Google Compute Engine vs. Microsoft Azure

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google Compute Engine
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Google Compute Engine is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) product from Google Cloud. It provides virtual machines with carbon-neutral infrastructure which run on the same data centers that Google itself uses.
$0
per month GB
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.5 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 Compute EngineMicrosoft Azure
Editions & Modules
Preemptible Price - Predefined Memory
0.000892 / GB
Hour
Three-year commitment price - Predefined Memory
$0.001907 / GB
Hour
One-year commitment price - Predefined Memory
$0.002669 / GB
Hour
On-demand price - Predefined Memory
$0.004237 / GB
Hour
Preemptible Price - Predefined vCPUs
0.006655 / vCPU
Hour
Three-year commitment price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.014225 / CPU
Hour
One-year commitment price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.019915 / vCPU
Hour
On-demand price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.031611 / vCPU
Hour
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google Compute EngineMicrosoft Azure
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPrices vary according to region (i.e US central, east, & west time zones). Google Compute Engine also offers a discounted rate for a 1 & 3 year commitment.The 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 Compute EngineMicrosoft Azure
Considered Both Products
Google Compute Engine
Chose Google Compute Engine
AWS has a ton of options in terms of tools that you can use. It's pricing model is hit or miss (some offerings are simply unaffordable). Some of the API design is questionable at best and frustrating at worst.
Microsoft Azure is a newcomer in the market with focus on enterprise …
Chose Google Compute Engine
As far as user-friendliness is concerned, I personally rank Google Cloud above both AWS and Azure. Their user interface makes it easy to manage, which is important.
Chose Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine provides on-demand computing resources that are easy to scale up or down according to my organization needs. This allows our business to quickly adapt to changes in demand without having to invest in additional hardware. It also offers a very competitive …
Chose Google Compute Engine
Google Cloud lacks the features and compatibility of the other cloud providers. It makes up for that with highly specialized and perfected services like their Big Data and Query features.
Chose Google Compute Engine
After all the discounts, GCE is a bit cheaper with much less incidental expenses to deploy and maintain compared to Amazon, Microsoft Azur and Oracle (OCI). It is also easy to manage as the interface is simpler compared to AWS or Azur.
Chose Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine is the leader in infrastructure-as-a-service and moving up the stack to everything from the Internet of Things to artificial intelligence. The price is very good. The support is excellent. User-friendly and very customizable solution. Fit great with our …
Microsoft Azure
Chose Microsoft Azure
AWS is the most stable cloud options but Azure has done well in last few years and provides good options specifically for Microsoft customers and who are more familiar with Microsoft technologies like WINDOWS, MS SQL SERVER, GITHUB, VISUAL STUDIO etc. Google cloud is more …
Chose Microsoft Azure
Instead of above mentioned alternative we opted for Microsoft Azure because it is more powerful, reliable and pretty much a responsive environment.
Chose Microsoft Azure
Nowadays it is too hard to say why and how one cloud service is better than the other. IT is probably the question that combines a lot of different aspects like price, functionality, how it looks, ease of administration, size of the infrastructure. As for me, it is more …
Features
Google Compute EngineMicrosoft Azure
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Google Compute Engine
7.6
64 Ratings
8% below category average
Microsoft Azure
8.4
28 Ratings
2% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.125 Ratings8.227 Ratings
Dynamic scaling7.859 Ratings8.626 Ratings
Elastic load balancing8.353 Ratings8.725 Ratings
Pre-configured templates8.361 Ratings8.226 Ratings
Monitoring tools3.026 Ratings8.327 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images8.363 Ratings8.425 Ratings
Operating system support8.264 Ratings8.927 Ratings
Security controls8.362 Ratings8.627 Ratings
Automation7.92 Ratings8.225 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Google Compute EngineMicrosoft Azure
Small Businesses
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.4 out of 10
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google Compute EngineMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(64 ratings)
8.7
(97 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.7
(3 ratings)
10.0
(17 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(9 ratings)
8.4
(37 ratings)
Availability
9.5
(27 ratings)
6.8
(2 ratings)
Performance
8.9
(27 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(10 ratings)
8.0
(28 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google Compute EngineMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
Google
You can use Google Cloud Compute Engine as an option to configure your Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure DevOps self-hosted runners. This allows full control and management of your runners rather than using the default runners, which you cannot manage. Additionally, they can be used as a workspace, which you can provide to the employees, where they can test their workloads or use them as a local host and then deploy to the actual production-grade instance.
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.
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Pros
Google
  • Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts
  • Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy
  • Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs
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
  • Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides.
  • Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount.
  • Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.
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
Its pretty good, easy and good performance. Also, interface is very good for starters compared to competitors. Infra as Code (IaC) using Terraform even added easiness for creation, management and deletion of compute Virtual Machines (VM). Overall, very good and very easy cloud based compute platform which simplified infrastructure, very much recommend.
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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.
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Usability
Google
Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.
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.
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Reliability and Availability
Google
Google Compute Engine works well for cloud project with lesser geographical audience. It sometimes gives error while everything is set up perfectly. We also keep on check any updates available because that's one reason of site getting down. Google Compute Engine is ultimately a top solution to build an app and publish it online within a few minutes
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Microsoft
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
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Performance
Google
It works great all the time except for occasional issues, but overall, I am very happy with the performance. It delivers on the promise it makes and as per the SLAs provided. Networking is great with a premium network, and AZs are also widespread across geographies. Overall, it is a great infra item to have, which you can scale as you want.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Google
  • The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product.
  • Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues.
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
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
Google Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability. It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and IoT services provider, which helps with ease of integration and updates in the future.
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
Scalability
Google
It works really well with other Google Cloud services, making it easy to build scalable solutions across different teams and locations.
Read full review
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Google
  • With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems.
  • As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster.
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 Compute Engine Screenshots

Screenshot of How to choose the right VM
With thousands of applications, each with different requirements, which VM is right for you?Screenshot of documentation, guides, and reference architectures
Migration Center is Google Cloud's unified migration platform with features like cloud spend estimation, asset discovery, and a variety of tooling for different migration scenarios.