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AWS Lambda vs Amazon EC2 comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

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
6.4
Amazon EC2 delivers cost savings and efficiency, enhancing innovation and agility despite higher costs than on-premise solutions.
Sentiment score
6.6
AWS Lambda offers cost efficiency via pay-per-use pricing, serverless design, automatic scaling, and reduced operational expenses.
This cost factor has an impact on the project, giving us more possibilities to configure other services and greater financial freedom.
Data Engineer I at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
I would say I have saved more than a week with Amazon EC2 compared to my previous on-premises setup.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Employment can be invested in other tasks rather than focusing on regular monitoring tasks or regular repeatable jobs that AWS Lambda can handle.
cloud engineer at softwareone
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Amazon EC2 support is generally effective, though premium support excels, with some challenges in technical integration and communication.
Sentiment score
6.9
AWS Lambda support is responsive and helpful, but experiences vary with documentation reliance and different support plan speeds.
I would rate technical support from Amazon a 10, as we have on-prem AWS experts.
Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the AWS support team a seven.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
Amazon's customer support is much better than other clouds.
Data Engineer I at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
The customer support for AWS Lambda is always great.
cloud engineer at softwareone
When we raise a ticket or have an issue, the support team is responsive.
Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives
Overall, it is good, but there is some room for improvement when it comes to response time and overall competence.
Consultant at Deloitte
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EC2 is highly praised for its scalability and autoscaling features, contributing to cost efficiency and reliability.
Sentiment score
7.6
AWS Lambda efficiently scales for varied traffic, integrates with AWS, but may incur higher costs for extensive use.
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.
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.
Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives
You can scale it up, but the scalability is restricted to 15 minutes of execution time.
cloud engineer at softwareone
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EC2 is highly stable, with minimal downtime and issues usually caused by specific use cases or misconfigurations.
Sentiment score
8.1
AWS Lambda is highly rated for reliability and performance, with effective scalability, minor latency issues, and excellent stability.
It is somewhat more reliable compared to Azure.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
Amazon EC2 is stable and more economical.
Data Engineer I at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EC2 users seek cost reduction, improved documentation, better UI, seamless integrations, scalability, and more user-friendly tools.
AWS Lambda's limitations include execution time, integration difficulties, debugging complexities, and runtime constraints, requiring improved usability and flexibility.
I have heard from multiple people that if you have an Amazon EC2 instance running and you stop it, the billing continues unless you terminate the Amazon EC2 instance.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I think improvements can be made to Amazon EC2 by increasing the memory, offering more instance types, and including GPUs as mentioned in the keynote.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
There was not proper documentation on how to install the patch managers and automate patching with System Managers.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
AWS Lambda needs to improve cold start time.
Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives
Regarding scaling, we can add up to 1,000 execution environments for every 10 seconds per function, per region.
Consultant at Deloitte
AWS Lambda could be improved regarding the execution time size, as the duration of execution time is fixed at 15 minutes currently, so we could increase it.
cloud engineer at softwareone
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 offers flexible, scalable pricing with potential savings, though cost management requires strategic planning to address complexities.
AWS Lambda pricing is pay-as-you-go, offering free initial usage, appealing for small applications and cost-effective for startups.
The licensing fees for Amazon EC2 are affordable, especially for lower tiers where there are fewer requirements or where the load is very low for product development.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
I found it very cheap and a fair price according to what we need.
Data Engineer I at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
AWS Lambda pricing is high, similar to the servers for S3 buckets.
Python Developer at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees
Based on the execution and time duration of execution, it is much cheaper than expected.
cloud engineer at softwareone
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 provides scalable, flexible, cost-effective cloud resources with seamless AWS integration, security, and tools like Docker and Kubernetes.
AWS Lambda excels with serverless architecture, automatic scaling, cost-effective pricing, and seamless integration with other AWS services.
With the cloud, deployment is easy, and within a minute, we can deploy the server and give it to the developers so they can work on it right away after deployment.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The main benefits Amazon EC2 provides for me as an end user are cost savings, as they are more OpEx costs rather than CapEx for us.
Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Amazon EC2 offers flexibility.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives
As it is serverless, AWS Lambda has more scope for building scalable architectures.
Consultant at Deloitte
What I appreciate most about AWS Lambda is that you do not need to purchase the entire service; it only charges you whenever you call that API, which is excellent.
Python Developer at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2
Ranking in Compute Service
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Lambda
Ranking in Compute Service
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 15.2%, up from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Lambda is 15.1%, down from 19.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS Lambda15.1%
Amazon EC215.2%
Other69.7%
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

BS
AWS Architect at Corvit Networks
Elasticity and auto scaling enhance performance and cost efficiency
Amazon EC2 features that I have found the most valuable and useful include elasticity and scalability, a variety of instance types, pay-as-you-go pricing, security, isolation, AMIs, integration with other services, Spot Instances, and high availability of reliability, user data, and EC2 metadata. These include Amazon EC2 images, image builder, and auto scaling as instance types, pricing models, and security with VPC, IAM roles, and security groups. The most beneficial features of Amazon EC2 for cloud operations are EC2 Auto Scaling with Elastic Load Balancing, which allows scale up and scale down, maintains high availability, and optimizes costs. Auto Scaling provides fault tolerance, performance optimization, and cost efficiency. A real-world benefit is that an instance automatically handles the load. When traffic drops, it reduces the number of instances. Other highly beneficial Amazon EC2 features include Spot Instances, multiple instance types, custom AMIs, VPC security groups, strong network and access security, and Elastic IPs, which are the static IPs for dynamic instances.
Rajaraman Ramachandran - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise30
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business36
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise46
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2?
The licensing fees for Amazon EC2 are affordable, especially for lower tiers where there are fewer requirements or where the load is very low for product development. The pricing is very much affor...
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?
During the initial setup, we downloaded a certificate because we could not find proper documentation for it. There should be clear direction based on whether you are using Linux or Windows. There w...
What is your primary use case for Amazon EC2?
We use Amazon EC2 for our databases as well as CRM DNS to host our applications. For 3D architecture, we use the EC2 constraints.
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lambda?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been positive. Based on the execution and time duration of execution, it is much cheaper than expected.
What needs improvement with AWS Lambda?
AWS Lambda could be improved regarding the execution time size, as the duration of execution time is fixed at 15 minutes currently, so we could increase it. I don't have anything more to add about ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Netflix
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2 and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,745 professionals have used our research since 2012.