Great question. I hold the CompTIA Cloud Essentials and Cloud+ certifications. I also hold the AWS Cloud Practitioner and Cloud Solution Architect certifications. In my opinion the CompTIA certifications are cloud centric and completely vendor neutral.
I took the Cloud Essentials and the AWS Cloud Practitioner exams the same day and passed both. It's important to realize that CompTIA Cloud Essentials is targeted at managers and sales people who are seeking to certify their cloud industry knowledge. The Essentials certification is not a pre-requisite to Cloud+ but really a subset of that material. Comparing Essentials and Practitioner is easy. Practitioner requires that you know and can position all of the AWS cloud offerings. I found the hardest part of that exam was being able to recall all the product names. CompTIA Cloud Essentials focuses on cloud capabilities such as compute, memory, storage, virtualization, containerization, networking and security in the cloud. The capabilities and concepts covered are available in AWS, Azure, GCP, and other CSPs.
Cloud+ covers that same ground but goes deeper in that you have to be able to explain how these capabilities work and how they compare to one another. Which capability should be used where? That's vendor neutral cloud architecture. It does go further in that Cloud+ does cover cloud and Internet networking (VPCs to DNS to routing to load balancing). It also goes pretty deep in security of and in the cloud.
AWS Solution Architect Associate is similar to Cloud+ in depth but only covers a subset of how to design solutions using the AWS offerings. AWS offers Solution Architect Professional which (I'm still studying for) starts from Associate and focuses on designing more complex solutions using almost all of AWS offerings. AWS also offers a Security Specialist certification which in my opinion is almost a Security+ in the cloud type certification. It does go deeper in that you will need to demonstrate more knowledge about how to deploy permissions, firewalls, load balancers, and the like.
