AWS Lambda vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling comparison

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS Lambda are both solutions in the Compute Service category. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is ranked #4 with an average rating of 9.1, while AWS Lambda is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling holds a 7.7% mindshare in CS, compared to AWS Lambda’s 13.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of AWS Lambda users who would recommend it.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Read 51 Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling reviews

1,085 Views
1,085 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

AWS Lambda

Read 90 AWS Lambda reviews

2,034 Views
1,831 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

AWS Lambda

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

AWS Lambda and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling are leading solutions for application scaling in AWS. AWS Lambda generally takes the lead due to its serverless architecture, cost efficiency, and ease of use, particularly for intermittent workloads.

Features: AWS Lambda provides serverless computing, seamless AWS service integration, and a pay-as-you-go model delivering cost-effective, rapid deployments. It supports multiple programming languages, automatic scaling, and reduces infrastructure management complexity. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling lets users manage multiple instances efficiently, scales based on defined policies, and ensures high availability and full control over server configurations.

Room for Improvement: AWS Lambda could expand its language support and improve cold start times and execution limits. More robust integration with external services and enhanced monitoring could benefit users. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling could improve instance pricing transparency and third-party integration, with better documentation for diverse operational needs.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS Lambda offers straightforward deployment across environments due to its serverless nature and has responsive support with standard and personalized services. Some users note the high responsiveness of its enterprise services, but criticize the lack of immediate tech support without premium plans. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is praised for reliable customer service and comprehensive documentation, though requests for more responsive technical assistance persist.

Pricing and ROI: AWS Lambda's pay-as-you-go model leads to cost savings for sporadic workloads, offering strong ROI as it charges based on execution time. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling provides predictable pricing, based on compute resources used, valued for consistent performance and control. Its pricing aligns more closely with traditional hosting, balancing cost benefits with detailed configuration control.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

December 2025

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Helped 879,768 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score

5.6

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers substantial ROI, over 50% for high loads, outperforming GCP, with cost-effective instance deployment.

Sentiment score

7.1

AWS Lambda offers cost savings and high ROI through its pay-as-you-go model, auto-scaling, and serverless infrastructure.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

7.3

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling support is highly rated for responsiveness and effectiveness, despite challenges with third-party integrations.

Sentiment score

6.9

AWS Lambda support is efficient and knowledgeable, but some users find cost a barrier for higher service levels.

They have very good support.

IbrahimSow

Cloud Architect Consultant at T-Systems International

I would rate the technical support of AWS a nine, as their team resolves issues effectively and meets our expectations.

SAURAB K GANGURDE

Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling report

When we raise a ticket or have an issue, the support team is responsive.

Rajaraman Ramachandran

Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

7.4

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling efficiently adapts to demand changes, supporting scalability with features like load balancing and server automation.

Sentiment score

7.8

AWS Lambda efficiently scales with demand, offering seamless serverless operations, integration with AWS services, but may become costly.

The scaling feature appears to be embedded in the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling price.

André Da Silva Santos

Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling report

I would rate how scalable AWS Lambda is a nine on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 would be the lowest and 10 would be the highest level of scalability.

reviewer2706945

Assistant Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Whenever the number of requests increases, the system automatically scales up to the target we have set and scales down once the requests are resolved.

Rajaraman Ramachandran

Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.1

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is praised for its stability, resilience, and effective performance, with up to 99% reported uptime.

Sentiment score

8.1

AWS Lambda is highly stable, reliable, and integrates well, though limited by timeout constraints, rated 8-9 for stability.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling should automatically scale out systems during high demand and scale in new instances when demand decreases.

Karthikeyan Ganesan

Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group

The stability of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling rates a 10.

André Da Silva Santos

Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Room For Improvement

Enhancements needed in scalability, customization, integration, documentation, UI, pricing, predictive scaling, security, and vertical scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.

AWS Lambda users desire improved integration, user-friendliness, language support, execution speed, monitoring, setup, customization, and computational capabilities.

Amazon should provide more detailed training materials for people who are just starting to work with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.

Manoday Ahire

Cloud Architect at Acmegrade

Integration with LLM would be beneficial as many services are implementing this functionality.

André Da Silva Santos

Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

In enterprise environments such as healthcare or banking with numerous instances running different applications, customizable policies allow appropriate scaling.

Karthikeyan Ganesan

Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling report

AWS Lambda needs to improve cold start time.

Rajaraman Ramachandran

Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers flexible pricing based on usage, with careful management needed to control potential costs.

AWS Lambda offers cost-effective, pay-per-use pricing, ideal for low-traffic workloads, with potential cost escalation if unmonitored.

It operates on a pay-as-you-go model, meaning if a machine is used for only an hour, the pricing will be calculated for that hour only, not the entire month.

Manoday Ahire

Cloud Architect at Acmegrade

In some projects, incorrect decisions were made by not consulting them first, resulting in higher setup and maintenance costs.

