Amazon AWS vs Amazon Lightsail comparison

Amazon AWS and Amazon Lightsail are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Amazon AWS is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1, while Amazon Lightsail is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.9. Amazon AWS holds a 13.0% mindshare in PSP, compared to Amazon Lightsail’s 2.0% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Amazon AWS users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Amazon Lightsail users who would recommend it.

Amazon AWS

Read 256 Amazon AWS reviews

17,948 Views
8,615 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Amazon Lightsail

Read 13 Amazon Lightsail reviews

1,022 Views
1,022 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon AWS

Amazon Lightsail

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Amazon AWS and Amazon Lightsail compete in the cloud hosting and computing services category. AWS appears to have an upper hand due to its extensive features and flexibility aimed at both small and large-scale operations.

Features: Amazon AWS is equipped with scalable storage solutions, flexible computing power, and a comprehensive security suite suitable for diverse operating systems and relational databases. It offers dynamic pricing with extensive technical support. Amazon Lightsail is best for simple applications offering ease of setup and a budget-friendly pricing structure, making it especially appealing for startups and smaller projects.

Room for Improvement: AWS users consistently call for simplified cost structures and enhanced technical support. The complexity of pricing and high data transfer costs could deter startups seeking predictable expenses. Amazon Lightsail, on the other hand, needs enhancements in documentation and support to enable easier navigation and better utilization of its platform features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS provides extensive deployment options for public, private, and hybrid cloud configurations, receiving praise for its technical support, although users seek quicker response times. Amazon Lightsail excels with its simple public cloud deployment, highlighted for being user-friendly and having a straightforward setup process, receiving positive reviews for customer support.

Pricing and ROI: AWS's pay-as-you-go model offers flexibility but can become costly with increased usage, yet it remains cost-efficient for large-scale operations. Amazon Lightsail offers flat-rate pricing starting at five dollars, making it a cost-effective choice for startups. Both platforms deliver positive ROI, with AWS’s flexibility aiding long-term value, while Lightsail emphasizes affordability and simplicity.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon AWS vs. Amazon Lightsail Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS vs. Amazon Lightsail

September 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon AWS

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

256

Ranking in other categories

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)

Amazon Lightsail

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

8th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.0%, down from 16.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Lightsail is 2.0%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon AWS	13.0%
Amazon Lightsail	2.0%
Other	85.0%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

HarishMahanta

Sr PeopleSoft Consultant at People Tech

Reliable cloud service enhances ERP management with advanced security features

I use Amazon AWS for ERP implementation. My responsibility is to integrate our application into the AWS cloud and provide AI solutions to the infrastructure AWS is stable and has provided a reliable infrastructure for my organization. AWS offers add-on services such as security and automated…

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VictorAugusto De Souza E Silva

Cloud Engineer at Leek Solucoes

Has simplified website migration and reduced hosting costs significantly

Amazon Lightsail should have some kind of scale service. To be more clear, if I need to scale up my instance or VPS, I need to create a snapshot and create a new instance from this snapshot with more resources, such as CPU, RAM, or disk. It would be beneficial to have a welcome instance where we can just set the instance, go there to edit and select a greater instance from large to x-large or 2x-large. I do not see the need to scale down, but it would be good too. When we are on an x-large for testing purposes and need to do a rollback to a large one, we need to scale down. We do not have this capability on Amazon Lightsail.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"They integrate well with various other solutions."

"I am happy with the dashboard."

"Some of the introduced one-year and three-year reservations helped us reduce costs early on. With time, we learned how to minimize our at REST capacity, allowing us to scale up and scale down in near seconds."

"The AWS feature that I most enjoy is Lambda functions. I primarily use serverless components because they allow you to process things without having to compromise on resources like when running EC2 instances or virtual machines. With minimal effort, you can scale up an unlimited number of processes, even concurrently, to process things. I frequently work with web APIs, so I use Lambda a lot in this area."

"The most valuable features of Amazon AWS are the high level of capabilities, cloud-native environment, developer-friendly, intuitive interface, and automation. The solution overall is easy to learn from the resources available."

"It's quite stable and scalable. The price is good as well."

"This solution offers a very detailed dashboard that has some metrics, such as performance and budget."

"I am impressed with the solution's EC2 EKS."

More Amazon AWS pros

"One of the product's most valuable features is its fixed pricing, which makes it ideal for small projects and websites that do not require scaling."

"The intuitive management console of Amazon Lightsail is very good because it is simple; with just a few clicks, I can set a blog online, a WordPress blog online, a new e-commerce online, or just a new application with NodeJS."

