Google App Engine vs. Microsoft Azure

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google App Engine
Score 8.4 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
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.6 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 EngineMicrosoft Azure
Editions & Modules
Starting Price
$0.05
Per Hour Per Instance
Max Price
$0.30
Per Hour Per Instance
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google App EngineMicrosoft Azure
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level 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 EngineMicrosoft Azure
Considered Both 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
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
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
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
The advantage of Microsoft Azure compared to competing tools is that Azure integrates nicely with the other Microsoft tools. Another advantage of Azure is that it has attempted to be quite user-friendly. The disadvantage of Azure is that it is relatively slow compared to …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Google App EngineMicrosoft Azure
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Google App Engine
8.7
31 Ratings
6% above category average
Microsoft Azure
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces9.017 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability9.031 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead8.931 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability9.023 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control8.930 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration8.027 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation8.928 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication8.027 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification9.027 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery8.925 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes8.028 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
Microsoft Azure
8.6
17 Ratings
6% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings8.716 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings9.316 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings8.816 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings7.016 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings8.016 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.415 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings9.516 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings9.016 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings8.715 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Google App EngineMicrosoft Azure
Small Businesses
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Score 9.0 out of 10
Akamai Cloud Computing
Akamai Cloud Computing
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google App EngineMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(35 ratings)
8.5
(88 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.3
(8 ratings)
10.0
(15 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(7 ratings)
9.0
(27 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
6.8
(2 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(12 ratings)
8.8
(27 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google App EngineMicrosoft 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
Microsoft
In terms of cloud computing, Microsoft Azure is the only comprehensive result the company offers. Regardless of how big or small an organization is, it can make use of this system. As a cyber-security professional, this is your best option for data management. A business that wants to minimize capital expenditures can use Microsoft Azure. Many Microsoft services accept it. People with little or no knowledge of cloud computing may find it impossible. It isn’t the solution for companies that don’t want to risk having only one platform and infrastructure vendor.
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
Microsoft
  • Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
  • Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
  • BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
  • Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.
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
Microsoft
  • In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
  • Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
  • Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.
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
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
Google App Engine is very intuitive. It has the common programming language most would use. Google is a dependable name and I have not had issues with their servers being down....ever. You can safely use their service and store your data on their servers without worrying about downtime or loss of data.
Read full review
Microsoft
Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Google
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
Read full review
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
Microsoft
Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
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
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
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
Microsoft
  • Brings down Capex to customers.
  • Some of the built-in security features of DDoS Basic protection that comes with VNET on Azure or even WAF on AGW brings huge advantages to customers.
  • Hybrid benefits for those who have software assurance can save even more costs by moving to Azure.
Read full review
ScreenShots