It’s one of the most common questions in cloud computing: should you go with AWS or Azure? Both platforms power millions of businesses worldwide, and both are genuinely excellent. But they’re not identical, and the differences matter depending on your situation.
Although we’re an Azure-focused MSP, we’ve worked with plenty of organisations running AWS. What follows is our honest take on how these platforms compare, and what might tip the scales when you’re choosing between the two.
Before we compare the two, here’s a quick overview of each platform.
AWS launched in 2006 and essentially invented cloud computing as we know it. Amazon took the infrastructure it had built for its own retail operations and made it available to everyone else. Today, AWS is the largest cloud provider globally, holding around 30% of the market.
The platform offers over 200 services covering everything from basic compute and storage to machine learning, IoT, and satellite ground stations. AWS is known for its breadth and flexibility – and the sheer depth of options available. It’s particularly popular with startups, digital-native companies, and organisations building cloud applications from scratch.
Azure arrived in 2010, a few years behind AWS, but has grown rapidly to become the second-largest cloud provider with roughly 20% market share. Azure’s main advantage is its deep integration with the Microsoft ecosystem: if your organisation runs on Microsoft 365, Teams, and Windows Server, Azure feels like a natural extension of what you already have.
Azure has a strong enterprise focus and is particularly popular with organisations already invested in Microsoft technologies. It’s also the fastest-growing major cloud platform, with year-on-year growth consistently outpacing AWS.
In the UK, the government estimates that AWS and Microsoft each control roughly 30–40% of the public cloud infrastructure market, with Google Cloud a much smaller third player.
Globally, though, AWS leads in market share with around 30% of the cloud infrastructure market. It’s followed by Azure at 20% and Google Cloud at around 13% (then you’ve got Alibaba Cloud, Oracle, and others).
But the gap is narrowing.
In 2025, Azure’s cloud revenue has been growing markedly faster than AWS, with estimates putting Azure’s year‑on‑year growth in the low‑ to mid‑30% range versus the mid‑teens for AWS. Analysts expect the gap to persist into 2026 as Microsoft’s AI investments and OpenAI partnership continue to drive Azure adoption.
For mid-sized businesses, these market share figures matter less than you might think. Both platforms are well-established and not going anywhere. What matters more is which ecosystem aligns with your existing investments (and where you can find the skills and support you need).
Pricing is often the first question organisations ask, and the honest answer is: it depends.
Neither platform is categorically cheaper than the other. Both use pay-as-you-go models, but they structure costs differently, and your total spend depends heavily on your workload and how well you optimise.
AWS pricing is granular, with per-second billing for many services. This flexibility is powerful but can make costs difficult to predict. AWS offers Reserved Instances and Savings Plans for committed usage, and the sheer number of pricing options means there’s usually a way to optimise, though it takes effort to find it.
Azure uses a similar pay-as-you-go approach, but where it often delivers better value is for organisations with existing Microsoft licences. Azure Hybrid Benefit lets you use your existing Windows Server and SQL Server licences in the cloud, potentially saving up to 40% on compute costs. If you’re already paying for Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft software, these savings can add up quickly.
Both platforms offer reserved instances for predictable workloads, and both have free tiers for experimentation. The real lesson is that neither platform will automatically save you money. You need to understand your usage patterns and actively manage costs. (Our guide to Azure cost management covers the strategies that actually work.)
Security is where both platforms genuinely excel, and it’s difficult to declare a clear winner. Both AWS and Azure meet major compliance standards including ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, and industry-specific requirements for healthcare, finance, and government.
AWS takes an IAM-centric (Identity and Access Management) approach to security, with fine-grained permissions and a comprehensive suite of security services. It has a strong track record and extensive documentation. For organisations building security from scratch, AWS provides all the tools you need.
Azure’s security strength comes from its integration with Microsoft’s broader security ecosystem. If you’re already using Microsoft Defender, Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), and Microsoft Purview, your Azure security configuration becomes an extension of policies you’ve already defined. You’re not learning new tools or maintaining separate security frameworks.
