AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 comparison

Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate are both solutions in the Compute Service category. Amazon EC2 is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.8, while AWS Fargate is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.4. Amazon EC2 holds a 6.4% mindshare in CS, compared to AWS Fargate’s 15.7% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon EC2 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of AWS Fargate users who would recommend it.

Amazon EC2

Read 65 Amazon EC2 reviews

1,466 Views
1,060 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

AWS Fargate

Read 15 AWS Fargate reviews

4,273 Views
2,555 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon EC2

AWS Fargate

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate compete in the cloud solutions category. AWS Fargate seems to have the upper hand due to its serverless architecture offering simplicity and ease of use, whereas Amazon EC2 is more complex but flexible.

Features: Amazon EC2 offers high performance, versatility, and flexibility, allowing for quick instance creation and efficient resource scaling. It supports diverse operating systems and is highly customizable, which is beneficial for larger deployments. AWS Fargate provides a serverless architecture, allowing for deployment without server management, automatic scaling, and seamless integration with other AWS services, making it ideal for applications with variable workloads.

Room for Improvement: Amazon EC2 faces areas of improvement in terms of complexity, cost management, and integration, as the service can become expensive and challenging to deploy effectively. AWS Fargate could simplify configuration and cost complexity, despite its ease of container management. Both services would benefit from enhanced documentation and support to assist users in overcoming common challenges.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon EC2 is widely deployed in public and hybrid clouds, offering flexibility but sometimes requiring technical support, which varies in responsiveness. AWS Fargate benefits from simple container deployment in public clouds but faces criticisms about technical support consistency. AWS provides comprehensive documentation, though assistance quality can vary depending on the solutions architect assigned.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon EC2 operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which can be cost-efficient if managed well but can lead to unexpected expenses due to its complexity. It is considered more expensive compared to on-prem solutions but can provide substantial ROI through reduced infrastructure and staffing costs. AWS Fargate is generally cost-effective for its serverless advantages but might be costlier for startups with limited budgets. Both solutions offer potential cost savings if used strategically, with EC2 providing significant flexibility and Fargate offering a more managed service approach.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2 Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2

January 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 EC2

Ranking in Compute Service

5th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

AWS Fargate

Ranking in Compute Service

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 6.4%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Fargate is 15.7%, down from 15.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Compute Service

Featured Reviews

Prapoj Chipat

Assistant Director at True Corp. PCL.

You only pay for what you use, and you can scale up or scale down without any issues; has good stability and connectivity

My company uses AWS products, including cloud services. Amazon EC2 is being used within the company as well. My company has about ten thousand employees that use Amazon EC2 because everybody connects to the internet. For example, employees use the mail service from the console and Outlook service on the cloud. Everyone uses the internet within the company, so that means Amazon EC2 is being used as well, especially in this COVID situation. Right now, employees use more applications such as streaming and video services which require more connectivity and cloud capacity, so there's a plan to increase usage for Amazon EC2. In terms of how much staff is required for the deployment and maintenance of Amazon EC2, I'm not quite sure how much technical staff my company has because some of the technical staff was outsourced. There's no permanent IT staff in the office. I'm recommending Amazon EC2 to other people because it's a critical product that has more reliability. It has good quality, and it also has many features, so if the features support your use cases, then Amazon EC2 would be a good product for you. My rating for Amazon EC2 is nine out of ten.

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Subrata Mukherjee

Senior Technical Architect; Head of Platform at Blenheim Chalcot IT Services India

Boost demand response with cost-efficient serverless architecture

We are a venture builder company, and if we select AWS for our product. Our design is based on a serverless architecture model. ECS Fargate is the most convenient way in terms of scalability, integration, and cost control Thanks to the serverless model and easy integration features, a few…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I can quickly create a VM instance with just one click."

"The solution offers good access policies."

"The Key Management Service (KMS) feature is very helpful for security. It encrypts the data that is being saved. Cloud storage is also very helpful, and it could be AWS S3, which a lot of people use."

"EC2 is flexible when we need to increase its resources (memory, boosting, and storage) based on our usage. That is the power of EC2."

"One of the most valuable features of EC2 is its accessibility; I can easily access it through various tools like GIT and use it on mobile devices."

"The product is very mature and organized."

"We don't have to worry about scalability issues or maintenance or security. It's all taken care of."

"The tool's performance, reliability, security and flexibility are good. We can use it remotely. The autoscaling functionality of EC2 is quite good. I appreciate the DevOps suite for tracking development tasks. This functionality is important for pure software development."

More Amazon EC2 pros

"The most valuable feature of AWS Fargate is its ability to run on demand without the constant run time of basic resources."

"The most valuable feature of Fargate is that it's self-managed. You don't have to configure your own clusters or deploy any Kubernetes clusters. This simplifies the initial deployment and scaling process."

"I like their containerization service. You can use Docker or something similar and deploy quickly without the know-how related to, for example, Kubernetes. If you use AKS or Kubernetes, then you have to have the know-how. But for Fargate, you don't need to have the know-how there. You just deploy the container or the image, and then you have the container, and you can use it as AWS takes care of the rest. This makes it easier for those getting started or if you don't have a strong DevOps team inside your organization."

