 750,000 Metrics	$0.05¹
Over 1,000,000 Metrics	$0.02¹

Per Metric

Additional Pricing Details

With Amazon CloudWatch, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee; you simply pay for what you use. You will be charged at the end of the month for your usage.

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Avalara Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Rating Summary

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

Amazon CloudWatch

Avalara

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