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Amazon Elastic Container Service vs Rancher Labs comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

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
7.9
Amazon ECS provides significant cost savings and ROI with reduced server expenses, auto-scaling, and a pay-as-you-go model.
Sentiment score
8.5
Rancher Labs provides efficient open-source solutions like OpenShift with significant cost savings and an eight out of ten rating.
This saving is achieved since, with EC2, the entire virtual machine must be running regardless of workload, whereas Fargate eliminates this cost.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.9
Amazon ECS support is praised for responsiveness and expertise, yet feedback varies due to cost, knowledge gaps, and response times.
Sentiment score
7.8
Rancher Labs' customer service and technical support are praised for responsiveness, with users valuing community forums for assistance.
We do not rely heavily on technical support from AWS as we have our own teams managing the infrastructure.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.9
Amazon ECS is highly praised for scalability, handling diverse workloads effectively, with minor regional and autoscaling challenges.
Sentiment score
7.7
Rancher Labs offers robust scalability for small to large teams, with effective deployment and minor automation improvements suggested.
Scalability becomes an inherent capability in the cloud context, and this service does well in that regard.
Amazon Elastic Container Service has a scalability rating of ten out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.6
Amazon ECS is highly rated for stability and performance, achieving up to 99.99% uptime, with infrequent user-related issues.
Sentiment score
8.7
Rancher Labs is praised for its stability and reliability, though users note complexity and upgrade challenges.
The stability of Amazon Elastic Container Service is excellent.
Amazon Elastic Container Service is mostly very stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon ECS needs improved management, user experience, pricing transparency, security, integration, support, auto-scaling, reliability, and intuitive interface.
Rancher Labs needs improved stability, integrations, user-friendly features, enhanced security, multicloud support, and better community and development resources.
Currently, when scaling with Amazon Elastic Container Service, I have to choose between monitoring CPU or memory usage to scale up or scale out; there is no option to monitor both simultaneously.
When it comes to new-age services around AI, particularly in the areas of LLMs and genomics, these services are not fully available in our region's availability domain.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Elastic Container Service offers variable, usage-based pricing, appreciated for cost-effectiveness despite potential regional and configuration-related cost variances.
Rancher Labs provides a cost-effective open-source container orchestration with optional paid support, seen as competitively mid-range priced.
Amazon Elastic Container Service is quite cheap compared to Google, particularly for hosting databases.
Our customers often do a trade-off between requiring services at particular SLA levels and being willing to pay a premium price to us as partners.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Elastic Container Service is scalable, cost-effective, easy to use, with seamless AWS integration and flexible deployment options.
Rancher Labs offers user-friendly Kubernetes management, seamless integrations, and supports GitOps and virtual machine management with promising potential.
It inherently offers scalability by default, without our IT teams needing to take the extra load to make the services available for our end users.
Amazon Elastic Container Service makes horizontal scaling easy and is especially effective when working under the ECS service.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Elastic Container Se...
Ranking in Container Management
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Containers as a Service (CaaS) (1st)
Rancher Labs
Ranking in Container Management
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Data Storage for Kubernetes (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Elastic Container Service is 1.4%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rancher Labs is 8.9%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

FABIO NAGAO - PeerSpot reviewer
Horizontal scaling is streamlined when deploying modern workloads
Currently, when scaling with Amazon Elastic Container Service, I have to choose between monitoring CPU or memory usage to scale up or scale out; there is no option to monitor both simultaneously. This limitation makes it challenging to define a balanced scale-out automation since a well-written software should balance between processing and memory.
RyanVassallo - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers an open-source version along with a good UI
The product has multiple good features. One of the solution's good features is that it is the GitOps functionality known as Rancher fleet, which is used for continuous delivery. The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or on-premises, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations. The tool also has a feature that is still kind of maturing, but I think it has very good potential. This new feature is named Harvester, which is allows users to have virtual machines managed by Kubernetes engine. This is very new technology in the market. I think that Harvester needs to mature as a product, and I think that in the future, it will be very powerful. You have one tool that does many things for you.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
30%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 do you like most about Rancher Labs?
The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or the company, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rancher Labs?
The cost is reasonable since it's open-source. Rancher effectively addresses container orchestration trends, especially for those with some Kubernetes knowledge.
What needs improvement with Rancher Labs?
While Rancher Labs provides some level of security, it's not considered very robust. We found it to offer basic security features, which met some of our requirements, but we also relied on other op...
 

Also Known As

Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2 Container Service
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ubisoft, GoPro, TIBCO, Remind
Albert Heijn, Bell, BMC, Samsung, WindStream, Johnson & Johnson
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Elastic Container Service vs. Rancher Labs and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,210 professionals have used our research since 2012.