Amazon Elastic Transcoder vs. Google Compute Engine

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
The Amazon Elastic Transcoder from AWS is a cloud-based media transcoding service available to AWS users which is priced on the volume of media transcoded by minute and the media's resolution. The service is scalable and anticipates transcoding of very large files or high volumes of files.
$0
per minute
Google Compute Engine
Score 8.3 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.
$0.01
Hour
Pricing
Amazon Elastic TranscoderGoogle Compute Engine
Editions & Modules
Audio Only
$0.0045
per minute
Less than 720p
$0.015
per minute
720p and above
$0.03
per minute
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
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic TranscoderGoogle Compute Engine
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAmazon Elastic Transcoder offers a monthly free usage tier. The free tier consists of: 20 minutes of free audio-only output per month, 20 minutes of free SD output per month and 10 minutes of free HD output per month. Once you exceed the number of minutes in this free usage tier, you will be charged at the prevailing rates.Prices 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.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic TranscoderGoogle Compute Engine
Features
Amazon Elastic TranscoderGoogle Compute Engine
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
9.2
Ratings
13% above category average
Google Compute Engine
7.3
Ratings
10% below category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime10.00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Dynamic scaling10.00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.50 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates9.00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Monitoring tools9.50 Ratings3.00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images8.00 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Operating system support9.00 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Security controls8.00 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Automation9.50 Ratings7.90 Ratings
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Amazon Elastic TranscoderGoogle Compute Engine
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Score 8.7 out of 10
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Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
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Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 9.5 out of 10
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User Ratings
Amazon Elastic TranscoderGoogle Compute Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic TranscoderGoogle Compute Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
If your entire stack is in AWS. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is easier to integrate into your workflow. As input and output files can be in S3. You can get notifications when your job is complete. If you want real-time transcoding it is not possible with this service.
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It is excellent if you have any workloads that need raw computing or plan to have any state-full services running in your environment like DBs (for which you don't want to use Managed services), cache, etc. It also gives you complete control over which versions of software, OS, etc., you need, and thus, you can build anything and deploy it on GCE.
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Pros
  • converting and playing audio and video files on the go
  • cloud capability
  • speed and reliability
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  • A simple web-based interface that is a breeze to train new engineers to use. Our experienced engineers never have trouble finding or doing anything on GCE.
  • Sustained use and Committed use discounts mean we get top-tier VMs for an incredibly competitive price.
  • Wonderful identity and access management that gives us peace-of-mind when granting access to machines to contractors and other 3rd parties.
  • Fast VMs, lastest in hardware, and enough RAM to power even the hungriest of our services.
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Cons
  • Cannot transcode videos in real time
  • The quality of transcoded videos is average. There are other services that provide better quality output.
  • Slow AWS support
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  • The L7 load balancer can be difficult to get set up. It's limited in its functionality, especially with the container engine.
  • It's hard to find certain objects on the web console. Often times the things I need to get to are buried in advanced menus.
  • Google's decision to only support MySQL on their relational DB service means that I have to manage Postgres instances in Compute on my own, managing everything from storage to backups.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
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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Usability
No answers on this topic
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.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
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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Performance
No answers on this topic
The raw computer power is excellent; our applications feel snappy, pages load almos instantly for our customers and so on. The primary reason it is not a perfect 10 is that the native tools for monitoring individual VM performance can be complex, making it challenging to easily diagnose specific resource bottlenecks without significant configuration
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Support Rating
Support for Amazon Elastic Transcoder is the same as any other service within AWS. If you are familiar with AWS, it is easy to start using Elastic Transcoder
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  • 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.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon Elastic Transcoder is in a league of its own when compared to other alternatives in the market. The most noticeable competitor would be either Microsoft or Adobe or Google. When I had a chance to compare Azure products and Amazon products, the difference is obvious and the experience provided by both the products are very different in terms of user experience and interaction with the application. The cost and availability also were taken into consideration when choosing between the two shortlisted choices. So we went with Amazon's product as it is widely used and has support and maintenance which is basically better than the competition.
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When configuring Amazon ECS, it is a bit confusing as you are not able to find the actual issue. You need to enable Additional AppInsights to get detailed level info, which is not a concern when configuring on the Instance Level. Moreover, Azure VM does not provide an in-browser option; instead, it is Azure Bastion, but for that, you have to enable a dedicated subnet, which is a bit unnecessary.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
It works really well with other Google Cloud services, making it easy to build scalable solutions across different teams and locations.
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Return on Investment
  • Amazon Elastic Transcoder is faster and costs less than most competitors
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  • Scalability means flexibility and less upfront costs
  • Can become expensive when hard set compute requirements are clear, but things like Spot VMs can help here too, or just having your own infrastructure and scaling up with Google. This is for more advanced cases though
  • Ramp up time is long, but after that it is quick to do many things and ROI is awesome
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.