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Amazon Elastic Container Service vs Microsoft Azure Container Service comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 Elastic Container Se...
Ranking in Containers as a Service (CaaS)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Container Management (9th)
Microsoft Azure Container S...
Ranking in Containers as a Service (CaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Containers as a Service (CaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon Elastic Container Service is 16.5%, down from 38.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Container Service is 19.8%, down from 25.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Containers as a Service (CaaS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Elastic Container Service16.5%
Microsoft Azure Container Service19.8%
Other63.7%
Containers as a Service (CaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

AG
Lead Developer at Virtual Restaurant Solutions
Starts strong with functionalities but reveals cost limitations
The main challenge with Amazon Elastic Container Service is the significant learning curve. Everything mentioned took months to understand. It is not for the faint of heart. Though they have graphical interfaces and numerous dashboards that help create all the services graphically, learning to use Bash can be challenging. Because these are headless servers by nature, there is no graphical interface. It is not similar to Windows where you can hit the start button and look for your program, or Mac where you can look for programs on your desktop. Instead, users must understand this new paradigm of a Linux headless server, which requires using command-based prompts for builds and development.
MV
Architect at Hexaware Technologies Limited
Has supported seamless microservices deployment and improved cost control through managed infrastructure
Microsoft Azure Container Service includes being a very mature tool and a fully managed service, making it ready to use. You can simply opt for it and use it. As a managed service, you don't need to take care of the managed components. You only need to take care of whatever user-space you are managing. All the managed components are taken care of by Microsoft. They provide support for different upgrade operations, and anything related to managed components such as the controller nodes, those things they can take care of automatically. This is actually a very challenging task that is handled by Microsoft itself. Microsoft Azure Container Service has positively impacted my organization as it is a very mature tool and, when using the Azure platform, it's highly secure. It can offer end-to-end encryption and take care of all kinds of compliance. It also offers Azure Defender for Cloud that can provide security recommendations on a daily basis, making it a very mature product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Once you get the procedure right, and set a pattern, it just works."
"Good documentation and very straightforward to implement and use."
"The cloud services are readily available."
"The tool's most valuable feature is the ability to create revisions on the configurations."
"I like Amazon EC2 Container Service's elasticity."
"In seven years, we have not faced a single second of downtime."
"Scalability and availability are the most valuable features of Amazon Elastic Container Service."
"It has helped our organization greatly and especially on weekends because we have many transactions as our users are buying some kind of tools and paying online."
"Storage is one of the most beneficial features of cloud providers, specifically Azure because when you are working in their cloud environment, you can easily use a storage interface and a storage object that is provided by Microsoft Azure. In a local environment, you have to be involved in establishing and setting up distributed storage file systems for containers which are very difficult and complex. In a cloud environment, you are not concerned about the storage and the dashboard provides you with storage objects with high availability."
"Microsoft Azure Container Service has a good level of stability."
"The most valuable feature is that you don't have to maintain the infrastructure."
"The product makes things easier since it's self-managed. Therefore, there is less administration workload and operational costs."
"Microsoft Azure Container Service helps to optimize resources and save costs by allowing our product to handle it through this containerization method."
"The most valuable features are that it is simple, and the compression of the data."
"Visualization is the most important feature."
"It's a great product if you are in a Microsoft environment."
 

Cons

"The solution can still be expensive, even with per-second billing."
"The solution's pricing could be improved."
"The solution is expensive compared to other alternatives like Azure."
"The solution’s UI should be improved."
"After the load balancer gets attached to Amazon Elastic Container Service clusters, I can't modify, remove, or replace it later."
"The existing domain-joined capability the solution provides during the initial boot-up of the compute should be streamlined and made a little robust."
"It's a complex tool and should be simplified."
"I think that it would help if the vendor provided more use cases and explanations as to how ECS can be utilized."
"Since the product is fully managed, it is expensive."
"In terms of the container strategy, they need to make it more compliant with the Linux OS."
"Standard support could be more helpful and responsive."
"f Microsoft Azure can provide GUI dashboards for end-users and administrators to work separately to manage all the Kubernetes clusters without a need to connect to Azure environments and through CLI it would be better."
"The customization is an area that needs improvement."
"I wasn't very impressed with the documentation."
"In the future, I would like to see it generalized and have the ability to better integrate with open-source tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon Elastic Container Service is an expensive solution."
"If you increase the sizes, you incur costs to your accounts."
"I don't exactly deal with the pricing. We have a separate Infra team that deals with the pricing. They are more into the scalability part. Based on our requirements, the pricing will increase. The automation teams will test some of the benefits to see how can we can optimize the cost. They'll have a security manager connection and some alerts based upon the usage to see how to reduce the building cost based upon the installations."
"Amazon EC2 Container Service is priced high."
"The platform is inexpensive."
"The tool's licensing is monthly."
"I rate the product's pricing an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"They offer a pay-as-you-go pricing model for the product."
"The solution's pricing is reasonable."
"The costs depend on the resources that you use, and there is a cost-management system to help calculate it."
"Microsoft Azure Container Service has costs but in the container environment, there are no costs because it is open source and we are using Docker as the container engine in the master and worker nodes established in the Azure environment."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
7%
Performing Arts
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Elastic Container Service?
Implementing the product has helped me monitor the parameters. I utilize tools like CloudWatch and AWS systems to track these parameters. If any issues arise, I alert our developer team to address ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Elastic Container Service?
The solution must improve backup and compatibility around OS like Windows and Mac.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Container Service?
The experience with pricing for Microsoft Azure Container Service depends on the use case and current workload. Based upon that, it can offer different types of SKU sizes because under the hood it ...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Container Service?
Microsoft Azure Container Service can improve if it can integrate current AI tools within the service, which would help us to fix the issues much faster. By default, AI can offer different chatbots...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Azure Container Service?
My main use cases for Microsoft Azure Container Service involve automating different infrastructure needs. Customers frequently ask to automate different environments using Terraform. They want to ...
 

Also Known As

Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2 Container Service
MS Azure Container Service
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ubisoft, GoPro, TIBCO, Remind
Esri, BIO CATCH
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Elastic Container Service vs. Microsoft Azure Container Service and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.