Karthikeyan Ganesan

Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling ensures efficient demand scaling, cost-effectiveness, and seamless integration with CloudWatch for optimal resource management.

AWS Lambda provides serverless architecture, automatic scaling, seamless integrations, cost efficiency, and simplified deployment for efficient application development.

The service offers 99.9999% availability.

André Da Silva Santos

Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The best feature I appreciate about Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is its health check functionality; when a server becomes unreachable or enters an unhealthy state, it automatically triggers an alert, and the load balancer responds by spinning up a new server, ensuring that traffic is distributed effectively.

SAURAB K GANGURDE

Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators

This pre-configuration makes on-demand scaling refined, and the configuration includes automatic traffic distribution because when the first system is overloaded, new incoming traffic is redirected to the newly created systems.

Karthikeyan Ganesan

Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling report

Automatic scaling is a valuable feature. When the number of requests increases, the system automatically scales up to the target we have set and scales down once the requests are resolved.

Rajaraman Ramachandran

Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives

For more quotes and insights, download the AWS Lambda report

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Ranking in Compute Service

4th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

AWS Lambda

Ranking in Compute Service

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is 7.7%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Lambda is 13.8%, down from 20.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Compute Service Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
AWS Lambda	13.8%
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling	7.7%
Other	78.5%

Compute Service

Featured Reviews

Karthikeyan Ganesan

Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group

Offers automatic scaling features but can improve user interface and setup guidance

Customizable policies help us determine how scaling should occur. In enterprise environments such as healthcare or banking with numerous instances running different applications, customizable policies allow appropriate scaling. For critical servers, we can set up a higher number of new instances to scale out to prevent downtime. For less critical servers that perform simple tasks such as file copying, we can use customizable policies to scale out minimal instances to avoid unnecessary expenses or cloud costs. Regarding integration, there are some disadvantages in AWS where certain availability zones or regions experience glitches. This can cause production halts because of problems on Amazon's side. In particular regions, when integrating Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling or other services, there might be delays in creating new Amazon EC2 instances, sometimes becoming inefficient.

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Rajaraman Ramachandran

Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives

Has enabled us to manage compute resources efficiently while supporting multiple languages

AWS Lambda needs to improve cold start time. Some AWS Lambda functions require a cold start, and if you need AWS Lambda to provide quick responses, you need some of the AWS Lambdas to be always on, which is risky. We need AWS Lambda's cold start time to be reduced so that we can use it much faster than now. We need a better way to handle the cold start. We should be able to start AWS Lambda much before in a predictable way instead of just calling and then having it start.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

University

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	27

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	35
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	43

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?

The solution removes the need for hardware. We can easily create servers or machines. Just by clicking or specifying our requirements, like memory size or disk space, it's set up for us. The tool e...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?

Regarding licensing and setup costs, we always study in detail using lower environments such as User Acceptance Testing or sandbox environments. Before creation, we consult AWS official documentati...

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What needs improvement with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?

I don't work with predictive scaling. I know this feature, but I have never worked with it. For me, availability is something different. If you want to set up your application to be highly availabl...

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Which is better, AWS Lambda or Batch?

AWS Lambda is a serverless solution. It doesn’t require any infrastructure, which allows for cost savings. There is no setup process to deal with, as the entire solution is in the cloud. If you use...

See all answers

What do you like most about AWS Lambda?

The tool scales automatically based on the number of incoming requests.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lambda?

The pricing of AWS Lambda is reasonable. It's beneficial and cost-effective for users regardless of the number of instances used.

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Compared 46% of the time

Zadara vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Compared 12% of the time

AWS Batch vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Compared 11% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Compared 9% of the time

Apache NiFi vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Compared 7% of the time

More Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Competitors

Apache NiFi vs AWS Lambda

Compared 19% of the time

AWS Batch vs AWS Lambda

Compared 19% of the time

Apache Spark vs AWS Lambda

Compared 18% of the time

Amazon EC2 vs AWS Lambda

Compared 13% of the time

Spot vs AWS Lambda

Compared 5% of the time

More AWS Lambda Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

January 2026

Download Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda

January 2026

Download AWS Lambda product report

Also Known As

AWS RAM

No data available

Overview

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to conditions you define. ... Dynamic scaling responds to changing demand and predictive scaling automatically schedules the right number of EC2 instances based on predicted demand.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda executes your code only when needed and scales automatically, from a few requests per day to thousands per second. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With AWS Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. AWS Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all of the administration of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code monitoring and logging. All you need to do is supply your code in one of the languages that AWS Lambda supports (currently Node.js, Java, C# and Python).

You can use AWS Lambda to run your code in response to events, such as changes to data in an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon DynamoDB table; to run your code in response to HTTP requests using Amazon API Gateway; or invoke your code using API calls made using AWS SDKs. With these capabilities, you can use Lambda to easily build data processing triggers for AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB process streaming data stored in Amazon Kinesis, or create your own back end that operates at AWS scale, performance, and security.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Netflix

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

December 2025

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