Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google App Engine
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Google App Engine is Google Cloud's platform-as-a-service offering. It features pay-per-use pricing and support for a broad array of programming languages.
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Google BigQuery
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Google's BigQuery is part of the Google Cloud Platform, a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) supporting the querying and rapid analysis of enterprise data.
$6.25
per TiB (after the 1st 1 TiB per month, which is free)
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
Google App EngineGoogle BigQueryMicrosoft Azure
Editions & Modules
Starting Price
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Max Price
$0.30
Per Hour Per Instance
Standard edition
$0.04 / slot hour
Enterprise edition
$0.06 / slot hour
Enterprise Plus edition
$0.10 / slot hour
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google App EngineGoogle BigQueryMicrosoft Azure
Free Trial
NoYesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsThe free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google App EngineGoogle BigQueryMicrosoft Azure
Considered Multiple Products
Google App Engine
Chose Google App Engine
Compared with Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine requires a more complicated development environment setup. It's not as simple as using Visual Studio 2015 with Azure SDK. There are multiple IDE on the market to choose from for developing apps for Google App Engine. JetBrains …
Chose Google App Engine
If you have a small team which is also responsible for development of the product then surely go for it. And if you have a larger team with dedicated person to take care of deployments. Go for cheaper options such as compute engine or AWS (be sure to do your research on pricing …
Chose Google App Engine
It's the manageability of the Google App Engine which made it a better option in our case.
It's quite straightforward to deploy on App-Engine.
No worries for monitoring setup
Chose Google App Engine
We were on another much smaller cloud provider and decided to make the switch for several reasons - stability, breadth of services, and security. In reviewing options, GCP provided the best mixtures of meeting our needs while also balancing the overall cost of the service as …
Chose Google App Engine
App Engine is a much more streamlined system than EC2. There is a fundamental difference between them, but they are used for basically the same thing as far a I could tell -- to serve applications EC2 is certainly more complicated, but if offers more machine-level control if …
Chose Google App Engine
I think that Microsoft and Amazon are simply investing more in their offerings, and there are a bunch of cool PaaS solutions out there as well. Google App Engine is solid, and is probably the right choice for some projects. But ultimately one should evaluate each platform …
Chose Google App Engine
  • No management of operating system
  • Cheaper
Google BigQuery
Chose Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery seemlessly integrates with all the Google services. In Looker Studio you directly have a connector for Google BigQuery which can help to create dashboards in few clicks.
For automating some stored procedures we have used Cloud Functions which are triggered by a …
Chose Google BigQuery
We selected BigQuery since we were already making use of many other offerings within the Google Cloud Platform and it made sense to stay within that eco-system. Of course, we made sure it met our needs and was cost-effective, and when it did we didn't seriously consider an …
Chose Google BigQuery
At my previous organization we used server based SQL server. There were days when the server was down and we couldn't work or access the data. This caused multiple reports and processes which were fed from the server to fail. Google BigQuery doesn't have such problems.
Chose Google BigQuery
We liked BQ because the cost of it is only dependent on the amount of data you store (and there are tiers of data access) and how much you search. For us, it is significantly less expensive to run BQ than an equivalent hosted RDBMS. Because most of our data pipelines are …
Chose Google BigQuery
BigQuery by far the best solution in all angles compared to other ones: Especially scalability, ease of use, performance and there is no need to manage any cluster of servers. Also it's ABSOLUTELY pay as you go! No one in market currently provide such service that can compete …
Microsoft Azure
Chose Microsoft Azure
We have settled with Microsoft Azure considered its effective administration and the ability to data visualization and analysis, together with the top-notch security/stability.
