AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 comparison

Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate are both solutions in the Compute Service category. Amazon EC2 is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.6, while AWS Fargate is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5. Amazon EC2 holds a 5.4% mindshare in CS, compared to AWS Fargate’s 14.4% 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 67 Amazon EC2 reviews

1,034 Views
674 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

AWS Fargate

Read 17 AWS Fargate reviews

2,958 Views
1,720 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon EC2

AWS Fargate

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate compete in the cloud infrastructure space, providing scalable and flexible solutions. AWS Fargate seems to have an advantage in ease of use due to its serverless architecture, requiring less management intervention compared to EC2.

Features: Amazon EC2 offers quick instance provisioning, variety in instance types, and seamless integration capabilities. It supports both Windows and Linux systems and allows custom configurations. AWS Fargate delivers simplicity with its serverless architecture, focusing on container deployment and management without the need for EC2 instances. Its integration with other AWS services enhances its capability to scale applications automatically.

Room for Improvement: Amazon EC2 could simplify customization and reduce instance startup time. Better pricing clarity and network configuration would enhance its offering. AWS Fargate needs easier setup processes and improved monitoring features. Its cost management and application scaling integrations could also use refinement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon EC2 is adaptable, supporting public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments. While it offers excellent technical support, integration support is sometimes lacking. AWS Fargate simplifies public cloud application deployments without infrastructure management. Its customer service is commendable, especially noted for prompt email assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon EC2's multifaceted pricing includes pay-as-you-go and reserved instances, but it may become expensive if not efficiently managed. AWS Fargate operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. While potentially costlier for smaller applications, it offers savings in infrastructure management, making it valuable for enterprises seeking simplified management.

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2

April 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

6th

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

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 5.4%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Fargate is 14.4%, down from 18.5% 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

"Amazon EC2's most valuable feature I have heard from clients is easy provisioning. Provisioning is very quick and easy."

"Amazon EC2 is really reliable and provides great flexibility."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"The solution offers good access policies."

"I can quickly create a VM instance with just one click."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the ability to have standard operating systems along with the Windows, Linux operating systems, and their maintenance-free structure, which we prefer."

"Its ease of use is valuable."

"Configuration can be changed at any time and it's very scalable."

More Amazon EC2 pros

"The most valuable feature of AWS Fargate is its ease of use."

"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 process."

"AWS Fargate is a fully managed service, and it's very easy to use compared to other services like Elastic Beanstalk Service (EBS)."

"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."

"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."

"By using a server's compute resources, one can observe the resource metrics. With AWS, one can determine when servers will be used based on CloudWatch results. For example, CloudWatch informs the application and service platform when the hit ratio has reached the threshold value."

"We appreciate the simple use of containers within this solution, it makes managing the containers quick and easy."

"All AWS services allow me to manage a wide range of applications and services."

More AWS Fargate pros

Cons

"The support could be more responsive."

"The process of detaching EC2 instances to avoid billing could be less complex."

"The only issue with EC2 is that it makes it difficult to install an LLS certificate on your WordPress website that you have deployed inside that virtual machine. That becomes complicated."

"I would like to see as much automation for data validation as possible in the future."

"We found Amazon EC2 to be pricey."

"My impression is that the scalability of this product could be improved. My opinion is that, for example, the Lambda solution is much more scalable than EC2."

"The monitoring part could be improved. When we're building and configuring things or doing database replication, EC2's monitoring could provide more information. It's hard to find the information I need in the graphs they provide."

"The ease of migrating applications could be improved."

More Amazon EC2 cons

"There are features that could be added or enhanced."

"Challenges include higher costs for smaller clients, limited control over underlying infrastructure customization, and potential latencies during task startup."

"The main area for improvement is the cost, which could be lowered to be more competitive with other major cloud providers."

"We faced challenges in vertically scaling our workload."

"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 if it's ready for deployment after conversion."

"We would like to see some improvement in the process documents that are provided with this product, particularly for auto-scaling and other configuration tools that are a bit complicated."

"AWS Fargate could improve the privileged mode containers. We had some problems and they were not able to run."

"I heard from my team that it's not easy to predict the cost. That is the only issue we have with AWS Fargate, but I think that's acceptable. AWS Fargate isn't user-friendly. Anything related to Software as a Service or microservice architecture is not easy to implement. You're required to have DevOps from your side to implement the solution. AWS Fargate is just a temporary solution for us. When we grow to a certain level, we may use AKS for better control."

More AWS Fargate cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The use of Amazon EC2 does not incur any licensing fees."

"The price can be improved."

"Amazon EC2 has a pay-as-you-use cost model."

"It is not an expensive solution."

"The price of Amazon EC2 could improve. The Google Cloud Platform is more cost-effective."

"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."

"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

"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%

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Government

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?

The monitoring capabilities of AWS Fargate could be improved and made more robust. The error handling aspect sometimes causes issues and can get stuck during deployment, making the process not very...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering AWS Fargate?

I would recommend AWS Fargate as an alternative to AWS Lambda for running loads or hosting a service. It is a good service for keeping instances running, which minimizes initial latency. Overall, I...

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Batch vs Amazon EC2

Compared 24% of the time

AWS Lambda vs Amazon EC2

Compared 17% of the time

Google Compute Engine vs Amazon EC2

Compared 12% of the time

Google App Engine vs Amazon EC2

Compared 10% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EC2

Compared 9% of the time

More Amazon EC2 Competitors

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs AWS Fargate

Compared 41% of the time

Heroku vs AWS Fargate

Compared 16% of the time

Oracle Compute Cloud Service vs AWS Fargate

Compared 9% of the time

Apache NiFi vs AWS Fargate

Compared 8% of the time

AWS Batch vs AWS Fargate

Compared 7% of the time

More AWS Fargate Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2

May 2025

Download Amazon EC2 product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate

May 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

April 2025

Free Report: AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2

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