"In Lightsail, they simplified to do it in as few clicks as possible. So, around ten clicks, I have a virtual machine deployed."

"Implementations are completed with a few clicks, allowing efficient transitions to other development stages, and setup is easy whether for online support or basic business requirements."

"I find Lightsail particularly valuable for hosting WordPress as it is easier to set up than a bare metal server, which requires extensive configuration and package installations."

"Amazon Lightsail is a virtual instance that is a service of Amazon AWS, designed to store data securely and provide applications through the cloud at an affordable cost to the SME sector."

"We use Amazon Lightsail for hosting security components in-house and AI modules."

"The initial setup is pretty easy."

More Amazon Lightsail pros

Cons

"Price can always be cheaper."

"We have had several issues with the products and services but as of now, there are no good alternatives."

"The problem with AWS is you have to keep up with the technology. If you don't stay up to date with the technology and its latest changes then you won't know what to use in your infrastructure."

"The interface needs a bit of work. It's not intuitive."

"I have been using Amazon AWS for approximately one year."

"Could be more user friendly and include additional applications."

"I would appreciate more direct support from AWS."

"Amazon needs to develop better tools for troubleshooting network traffic, application insights, performance, and even some aspects of integration mapping. I'm hoping AWS implements something like Azure's Network Watcher and a log analytics solution where a can pull logs from various services and present them in a single dashboard. I want to summarize the performance and usage of every service and application."

More Amazon AWS cons

"Amazon Lightsail should have some kind of scale service. To be more clear, if I need to scale up my instance or VPS, I need to create a snapshot and create a new instance from this snapshot with more resources, such as CPU, RAM, or disk."

"Based on my limited exploration of Amazon Lightsail so far, I would like to see improvements in the console, particularly in user behavior and some cost-related aspects."

"The solution could be smoother than it is."

"The product's network features need enhancement."

"Backward compatibility and the flexibility to choose software versions while installing would be improvements."

"The main area for improvement in Lightsail is the difficulty in scaling down resources."

"To improve, I feel the disk management is too basic. I can't easily partition the disk for the operating system. I have to follow the main configuration that is already set up in the template. To partition the disk, I would need to deploy the operating system first and then make changes, but it's not an ideal method. I would recommend improving the disk management."

"Amazon Lightsail needs more security in the networking because hackers can attack in application layers three and four."

More Amazon Lightsail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is one of the best in the segment."

"The pricing of AWS was attractive for us, so that's something that's okay at least for this transaction-based system. However, we still have some concerns about more data-driven applications or those that involve a lot of heavy uploading and downloading. So our whole data warehouse is still something that would not go into the cloud because of the pricing model."

"As a startup business, it's very well priced, but if a number of transactions go up, clients have voiced that they are in a situation and feel a type of pressure and desire to move out of AWS."

"The prices are somewhat on the higher side. It would help if they can bring it down, especially for the sporting segment and for on-demand instances."

"With Amazon AWS, you pay as you go."

"It's not very pricey, but it could be cheaper."

"There are many variables involved in pricing service in AWS and overall the pricing is a bit on the higher side."

"It could be cheaper, and Amazon could also be more transparent with its pricing. I would first expect any product vendor to give me the utmost transparency on pricing information. There shouldn't be any hidden costs. Their service offerings have a bit of segmentation, and they focus more on SMBs. They brought them onto the cloud and encouraged them to use solutions on the cloud. But strategically, they should probably improve that and offer some credits."

More Amazon AWS pricing and cost advice

"The prices are better than EC2 machines, for instance, because they are simplified management, but it works well, and I am able to run everything that I need on it."

"The affordability of starting at five dollars makes it an attractive option for startups and medium-sized companies, aligning with budget considerations while offering essential cloud services."

"It's very cheap."

"Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month."

"A few months ago, Lightsail's pricing increased, likely due to the addition of the new VPC feature."

"Amazon Lightsail is a bit cheaper than Amazon EC2."

"The services that it provides are good for the price."

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Comparison Review

it_user8586

Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Aug 14, 2013

Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison

Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

University

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

University

11%

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	131
Midsize Enterprise	47
Large Enterprise	112

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?

Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...

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How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?

How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...

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Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure

We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...

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What do you like most about Amazon Lightsail?

In Lightsail, they simplified to do it in as few clicks as possible. So, around ten clicks, I have a virtual machine deployed.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Lightsail?

Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month. This cost may increase with additional features like a static IP.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Lightsail?

