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 #4 with an average rating of 8.4. Amazon EC2 holds a 6.3% mindshare in CS, compared to AWS Fargate’s 15.3% 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

1,375 Views
967 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

AWS Fargate

Read 16 AWS Fargate reviews

3,943 Views
2,331 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

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

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

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

"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."

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."

"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."

More AWS Fargate pros

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."

More Amazon EC2 cons

"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."

More AWS Fargate cons

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."

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

19%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Retailer

University

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

14%

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?

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

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 40% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Compute Cloud Service vs AWS Fargate

Compared 7% of the time

Apache NiFi vs AWS Fargate

Compared 6% of the time

Apache Spark vs AWS Fargate

Compared 6% of the time

More AWS Fargate Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2

February 2025

Download Amazon EC2 product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate

February 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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