AWS and Azure are the two largest public clouds, and for the overwhelming majority of workloads either one will do the job. That makes the usual framing, which of the two is better, close to useless. The question worth asking is narrower: which one fits the organisation you already are?
This page sets out the criteria that genuinely separate them, says what it does not measure, and leaves the choice with you.
What this comparison covers
Five things decide this in practice, roughly in order of how much they matter:
- Identity and directory. What your organisation already uses to authenticate people.
- Existing licensing and contracts. What you already pay Microsoft, if anything.
- Team experience. Which platform your engineers can already operate safely.
- Service depth for your specific workload. Not breadth in general, depth in the one area you care about.
- Hybrid requirements. Whether on-premises infrastructure is part of the picture.
Notice that four of the five are facts about you rather than facts about the platforms. That is not an accident.
Identity is the real dividing line
If your organisation runs Microsoft 365 and Active Directory, Azure starts with a structural advantage that is difficult to overstate. The same directory that governs your email and documents governs your cloud resources. Single sign-on, conditional access policies and group-based permissions carry over rather than being rebuilt.
On AWS the same outcome is achievable, through identity federation and AWS IAM Identity Center, but it is an integration you build and maintain rather than a property you inherit. For a team of five that is a minor cost. For an enterprise with complex access governance it is a project.
The reverse case is weaker but real: an organisation with no Microsoft estate gains nothing from Azure’s directory integration and will find AWS IAM a perfectly coherent model to learn from scratch.
Compute
Both offer broadly equivalent virtual machine families: general purpose, compute optimised, memory optimised, storage optimised and accelerated. AWS calls the service EC2 and the units instances; Azure calls it Virtual Machines and the units sizes. Both offer per-second or per-minute billing on Linux, both offer discounted pricing for committed or interruptible capacity, and both offer managed Kubernetes.
Where they diverge is in how the options are organised rather than what is available. AWS tends to expose more granular instance families and leaves more of the assembly to you. Azure tends to bundle more decisions into the service and surfaces fewer knobs. Engineers who like control usually prefer the first; teams who want fewer decisions usually prefer the second.
Data and analytics
Both have mature managed relational databases, managed NoSQL, data warehousing, streaming and a full analytics stack. AWS’s catalogue is larger and more specialised, which is an advantage when your requirement is specific and a burden when you are trying to choose. Azure’s data services integrate tightly with each other and with Microsoft’s analytics and reporting tools, which matters a great deal if your organisation already reports through them.
If you run SQL Server today, Azure’s licensing and migration paths for it are the most direct route available anywhere, and that single fact decides a lot of migrations.
Hybrid and on-premises
This is Azure’s clearest functional lead. Microsoft has invested heavily in running Azure services on infrastructure you own and in managing non-Azure resources through Azure’s control plane. For organisations with datacentre estates they are not retiring, regulated workloads that cannot move, or a genuinely long migration horizon, that tooling is substantive rather than cosmetic.
AWS has hybrid offerings and they are capable. The difference is one of emphasis and maturity in this specific area.
Side by side
| Criterion | AWS | Azure |
|---|---|---|
| Identity model | IAM, with federation to external directories you configure | Entra ID, inherited directly from an existing Microsoft estate |
| Service catalogue | Larger and more granular | Broad, with more bundled decisions |
| Compute service | EC2 instances | Virtual Machines |
| Managed Kubernetes | EKS | AKS |
| Hybrid emphasis | Capable | A primary strategic focus |
| Windows and SQL Server | Fully supported | Most direct licensing and migration path |
| Ecosystem and hiring | Largest pool of practitioners and third-party tooling | Strong, especially in enterprise and Microsoft-centric organisations |
| Learning curve | Steep because of breadth | Steep because of portal and naming inconsistencies |
Which to pick
Reasons to choose AWS
- No existing Microsoft identity or licensing estate to leverage.
- Your team already has AWS experience, or you are hiring into a market where that experience is most abundant.
- You need a specialised service and AWS has the deeper option in that specific area.
- You depend on third-party tooling that treats AWS as its first-class target, which many tools still do.
Reasons to choose Azure
- Microsoft 365 and Active Directory are already how your organisation authenticates.
- You run Windows Server or SQL Server workloads at any scale.
- Hybrid operation is a requirement rather than a transitional phase.
- You have an existing Microsoft agreement that changes the commercial comparison.
When the answer is both
Plenty of organisations run both deliberately: one platform for the estate the business already lives in, another for a specific capability or team. That is a legitimate architecture rather than a failure to decide, provided you accept the real cost, which is operating two identity models, two billing models and two sets of expertise. Keeping the accounts genuinely separate is what makes it manageable.
What this comparison does not tell you
Three things, stated plainly.
It contains no performance figures. There are no benchmarks here because meaningful cloud benchmarks are workload-specific, region-specific and instance-specific, and a number measured on one configuration tells you very little about another. Anyone quoting a single figure for which cloud is faster is selling something.
It contains no price comparison. Both platforms price per service, per region and per commitment level, and both change prices. A like-for-like comparison is only meaningful once you know your actual resource shapes, and at that point you should build it with each provider’s own calculator.
Everything above is subject to change. Instance families, service names, free-tier terms, regional coverage and quotas are set by the providers and change without notice. Verify against the provider’s own current documentation before committing to an architecture.
Getting an account on either
Both platforms are available here as prepared accounts, which removes the identity and payment verification delay rather than changing anything about the platform itself. AWS configurations run from trial accounts through vCPU-limited and Bedrock request-rate accounts to large committed credit tiers. Azure configurations run from student and trial credit through to large credit tiers, several with AI services enabled.
Whichever you choose, the account is yours on delivery, including responsibility for hardening it, controlling its spend and complying with the provider’s terms.