Microsoft claims to have the broadest compliance portfolio in the cloud market, with “100+ compliance offerings” for Azure, while AWS publicly lists over 50 certifications alongside numerous laws, frameworks and privacy regulations on their compliance page.
Many of these are tied to specific regions and countries. For UK organisations with specific regulatory requirements, or those operating across multiple jurisdictions, this breadth can make compliance significantly simpler.
The practical difference often comes down to what you’re already using. If your security team knows Microsoft’s tools, Azure will feel more natural. If they’ve built expertise around AWS security services, switching platforms means relearning. Either way, following security best practices matters more than which platform you choose.
Both AWS and Azure offer similar service level agreements, typically guaranteeing 99.95% to 99.99% uptime for most services. In practice, both platforms are highly reliable, and both have experienced notable outages.
The October 2025 AWS outage is a recent example: a DNS resolution failure affecting DynamoDB in the US-East-1 region disrupted services for nearly 15 hours, impacting major platforms including Roblox, Fortnite, Snapchat, and various financial services (that last one being a bit more important, we reckon).
Azure has had its own incidents too, like the outage affecting its Front Door content delivery network, among others. The reality is that at the scale these platforms operate, occasional failures can’t be entirely avoided.
What matters more than provider choice is how you architect for resilience. Both platforms offer availability zones (isolated data centres within a region) and the ability to deploy across multiple regions. Designing your applications to handle failure, rather than assuming it won’t happen, is the key to genuine reliability.
For disaster recovery specifically, Azure’s integration with the Microsoft ecosystem can simplify things. Azure Site Recovery provides straightforward replication and failover for both cloud and on-premises workloads. AWS does have similar capabilities through its own services, though the configuration tends to involve more moving parts.
Both platforms offer hundreds of services, but most organisations use a core set. Here’s how the commonly used services compare.
Both platforms offer flexible virtual machine services with a wide range of instance types. AWS EC2 has a slight edge in the sheer variety of specialised instances, while Azure VMs integrate more smoothly with Windows workloads and existing Microsoft licensing. For most mid-sized businesses, either platform will meet your compute needs without drama.
Serverless computing lets you run code without managing servers, and both platforms do it well. AWS Lambda pioneered the space and has a mature ecosystem. Azure Functions arrived later but integrates naturally with other Azure services and the Microsoft stack.
If you’re building event-driven applications that respond to changes in Microsoft 365, process data from Azure services, or integrate with Teams, Azure Functions often requires less glue code. For pure cloud-native applications with no Microsoft dependencies, Lambda’s maturity and extensive documentation might give it an edge.
Object storage is fundamental to cloud computing, and both S3 and Azure Blob Storage are battle-tested at massive scale. Both offer multiple storage tiers for balancing cost and access speed, and both provide eleven nines (99.999999999%) of durability.
The differences are mostly in pricing structure and how they integrate with the rest of your infrastructure. S3’s pricing is more complex, with separate charges for requests, data retrieval, and various features. Azure Blob Storage has a slightly simpler model but still requires attention to access tiers and transaction costs.
For organisations needing content delivery and edge services, both platforms have really good solutions. CloudFront is AWS’s CDN service; Azure Front Door combines CDN, load balancing, and web application firewall capabilities in a single service.
For bigger deployments (or those with complex routing requirements), these services become more relevant, but many mid-sized businesses can start with simpler configurations.
Monitoring and observability are essential for running cloud workloads effectively. AWS CloudWatch is comprehensive but can feel complex, with separate services for logs, metrics, and tracing that you need to stitch together.
Azure Monitor provides similar capabilities but integrates more naturally with the Microsoft observability stack. If you’re already using tools like Microsoft Sentinel or Defender for Cloud, Azure Monitor becomes part of a unified experience rather than a separate system to learn.
AWS provides DevOps capabilities through a collection of services: CodePipeline for orchestration, CodeBuild for builds, CodeDeploy for deployments, and CodeCommit for source control. These services are powerful but require configuration to work together.
Azure DevOps is a unified platform covering boards (for project management), repos (for source control), and pipelines (for CI/CD). Many teams find the integrated experience more approachable – especially those already clued up on Visual Studio and the Microsoft development ecosystem.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become major differentiators in the cloud market, and both platforms are investing heavily. So how do the two compare?