Chose Microsoft Azure
There are lots of players in this space these days, but Microsoft and AWS are the two most visible and easiest to get connected with. We were using AWS first, and have been using both for some time, but have now converted entirely over to Azure just for the ease of management, …
Features
Google App EngineGoogle BigQueryMicrosoft Azure
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Google App Engine
9.5
32 Ratings
20% above category average
Google BigQuery
-
Ratings
Microsoft Azure
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces9.018 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability10.032 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead9.032 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability8.024 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control10.031 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration10.028 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation10.029 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication10.028 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification9.028 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery9.026 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes10.029 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Google App Engine
-
Ratings
Google BigQuery
8.5
80 Ratings
0% above category average
Microsoft Azure
-
Ratings
Automatic software patching00 Ratings8.017 Ratings00 Ratings
Database scalability00 Ratings9.179 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated backups00 Ratings8.524 Ratings00 Ratings
Database security provisions00 Ratings8.773 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics00 Ratings8.475 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment00 Ratings8.013 Ratings00 Ratings
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Google App Engine
-
Ratings
Google BigQuery
-
Ratings
Microsoft Azure
8.5
27 Ratings
3% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings00 Ratings8.126 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings00 Ratings8.725 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings00 Ratings8.624 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings00 Ratings8.225 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings00 Ratings8.326 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings00 Ratings8.424 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings00 Ratings9.026 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings00 Ratings8.626 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings00 Ratings8.224 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Google App EngineGoogle BigQueryMicrosoft Azure
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.3 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google App EngineGoogle BigQueryMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(35 ratings)
8.8
(77 ratings)
8.8
(96 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.3
(8 ratings)
8.1
(5 ratings)
10.0
(17 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(7 ratings)
7.0
(6 ratings)
8.3
(36 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
6.8
(2 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(1 ratings)
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(12 ratings)
5.3
(11 ratings)
9.0
(27 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google App EngineGoogle BigQueryMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
Google
App Engine is such a good resource for our team both internally and externally. You have complete control over your app, how it runs, when it runs, and more while Google handles the back-end, scaling, orchestration, and so on. If you are serving a tool, system, or web page, it's perfect. If you are serving something back-end, like an automation or ETL workflow, you should be a little considerate or careful with how you are structuring that job. For instance, the Standard environment in Google App Engine will present you with a resource limit for your server calls. If your operations are known to take longer than, say, 10 minutes or so, you may be better off moving to the Flexible environment (which may be a little more expensive but certainly a little more powerful and a little less limited) or even moving that workflow to something like Google Compute Engine or another managed service.
Read full review
Google
Event-based data can be captured seamlessly from our data layers (and exported to Google BigQuery). When events like page-views, clicks, add-to-cart are tracked, Google BigQuery can help efficiently with running queries to observe patterns in user behaviour. That intermediate step of trying to "untangle" event data is resolved by Google BigQuery. A scenario where it could possibly be less appropriate is when analysing "granular" details (like small changes to a database happening very frequently).
Read full review
Microsoft
Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
Read full review
Pros
Google
  • Quick to develop, quick to deploy. You can be up and running on Google App Engine in no time.
  • Flexible. We use Java for some services and Node.js for others.
  • Great security features. We have been consistently impressed with the security and authentication features of Google App Engine.
Read full review
Google
  • Realtime integration with Google Sheets.
  • GSheet data can be linked to a BigQuery table and the data in that sheet is ingested in realtime into BigQuery. It's a live 'sync' which means it supports insertions, deletions, and alterations. The only limitation here is the schema'; this remains static once the table is created.
  • Seamless integration with other GCP products.
  • A simple pipeline might look like this:-
  • GForms -> GSheets -> BigQuery -> Looker
  • It all links up really well and with ease.
  • One instance holds many projects.
  • Separating data into datamarts or datameshes is really easy in BigQuery, since one BigQuery instance can hold multiple projects; which are isolated collections of datasets.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
  • You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
  • The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
  • The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
Read full review
Cons
Google
  • There is a slight learning curve to getting used to code on Google App Engine.
  • Google Cloud Datastore is Google's NoSQL database in the cloud that your applications can use. NoSQL databases, by design, cannot give handle complex queries on the data. This means that sometimes you need to think carefully about your data structures - so that you can get the results you need in your code.
  • Setting up billing is a little annoying. It does not seem to save billing information to your account so you can re-use the same information across different Cloud projects. Each project requires you to re-enter all your billing information (if required)
Read full review
Google
  • Please expand the availability of documentation, tutorials, and community forums to provide developers with comprehensive support and guidance on using Google BigQuery effectively for their projects.
  • If possible, simplify the pricing model and provide clearer cost breakdowns to help users understand and plan for expenses when using Google BigQuery. Also, some cost reduction is welcome.
  • It still misses the process of importing data into Google BigQuery. Probably, by improving compatibility with different data formats and sources and reducing the complexity of data ingestion workflows, it can be made to work.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
  • The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
  • Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Google
App Engine is a solid choice for deployments to Google Cloud Platform that do not want to move entirely to a Kubernetes-based container architecture using a different Google product. For rapid prototyping of new applications and fairly straightforward web application deployments, we'll continue to leverage the capabilities that App Engine affords us.
Read full review
Google
We have to use this product as its a 3rd party supplier choice to utilise this product for their data side backend so will not be likely we will move away from this product in the future unless the 3rd party supplier decides to change data vendors.
Read full review
Microsoft
Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
Read full review
Usability
Google
I had to revisit the UI after a year of just setting up and forgetting. The UI got some improvements but the amount of navigation we have to go through to setup a new app has increased but also got easier to setup. Gemini now is integrated and make getting answers faster
Read full review
Google
I think overall it is easy to use. I haven't done anything from the development side but an more of an end user of reporting tables built in Google BigQuery. I connect data visualization tools like Tableau or Power BI to the BigQuery reporting tables to analyze trends and create complex dashboards.