"Fargate itself is a stable product. We are quite satisfied with its performance."

"By using a server's compute resources, one can observe the resource metrics. With AWS, one can determine when servers will be used based on CloudWatch results. For example, CloudWatch informs the application and service platform when the hit ratio has reached the threshold value."

"We appreciate the simple use of containers within this solution, it makes managing the containers quick and easy."

"Fargate's integration with other AWS services is really good."

"It allows for focusing on applications instead of managing infrastructure."

More AWS Fargate pros

Cons

"The scalability could improve."

"Built-in and/or integration with other services to proactively identify potential failures before they occur."

"The process of detaching EC2 instances to avoid billing could be less complex."

"The availability and response time of the free technical support can be improved."

"In terms of improvement, they could build some client-side desktop tools that provide easier connectivity to Amazon."

"The price could be better, and it could be more affordable. Because I run my own servers, the prices are quite high."

"One of the challenges is the AMI upgrades."

"EC2 could be improved with easier migration."

More Amazon EC2 cons

"I would like to see enhanced faster application scaling and better integration with the elastic file system to unify storage volumes and improve the launch time of instances."

"If there are any options to manage containers, that would be good. That relates more to the cost point. For example, over the next three months, I'll be making a comparison between solutions like CAST AI and other software-as-a-service platforms that offer Kubernetes management with an emphasis on cost reduction."

"I heard from my team that it's not easy to predict the cost. That is the only issue we have with AWS Fargate, but I think that's acceptable. AWS Fargate isn't user-friendly. Anything related to Software as a Service or microservice architecture is not easy to implement. You're required to have DevOps from your side to implement the solution. AWS Fargate is just a temporary solution for us. When we grow to a certain level, we may use AKS for better control."

"The main area for improvement is the cost, which could be lowered to be more competitive with other major cloud providers."

"We would like to see some improvement in the process documents that are provided with this product, particularly for auto-scaling and other configuration tools that are a bit complicated."

"We faced challenges in vertically scaling our workload."

"AWS Fargate could improve the privileged mode containers. We had some problems and they were not able to run."

"Challenges include higher costs for smaller clients, limited control over underlying infrastructure customization, and potential latencies during task startup."

More AWS Fargate cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not an expensive solution."

"We are using a pay-as-you-go model."

"The pricing of this solution is variable. There is an open-source variant that is accessible via the public cloud, and then tiers that range in price depending on the level and amount of usage that is required."

"Amazon EC2 is a very expensive solution."

"It has helped to reduce costs with infrastructure."

"The license fee for Amazon EC2 is higher than its competitors."

"When we did the deployment of Amazon EC2 we found it to be less expensive than other solutions."

"EC2 pricing is somewhat transparent, in that AWS provides pricing for all instance types. However, the number of pricing options can be confusing."

More Amazon EC2 pricing and cost advice

"I rate the price of AWS Fargate a four out of five."

"We would advise that this solution has a slightly-higher price point than others on the market. There is a free plan available for start-ups, but the free and lower range licensing models do not provide the full functionality."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EC2?

The scalability and elasticity are helpful.

See all answers

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

The pricing of EC2 can vary depending on workloads. It can be expensive for high workloads but more cost-effective for smaller applications. AWS provides various services at competitive pricing, ma...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?

An area needing improvement is the time limitations when accessing EC2 instances. When accessing the server, sometimes PeerSpot can fail, making it difficult to access multiple servers simultaneous...

See all answers

What do you like most about AWS Fargate?

The most valuable feature of Fargate is that it's self-managed. You don't have to configure your own clusters or deploy any Kubernetes clusters. This simplifies the initial deployment and scaling p...

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Fargate?

There is a tool named Compose that helps in converting the Docker Compose file into a Kubernetes file. For ECS and Fargate, AWS reads a Dockerfile and helps with conversion. However, I am uncertain...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering AWS Fargate?

I rate Fargate ten out of ten. The most significant advantage is the unified configuration for all containers deployed by ECS, allowing seamless integration with services like OpenAI or Google Gemi...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 24% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EC2

Compared 15% of the time

AWS Lambda vs Amazon EC2

Compared 10% of the time

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Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs AWS Fargate

Compared 41% of the time

Heroku vs AWS Fargate

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Compute Cloud Service vs AWS Fargate

Compared 7% of the time

Apache Spark vs AWS Fargate

Compared 6% of the time

Apache NiFi vs AWS Fargate

Compared 6% of the time

More AWS Fargate Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2

January 2025

Download Amazon EC2 product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate

January 2025

Download AWS Fargate product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2

No data available

Overview

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate them from common failure scenarios.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

A new compute engine that enables you to use containers as a fundamental compute primitive without having to manage the underlying instances. With Fargate, you don’t need to provision, configure, or scale virtual machines in your clusters to run containers. Fargate can be used with Amazon ECS today, with plans to support Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) in the future.

Fargate has flexible configuration options so you can closely match your application needs and granular, per-second billing.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2

January 2025

Free Report: AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2

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