AWS offers SageMaker for building and deploying machine learning models, plus specialised services like Rekognition for image analysis and Lex for chatbots. Amazon Bedrock gives you access to foundation models from multiple providers, including Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama, and others. This multi-model approach gives organisations flexibility to choose the right model for each use case.
Azure counters with a broad set of AI services and platforms. You’ve got Azure Machine Learning, Cognitive Services for pre-built AI capabilities, and Azure OpenAI Service. Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI gives Azure customers direct access to GPT models within their Azure environment, with enterprise security and compliance built in. For organisations specifically wanting OpenAI’s models, this integration is really valuable.
Both platforms now offer competitive AI capabilities though, and the gap has narrowed quite a bit. AWS’s strength is model choice and flexibility; Azure’s is tight integration with the Microsoft ecosystem and OpenAI specifically. If AI is central to your strategy, think about the specific models and services you need rather than assuming one platform is universally better.
AWS generally makes more sense when you’re building cloud-native applications from scratch with no existing Microsoft dependencies. If your development team thinks in Linux, containers, and open-source tools, AWS’s ecosystem might feel more natural.
AWS also makes sense when you need the absolute broadest range of services. If you’re doing something unusual or highly specialised, AWS is more likely to have a managed service for it. And if your team already has strong AWS expertise, the cost and disruption of switching platforms needs to deliver some really noticeable benefits to be worthwhile.
Certain industries have AWS deeply embedded in their ecosystem. E-commerce, gaming, and media companies often find that AWS’s services are better aligned with their specific needs, and that the talent pool of AWS-experienced engineers is larger.
Azure tends to be the stronger choice when your org is already invested in Microsoft technologies. If you’re running Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, and Windows Server, Azure integration transforms these from separate tools into a cohesive platform. Single sign-on actually works as intended, and Teams performs better. Managing it all just becomes simpler.
The financial case for Azure gets stronger when you can take advantage of existing licences. Azure Hybrid Benefit, Enterprise Agreements, and the ability to extend Microsoft 365 licensing into cloud workloads can deliver meaningful savings.
If you need to maintain some on-premises infrastructure alongside cloud workloads, Azure’s hybrid tools integrate nicely with existing Microsoft environments. Azure Arc and Azure Stack let you manage on-premises resources using the same Azure tools and policies you use in the cloud. AWS offers similar capabilities through Outposts, but Azure’s advantage here is consistency with the Microsoft management experience your team might already know.
For virtual desktop workloads specifically, Azure Virtual Desktop offers capabilities that AWS WorkSpaces can struggle to match, particularly for organisations with existing Windows licensing.
If you’re currently on AWS but finding that Microsoft integration is adding friction and cost, migrating from AWS to Azure might simplify your operations a lot. The same applies if you’re moving from GCP to Azure or migrating from on-premises infrastructure.
Multi-cloud strategies, using AWS and Azure together, are increasingly common. Some firms use different clouds for different workloads, choosing whichever platform is strongest for each use case.
The appeal is obvious: avoid vendor lock-in, and access the best services. But multi-cloud comes with real costs. You need expertise in both platforms, you’re managing two sets of security policies, and you have to deal with the complexity of networking and data transfer between clouds. Is it worth it?
For most mid-sized businesses, a primary cloud with selective use of other services can make more sense than a true multi-cloud architecture. If you’re interested in this approach, our article on adopting multi-cloud as a strategy explores the trade-offs in more detail.
Choosing between AWS and Azure tasks you with finding the best platform for your organisation’s situation – both now and in the future. Here are the questions that actually matter:
At Synextra, we specialise in Azure migrations and managed cloud services. We’ve helped organisations across the UK move to Azure, optimise their cloud spending, and get genuine value from Microsoft’s platform.
If you’re considering a move to Azure or want to understand how it compares for your situation, we’re happy to help. We’ve guided many UK businesses through cloud migrations and can give you a realistic assessment of what switching would involve. Get in touch today to find out more.
