AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 comparison

Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate are both solutions in the Compute Service category. Amazon EC2 is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.8, while AWS Fargate is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5. Amazon EC2 holds a 5.7% mindshare in CS, compared to AWS Fargate’s 14.7% 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

1,179 Views
773 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

AWS Fargate

Read 17 AWS Fargate reviews

3,381 Views
1,929 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon EC2

AWS Fargate

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate compete in the cloud infrastructure space, providing scalable and flexible solutions. AWS Fargate seems to have an advantage in ease of use due to its serverless architecture, requiring less management intervention compared to EC2.

Features: Amazon EC2 offers quick instance provisioning, variety in instance types, and seamless integration capabilities. It supports both Windows and Linux systems and allows custom configurations. AWS Fargate delivers simplicity with its serverless architecture, focusing on container deployment and management without the need for EC2 instances. Its integration with other AWS services enhances its capability to scale applications automatically.

Room for Improvement: Amazon EC2 could simplify customization and reduce instance startup time. Better pricing clarity and network configuration would enhance its offering. AWS Fargate needs easier setup processes and improved monitoring features. Its cost management and application scaling integrations could also use refinement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon EC2 is adaptable, supporting public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments. While it offers excellent technical support, integration support is sometimes lacking. AWS Fargate simplifies public cloud application deployments without infrastructure management. Its customer service is commendable, especially noted for prompt email assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon EC2's multifaceted pricing includes pay-as-you-go and reserved instances, but it may become expensive if not efficiently managed. AWS Fargate operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. While potentially costlier for smaller applications, it offers savings in infrastructure management, making it valuable for enterprises seeking simplified management.

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2

April 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

6th

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

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 5.7%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Fargate is 14.7%, down from 17.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Compute Service

Featured Reviews

KatlegoMabila

Senior AWS Account Manager at Silicon Overdrive

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.

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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 believe that cloud solutions are better than physical servers."

"The solution offers good access policies."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon EC2 is the virtual machines that are available."

"This is a user-friendly solution."

"An advantage of Amazon is that it offers a wide range of infrastructure services with an easy way to configure them."

"The ability to bring up servers and then do the computation and deposit means we don't have to maintain a data center. Everything is virtual and the security is also taken care of. It helps us to achieve compliance. Being a small startup with the security features that AWS provides helps us with compliance."

"The most valuable feature is EC2 is scalable, so when you want to move to market, you don't need to wait until your provision is fast, you can just go and provision it and then easily install your application."

"The product helps us with scalability. We also need not have data centers."

More Amazon EC2 pros

"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."

"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."

"All AWS services allow me to manage a wide range of applications and services."

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

"If you create your deployment with a good set of rules for how to scale in, you can just set it and forget it."

"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."

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

"The most valuable feature of AWS Fargate is its ease of use."

More AWS Fargate pros

Cons

"Accessibility must be improved."

"One of the things that need to be looked into is the complex pricing, which is rather intense."

"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."

"We're expecting to have Graviton instances. Graviton means it's not internal, it's a low-cost instance. At present time, Graviton is not supported for a few packages."

"Regarding availability, a noticeable improvement would be the possibility of more load balancing configurations and the deployment of more datacenters, mainly in Latin America."

"The customization could be simplified."

"The monitoring part could be improved. When we're building and configuring things or doing database replication, EC2's monitoring could provide more information. It's hard to find the information I need in the graphs they provide."

"We found Amazon EC2 to be pricey."

More Amazon EC2 cons

"We faced challenges in vertically scaling our workload."

"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."

"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 if it's ready for deployment after conversion."

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

"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."

"AWS Fargate needs improvement in terms of setup complexity."

"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."

More AWS Fargate cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"For our usage, the cost is approximately $20,000 to $23,000 per month."

"We are paying about $1,500 a month for one of the services."

"Amazon EC2 has a pay-as-you-use cost model."

"The price of Amazon EC2 could improve. The Google Cloud Platform is more cost-effective."

"You pay as you use it."

"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."

"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."

More Amazon EC2 pricing and cost advice

"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

21%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

25%

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?

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...

See all answers

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...

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?

The monitoring capabilities of AWS Fargate could be improved and made more robust. The error handling aspect sometimes causes issues and can get stuck during deployment, making the process not very...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering AWS Fargate?

I would recommend AWS Fargate as an alternative to AWS Lambda for running loads or hosting a service. It is a good service for keeping instances running, which minimizes initial latency. Overall, I...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 23% of the time

AWS Lambda vs Amazon EC2

Compared 15% of the time

Google Compute Engine vs Amazon EC2

Compared 11% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EC2

Compared 11% of the time

Google App Engine vs Amazon EC2

Compared 8% of the time

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Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs AWS Fargate

Compared 39% of the time

Heroku vs AWS Fargate

Compared 16% of the time

Oracle Compute Cloud Service vs AWS Fargate

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Spark vs AWS Fargate

Compared 7% of the time

Apache NiFi vs AWS Fargate

Compared 7% of the time

More AWS Fargate Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2

April 2025

Download Amazon EC2 product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate

April 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

April 2025

Free Report: AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2

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