Read full review
Microsoft
As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Google
No answers on this topic
Google
I have never had any significant issues with Google Big Query. It always seems to be up and running properly when I need it. I cannot recall any times where I received any kind of application errors or unplanned outages. If there were any they were resolved quickly by my IT team so I didn't notice them.
Read full review
Microsoft
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
Read full review
Performance
Google
No answers on this topic
Google
I think Google Big Query's performance is in the acceptable range. Sometimes larger datasets are somewhat sluggish to load but for most of our applications it performs at a reasonable speed. We do have some reports that include a lot of complex calculations and others that run on granular store level data that so sometimes take a bit longer to load which can be frustrating.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Google
Good amount of documentation available for Google App Engine and in general there is large developer community around Google App Engine and other products it interacts with. Lastly, Google support is great in general. No issues so far with them.
Read full review
Google
BigQuery can be difficult to support because it is so solid as a product. Many of the issues you will see are related to your own data sets, however you may see issues importing data and managing jobs. If this occurs, it can be a challenge to get to speak to the correct person who can help you.
Read full review
Microsoft
We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Google
No answers on this topic
Google
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Google
We were on another much smaller cloud provider and decided to make the switch for several reasons - stability, breadth of services, and security. In reviewing options, GCP provided the best mixtures of meeting our needs while also balancing the overall cost of the service as compared to the other major players in Azure and AWS.
Read full review
Google
PowerBI can connect to GA4 for example but the data processing is more complicated and it takes longer to create dashboards. Azure is great once the data import has been configured but it's not an easy task for small businesses as it is with BigQuery.
Read full review
Microsoft
As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Google
No answers on this topic
Google
None so far. Very satisfied with the transparency on contract terms and pricing model.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Google
No answers on this topic
Google
We have continued to expand out use of Google Big Query over the years. I'd say its flexibility and scalability is actually quite good. It also integrates well with other tools like Tableau and Power BI. It has served the needs of multiple data sources across multiple departments within my company.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Google
No answers on this topic
Google
Google Support has kindly provide individual support and consultants to assist with the integration work. In the circumstance where the consultants are not present to support with the work, Google Support Helpline will always be available to answer to the queries without having to wait for more than 3 days.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Google
  • Effective employee adoption through ease of use.
  • Effective integration to other java based frameworks.
  • Time to market is very quick. Build, test, deploy and use.
  • The GAE Whitelist for java is an important resource to know what works and what does not. So use it. It would also be nice for Google to expand on items that are allowed on GAE platform.
Read full review
Google
  • Previously, running complex queries on our on-premise data warehouse could take hours. Google BigQuery processes the same queries in minutes. We estimate it saves our team at least 25% of their time.
  • We can target our marketing campaigns very easily and understand our customer behaviour. It lets us personalize marketing campaigns and product recommendations and experience at least a 20% improvement in overall campaign performance.
  • Now, we only pay for the resources we use. Saved $1 million annually on data infrastructure and data storage costs compared to our previous solution.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
  • DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
  • Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Google BigQuery Screenshots

Screenshot of Migrating data warehouses to BigQuery - Features a streamlined migration path from Netezza, Oracle, Redshift, Teradata, or Snowflake to BigQuery using the fully managed BigQuery Migration Service.Screenshot of bringing any data into BigQuery - Data files can be uploaded from local sources, Google Drive, or Cloud Storage buckets, using BigQuery Data Transfer Service (DTS), Cloud Data Fusion plugins, by replicating data from relational databases with Datastream for BigQuery, or by leveraging Google's data integration partnerships.Screenshot of generative AI use cases with BigQuery and Gemini models - Data pipelines that blend structured data, unstructured data and generative AI models together can be built to create a new class of analytical applications. BigQuery integrates with Gemini 1.0 Pro using Vertex AI. The Gemini 1.0 Pro model is designed for higher input/output scale and better result quality across a wide range of tasks like text summarization and sentiment analysis. It can be accessed using simple SQL statements or BigQuery’s embedded DataFrame API from right inside the BigQuery console.Screenshot of insights derived from images, documents, and audio files, combined with structured data - Unstructured data represents a large portion of untapped enterprise data. However, it can be challenging to interpret, making it difficult to extract meaningful insights from it. Leveraging the power of BigLake, users can derive insights from images, documents, and audio files using a broad range of AI models including Vertex AI’s vision, document processing, and speech-to-text APIs, open-source TensorFlow Hub models, or custom models.Screenshot of event-driven analysis - Built-in streaming capabilities automatically ingest streaming data and make it immediately available to query. This allows users to make business decisions based on the freshest data. Or Dataflow can be used to enable simplified streaming data pipelines.Screenshot of predicting business outcomes AI/ML - Predictive analytics can be used to streamline operations, boost revenue, and mitigate risk. BigQuery ML democratizes the use of ML by empowering data analysts to build and run models using existing business intelligence tools and spreadsheets.