AWS Lambda vs Amazon EC2 comparison

Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda are both solutions in the Compute Service category. Amazon EC2 is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.8, while AWS Lambda is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.5. Amazon EC2 holds a 6.4% mindshare in CS, compared to AWS Lambda’s 20.4% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon EC2 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of AWS Lambda users who would recommend it.

Amazon EC2

Read 64 Amazon EC2 reviews

1,466 Views
1,060 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

AWS Lambda

Read 83 AWS Lambda reviews

6,833 Views
4,044 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Amazon EC2

AWS Lambda

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Compute Service solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2

January 2025

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Helped 831,158 peers since 2012

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 Lambda

Ranking in Compute Service

1st

Average Rating

8.4

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 Lambda is 20.4%, down from 27.0% 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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Wai L Lin O

Cloud Engineer - Supervisor at KBZ Bank

A serverless solution with easy integration features

We use AWS Lambda because it provides a solution for our needs without requiring us to manage our infrastructure. With the tool, we only pay for the resources we use. Additionally, it is straightforward to implement and integrates with other services like API Gateway. The tool's serverless nature has had the most significant impact on our workflow. I find it particularly attractive because it eliminates the need for managing servers. In my previous experience, managing upgrades and updates was quite challenging. The solution's integration process with other AWS services was relatively easy. We primarily use AWS services such as EventBridge for scheduling processes and log management.

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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."

"EC2 has the typical advantages of using the cloud. It's easy to provision and set up."

"The most valuable features are the scalability options, low maintenance, and options to upgrade. AWS support is also pretty good. The generation upgrade is pretty simple and standardized."

"The solution offers good access policies."

"Stable, scalable, and simple to implement."

"The most valuable features of Amazon EC2 are ease of use and the services offered."

"The product is easy and quick to set up."

"We find it easy to scale."

More Amazon EC2 pros

"The fact that it is serverless is really important."

"We are building a Twitter-like application in the boot camp. I have used Lamda for the integration of the post-confirmation page in the application. This will help you get your one-time password via mail. You can log in with the help of a post-confirmation page. We didn’t want to setup an instance specifically for confirmation. We used the Lambda function so that it goes back to sleep after pushing up."

"The most valuable features are event-based triggers. They're really good for a reactive style when you want things to happen as soon as something else happens."

"AWS Lambda is itself serverless, and it is connected to the API gateway, and you can directly call the API through the API gateway and connect through AWS Lambda."

"The solution offers good performance."

"The serverless computing feature eliminates the need to manage servers, provision, or scale."

"Lambda is trigger-based, which means it only activates when accessed, ensuring cost savings."

"It's a fairly easy solution to learn."

More AWS Lambda pros

Cons

"Support doesn't share or give insights on OS-based issues. That needs to improve because if someone is buying an EC2 instance with the Windows server and SQL license, the client expects that there will be a minimum level of support."

"There should be enhanced accessibility from any standpoint. The accessibility should be increased, particularly in scenarios where accessing the software on the Azure platform from the cloud can be complex. Simplifying this process would be beneficial. There are too many steps involved."

"Accessibility must be improved."

"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."

"We found Amazon EC2 to be pricey."

"The GUI used to deploy EC2 must be improved."

"An area for improvement in Amazon EC2 is the cost because it's a bit higher than competitor pricing."

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

More Amazon EC2 cons

"The execution time could be better. One of the major limitations is the time period because it doesn't give you more than seven minutes. So, before thinking about Lambda, you should think through your use case and ensure it's a good fit. Otherwise, you can use batch, step functions, or other methods. Reports and the monitoring board could also be improved in terms of alerts. The threshold alerts are there but can be improved. It takes some time to get used to these methods and get the hang of them."

"The way Lambda works with HTTP headers is a bit odd."

"We need to invest time in learning the tool's language variant. We have encountered instances of downtime as well."

"AWS Lambda should improve its compatibility with the language used to write the code."

"It would be ideal if we could use the solution across different platforms."

"The runtime could be improved. There are certain use cases where I need a Lambda function to run longer."

"Lambda can only be used in one account; there's no possibility to utilize it in another account."

"The user-friendliness of the solution could be improved."

More AWS Lambda 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."

"It is not an expensive solution."

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

"I am using the tier three Amazon service. I am not going to use another solution other than Amazon EC2 because here in Pakistan there are some payment issues for solutions abroad."

"It has helped to reduce costs with infrastructure."

"The licensing of Amazon EC2 is expensive. Microsoft Windows Servers are expensive to license."

"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."

"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

"Price-wise, AWS Lambda is a five out of ten."

"Lambda is an affordable solution. They offer free requests every month and charge per the compute time. If you are working in a big organization, usually AWS offer a savings plan where you get approximately 70% discount on pricing."

"I think the price is okay. However, if they add more functionality, they can have better prices. In fact, they should have better and more flexible packages for clients who have greater consumption of Lambda."

"The solution is free of cost for the first year, and after that, it becomes expensive."

"AWS Lambda is inexpensive."

"AWS is slightly more expensive than Azure."

"We don't need to pay for licensing to use Lambda."

"Price-wise, AWS Lambda is very cheap. It's not free, but it's not that expensive."

More AWS Lambda pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

64%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

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...

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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...

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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...

See all answers

What do you like most about AWS Lambda?

The tool scales automatically based on the number of incoming requests.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda is cheaper compared to running an instance continuously. You only pay for what you use, making it cost-effective.

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2

Compared 52% of the time

AWS Batch vs Amazon EC2

Compared 23% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EC2

Compared 15% of the time

More Amazon EC2 Competitors

AWS Batch vs AWS Lambda

Compared 53% of the time

Apache NiFi vs AWS Lambda

Compared 14% of the time

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs AWS Lambda

Compared 12% of the time

Apache Spark vs AWS Lambda

Compared 9% of the time

More AWS Lambda Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2

January 2025

Download Amazon EC2 product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda

January 2025

Download AWS Lambda product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2

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Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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.

AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda executes your code only when needed and scales automatically, from a few requests per day to thousands per second. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With AWS Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. AWS Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all of the administration of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code monitoring and logging. All you need to do is supply your code in one of the languages that AWS Lambda supports (currently Node.js, Java, C# and Python).

You can use AWS Lambda to run your code in response to events, such as changes to data in an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon DynamoDB table; to run your code in response to HTTP requests using Amazon API Gateway; or invoke your code using API calls made using AWS SDKs. With these capabilities, you can use Lambda to easily build data processing triggers for AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB process streaming data stored in Amazon Kinesis, or create your own back end that operates at AWS scale, performance, and security.

Sample Customers

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

Netflix

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2

January 2025

Free Report: AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2

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