Amazon Lightsail needs more security in the networking because hackers can attack in application layers three and four. The networking layer is basically the hacker's target to break the network, s...

See all answers

Comparisons

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Amazon AWS

Compared 19% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS

Compared 10% of the time

Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS

Compared 9% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Amazon AWS

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Amazon AWS

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon AWS Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 32% of the time

Google Cloud vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 30% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 9% of the time

Heroku vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 8% of the time

AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 7% of the time

More Amazon Lightsail Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS

September 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Amazon Lightsail

September 2025

Download Amazon Lightsail product report

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS

No data available

Overview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an adopted cloud platform that offers more than 200 fully featured services from data centers located across the globe. This is a scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that is utilized by thousands of businesses of different sizes around the world. The product offers a wide variety of solutions for its customers, which allows them to launch applications regardless of their industry.

The most common use cases for AWS are:

Application hosting: Clients can take advantage of on-demand infrastructure to power their applications. The product supports multiple types of apps, varying from hosted internal applications to software as a service (SaaS) offerings.
Websites: With AWS, clients can satisfy their web hosting needs through a scalable platform for their websites.
Backup and storage: AWS offers reliable data storage services, which allow clients to store their data and build dependable backups for all of their valuable information.
Enterprise IT: The product allows companies to host internal- or external-facing IT applications in a highly secure environment.
Content delivery: Users who want to distribute content to end users worldwide can do so quickly and easily through the high data transfer speeds of this solution.
Databases: AWS offers a variety of database solutions, which include hosted enterprise database software as well as non-relational database solutions.

Amazon AWS supports a global cloud infrastructure with AWS Region and Availability Zone models, which contribute to the high availability of enterprise applications running on the solution. Amazon AWS has an extensive array of products that serve different purposes, including:

Analytics
Application integration
Blockchain
Business applications
Cloud financial management
Compute
Contact center
Containers
Database
Developer tools
End-user computing
Front-end web and mobile
Games
Internet of Things (IoT)
Machine learning
Management and governance
Quantum technologies
Robotics
Satellite
Security, identity and compliance, and others

The products and services that Amazon AWS delivers to these sectors provide a large computing capacity which is quicker and cheaper compared to building a physical server farm. Among the most popular services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2," and Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as "S3."

Amazon AWS Features

The wide array of products that Amazon AWS offers consist of different functions that utilize cloud computing across different sectors. The features of this solution can be categorized in the following ways:

Data and relationship management: With Amazon AWS, companies can manage multiple hierarchies of directory data, they can define attributes for objects and relationships, set custom inheritance rules for directories, and create multiple schemas.
Schema management: This group of features allows users to extend their directory schema according to their needs. They can extend it through multiple applications that share a single directory while avoiding duplication of data.
Fully managed infrastructure: This feature decreases time and costs for administrative tasks for companies regarding scaling infrastructure and managing servers.
Searching feature: The Cloud Directory feature of AWS offers built-in search capabilities which can cover sets of highly connected data and eliminate the need of creating nested queries.
Built-in data encryption: Users can benefit from high levels of protection of their data with AWS's products. The data in the cloud is automatically encrypted at rest and in transit through 256-bit encryption keys, managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
Object policies: This feature allows Amazon AWS users to organize objects in different hierarchies by providing a framework for applications to evaluate policy assignments.

Amazon AWS Benefits

This product delivers various benefits across all industries that utilize its services. The greatest advantages of using Amazon AWS include:

High product functionality is supported by machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, data lakes, and analytics.
The solution has a high level of security, which is backed by a deep set ofmore than 100 cloud security tools.
Amazon AWS has an easy-to-use interface that makes it possible for clients to host applications.
The product is very flexible in terms of which operating system, programming language, web app platform, and database clients can use.
AWS is a scalable and highly secure global computing infrastructure, supported by the reliability of Amazon.com.
Clients can utilize the Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing tools to personally scale up or down applications, depending on their demand.
Users can choose from an array of payment options, including paying for only the services they need, as well as a free trial to select the ones most useful for them.

Reviews from Real Users

Greg G., a chief executive officer at a tech services company, ranks Amazon AWS highly, as he states that the solution is flexible, scales well, and offers good stability.

A technology manager technology at a computer software company values Amazon AWS because it is extremely cost-efficient, easy to upgrade and expand storage with greatly improved interfaces.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Lightsail is ideal for simpler workloads, quick deployments, and getting started on AWS. It’s designed to help you start small, and then scale as you grow.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS vs. Amazon Lightsail

September 2025

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