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AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

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
65
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Fargate
Ranking in Compute Service
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 6.3%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Fargate is 15.3%, down from 16.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

KatlegoMabila - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers customization and flexibility with great support
Scalability depends on whether the client wants to scale up or scale down. It decreases resources based on demand. The great aspect of scalability is the flexibility to allow business success to optimize resource solutions and cost efficiency. Another crucial aspect of scalability is auto-scaling. When you have the opportunity to auto-scale, it can't always be available for everything. If you have chosen to integrate with auto-scaling, it's marvellous and doesn't require additional effort. Auto-scaling gives you the edge by using the capacity you have efficiently, scaling up or down as needed. These flexibilities within the EC2 feature instances of AWS play a crucial role in helping me utilize AWS EC2 Intelligent efficiently.
Subrata Mukherjee - PeerSpot reviewer
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…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The scalability of Amazon EC2 is good. However, the stability can depend on what service I am using."
"We find it easy to scale."
"The product helps us with scalability. We also need not have data centers."
"I like the AMI-related features. A very good feature of this solution is the customizable AMI. It is a very good feature provided by Amazon. The encryption technologies are also very good. We are using KMS, etc."
"What we have found most valuable is that we have not lost stability in the program."
"EC2 instances on AWS allow users to run virtual servers based on the CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity."
"EC2 has the typical advantages of using the cloud. It's easy to provision and set up."
"The amount of bandwidth has been most valuable."
"AWS Fargate has many valuable services. It does the job with minimal trouble. It's very observable. You can see what's going on and you have logs. You have everything. You can troubleshoot it. It's affordable and it's flexible."
"Fargate is beneficial for hosting our solutions and providing workflow management, creating legal documents, and delivering business intelligence."
"Fargate itself is a stable product. We are quite satisfied with its performance."
"It allows for focusing on applications instead of managing infrastructure."
"AWS Fargate is an easy-to-use tool to simplify setup. You only pay for the resources you use. If you need to quickly create, delete, or scale applications without managing resources like EC2 instances, Fargate is the best service to use."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of AWS Fargate is its ease of use."
"Fargate's integration with other AWS services is really good."
 

Cons

"They should fix the key pair name functionality and provide the ability to assign multiple key pair names to an EC2 instance. It is a key pair feature, and it provides you the ability to actually log into the server. It is basically like a password. In terms of new features, it should have the ability to increase and decrease the instance size based on certain times of the day. We should be able to do this without turning off the EC2 instance. Currently, you have to turn it off and then turn it back on. It should also have HTTPS or SSL integration."
"One of the challenges is the AMI upgrades."
"An area needing improvement is the time limitations when accessing EC2 instances."
"If the solution was cheaper, if the price was less, it would be better."
"Regional acceleration could improve. If I am hosting a website and I want the experience to be faster they should have this feature to allow for increased speeds."
"The price could be better, and it could be more affordable. Because I run my own servers, the prices are quite high."
"I would like to see improvement in the information available up-front for users around tailoring the package to their actual requirements. At present it can take time to work with the on demand instance until you are used to what features are right for the user."
"I would like to see more variety in the operating system images used to create test environments in EC2. There should be more versions and releases. Sometimes, you want to test an update from an old release to a higher version, but you can’t do that with the new images available. You have to use your own."
"The main area for improvement is the cost, which could be lowered to be more competitive with other major cloud providers."
"There are features that could be added or enhanced."
"I would like to see the older dashboard instead of the newer version. I don't like the new dashboard."
"Sometimes, Fargate can be really hard to configure."
"Service computing is not as straightforward compared to other computing services. It requires more effort to use effectively."
"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."
"As I have not worked with Fargate extensively, I do not have any specific improvements."
"AWS Fargate needs improvement in terms of setup complexity."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is reasonable, but there is definitely an opportunity to lower it in instances which are of a higher configuration, because they have been typically used for the long term."
"When we did the deployment of Amazon EC2 we found it to be less expensive than other solutions."
"It's expensive, and it could be cheaper."
"You pay as you use it."
"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."
"I use the free tier, although I have paid for some services that are not free. The overall cost of this solution depends on the services you use."
"We are using a pay-as-you-go model."
"For our usage, the cost is approximately $20,000 to $23,000 per month."
"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."
"I rate the price of AWS Fargate a four out of five."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Retailer
6%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2?
I'm going to mention again that there is quite a bit of complexity within the pricing of EC2 instances. I'm just going to give it six out of ten since there are various standards, upfront and commi...
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?
There is not much to be improved or enhanced. One of the things that need to be looked into is the complex pricing, which is rather intense. Sometimes, clients don't understand the structures. Thes...
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...
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...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2 and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.