StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Cloud Hosting
  4. Cloud Hosting
  5. Google Cloud Platform vs Google Compute Engine

Google Cloud Platform vs Google Compute Engine

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Stacks12.4K
Followers9.2K
Votes423
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform
Stacks26.2K
Followers14.1K
Votes18

Google Cloud Platform vs Google Compute Engine: What are the differences?

Developers describe Google Cloud Platform as "A suite of cloud computing services". It helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning. It is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube. On the other hand, Google Compute Engine is detailed as "Run large-scale workloads on virtual machines hosted on Google's infrastructure". Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Google Cloud Platform and Google Compute Engine can be primarily classified as "Cloud Hosting" tools.

9GAG, Snapchat, and CircleCI are some of the popular companies that use Google Compute Engine, whereas Google Cloud Platform is used by Sentry, WePay, and BetterCloud. Google Compute Engine has a broader approval, being mentioned in 594 company stacks & 429 developers stacks; compared to Google Cloud Platform, which is listed in 61 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Platform

Craig
Craig

Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech LLC

Jul 16, 2020

Decided

We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.

200k views200k
Comments
Stephen
Stephen

Artificial Intelligence Fellow

Feb 4, 2020

Decided

GCE is much more user friendly than EC2, though Amazon has come a very long way since the early days (pre-2010's). This can be seen in how easy it is to edit the storage attached to an instance in GCE: it's under the instance details and is edited inline. In AWS you have to click the instance > click the storage block device (new screen) > click the edit option (new modal) > resize the volume > confirm (new model) then wait a very long time. Google's is nearly instant.

  • In both cases, the instance much be shut down.

There also the preference between "user burden-of-security" and automatic security: AWS goes for the former, GCE the latter.

203k views203k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

It helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning. It is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube.

High-performance virtual machines- Compute Engine’s Linux VMs are consistently performant, scalable, highly secure and reliable. Supported distros include Debian and CentOS. You can choose from micro-VMs to large instances.;Powered by Google’s global network- Create large compute clusters that benefit from strong and consistent cross-machine bandwidth. Connect to machines in other data centers and to other Google services using Google’s private global fiber network.;(Really) Pay for what you use- Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so you don’t pay for unused computing time.;Load balancing- Native load-balancing technology helps you spread incoming network traffic across a pool of instances, so you can achieve maximum performance, throughput and availability at low cost.;Fast and easy provisioning- Quickly deploy large clusters of virtual machines with intuitive tools including a RESTful API, command-line interface and web-based Console. You can also use tools such as RightScale and Scalr to automatically manage your deployment.;Compliance and security- All data written to disk in Compute Engine is encrypted at rest using the AES-128-CBC algorithm. Compute Engine has completed ISO 27001, SSAE-16, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 certifications, demonstrating our commitment to information security.
Scales automatically; No server management
Statistics
Stacks
12.4K
Stacks
26.2K
Followers
9.2K
Followers
14.1K
Votes
423
Votes
18
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 87
    Backed by google
  • 79
    Easy to scale
  • 75
    High-performance virtual machines
  • 57
    Performance
  • 52
    Fast and easy provisioning
Pros
  • 5
    Good app Marketplace for Beginner and Advanced User
  • 4
    1 year free trial credit USD300
  • 3
    Live chat support
  • 3
    Cheap
  • 3
    Premium tier IP address
Integrations
RightScale
RightScale
Qubole
Qubole
Scalr
Scalr
Boundary
Boundary
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Kinvey
Kinvey
New Relic
New Relic
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Zencoder
Zencoder
Google App Engine
Google App Engine

What are some alternatives to Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Platform?

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2

It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

Linode

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

Scaleway

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Cloud Servers is based on OpenStack, the open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds. With the open cloud, you get reliable cloud hosting, without locking your data into one proprietary platform.

Gandi

Gandi

Gandi VPS Cloud Hosting offers you a flexible server with dedicated resources. The VPS virtualization is made possible by Xen technology.

WebFaction

WebFaction

No need to spend hours installing and configuring the software, database and other tools. We have over 50 one-click installers in our control panel.

Joyent Cloud

Joyent Cloud

Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering the only solution specifically built to power real-time web and mobile applications.

Vultr

Vultr

Strategically located in 16 datacenters around the globe and provides frictionless provisioning of public cloud, storage and single-tenant bare metal.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase