Firms strive to grow and survive. The survival chances can be fostered by a list of business strategies, such as strategic alliances. Different types of strategic alliances exist. This study groups the typology into manufacturing and non-manufacturing alliances. Little research has been done on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), particularly Medium-Sized Enterprises (MEs), from the manufacturing industry in the least developed countries such as Tanzania in relation to the alliance typology and partnering firms’ survival chances that can be explained by an ability to accumulate resources and reduce both costs and risks. A cross-sectional survey design and multistage probability sampling technique enabled the participation of 398 CEOs from three zones of Tanzania whose options were collected through questionnaires. In the context of this paper, both the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) are applied to explain the two main alliance types and how they predict firms’ survival chances respectively. To a great extent, we find that there exists a relationship between alliance typology and both the reduction of costs and risks, as well as resource accessibility. However, we argue that partners could adopt alliance types that concurrently reduce the costs and risks; but at the same time enabling them to acquire resources if they would carefully study and establish the link between costs, risks and resources.