Amazon AWS vs Amazon Lightsail comparison

Amazon AWS and Amazon Lightsail are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Amazon AWS is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.3, while Amazon Lightsail is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon AWS holds a 13.2% mindshare in PSP, compared to Amazon Lightsail’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Amazon AWS users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Amazon Lightsail users who would recommend it.

Amazon AWS

Read 259 Amazon AWS reviews

18,717 Views
8,048 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Amazon Lightsail

Read 13 Amazon Lightsail reviews

1,219 Views
1,219 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon AWS

Amazon Lightsail

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Amazon AWS and Amazon Lightsail compete in the cloud hosting and computing services category. AWS appears to have an upper hand due to its extensive features and flexibility aimed at both small and large-scale operations.

Features: Amazon AWS is equipped with scalable storage solutions, flexible computing power, and a comprehensive security suite suitable for diverse operating systems and relational databases. It offers dynamic pricing with extensive technical support. Amazon Lightsail is best for simple applications offering ease of setup and a budget-friendly pricing structure, making it especially appealing for startups and smaller projects.

Room for Improvement: AWS users consistently call for simplified cost structures and enhanced technical support. The complexity of pricing and high data transfer costs could deter startups seeking predictable expenses. Amazon Lightsail, on the other hand, needs enhancements in documentation and support to enable easier navigation and better utilization of its platform features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS provides extensive deployment options for public, private, and hybrid cloud configurations, receiving praise for its technical support, although users seek quicker response times. Amazon Lightsail excels with its simple public cloud deployment, highlighted for being user-friendly and having a straightforward setup process, receiving positive reviews for customer support.

Pricing and ROI: AWS's pay-as-you-go model offers flexibility but can become costly with increased usage, yet it remains cost-efficient for large-scale operations. Amazon Lightsail offers flat-rate pricing starting at five dollars, making it a cost-effective choice for startups. Both platforms deliver positive ROI, with AWS’s flexibility aiding long-term value, while Lightsail emphasizes affordability and simplicity.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon AWS vs. Amazon Lightsail Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS vs. Amazon Lightsail

February 2026

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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 AWS

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

259

Ranking in other categories

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (2nd)

Amazon Lightsail

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

7th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 13.2%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Lightsail is 2.2%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon AWS	13.2%
Amazon Lightsail	2.2%
Other	84.6%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Asif Meem

Senior Machine Learning Engineer at sportsbet

Managed cloud services have helped accelerate experiments with flexible configuration options

Sometimes the costs associated with spinning up a service, especially managed services, have implications. For example, if I create a Glue job, that will create S3 buckets and other resources that have cost implications, but once I clean up a Glue job, it does not delete the other accessory resources. Sometimes, I have to go hunting for what resources Amazon AWS might have provisioned and how it is costing behind the scenes. It can be complex depending on your level of expertise. It is not as easy to get started, especially when it comes to secure practices. Amazon AWS is more hands-on than other platforms.

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VictorAugusto De Souza E Silva

Cloud Engineer at Leek Solucoes

Has simplified website migration and reduced hosting costs significantly

Amazon Lightsail should have some kind of scale service. To be more clear, if I need to scale up my instance or VPS, I need to create a snapshot and create a new instance from this snapshot with more resources, such as CPU, RAM, or disk. It would be beneficial to have a welcome instance where we can just set the instance, go there to edit and select a greater instance from large to x-large or 2x-large. I do not see the need to scale down, but it would be good too. When we are on an x-large for testing purposes and need to do a rollback to a large one, we need to scale down. We do not have this capability on Amazon Lightsail.

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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 AWS has good performance and easy management."

"The managed services of Amazon AWS help with getting experiments out faster than it usually would have taken; it mainly provides quick accessibility from idea to execution."

"Newly introduced features advance capabilities."

"They integrate well with various other solutions."

"I am very impressed by the solution's stability."

"It is highly available and on-demand. So, you can scale up and scale down whenever required."

"The monitoring is the most valuable aspect of the product."

"The installation is quite straightforward."

More Amazon AWS pros

"We use Amazon Lightsail for hosting security components in-house and AI modules."

"The initial setup is pretty easy."

"The intuitive management console of Amazon Lightsail is very good because it is simple; with just a few clicks, I can set a blog online, a WordPress blog online, a new e-commerce online, or just a new application with NodeJS."

"Implementations are completed with a few clicks, allowing efficient transitions to other development stages, and setup is easy whether for online support or basic business requirements."

"Amazon Lightsail is easy to use and very cost-effective compared to other services such as Azure and Google."

"EC2 instances are pre-configured and upgraded, so you can simply select and instantly pay for an EC2 instance to set up WordPress, Node.js, or a server container using Docker."

"I find Lightsail particularly valuable for hosting WordPress as it is easier to set up than a bare metal server, which requires extensive configuration and package installations."

More Amazon Lightsail pros

Cons

"Price is an area with a shortcoming in the solution that has a scope for improvement"

"Some services which were easy to use through shortcuts are now more complicated to use."

"One problem is that the AWS public cloud doesn't have shared storage capabilities. The second thing is the cloud performance versus on-prem."

"There was some new learning in terms of IOPS on the EBS storage. The concept of burstable IOPS was new and we did have a few outages when we ran out of IOPS."

"Its interface could be better because there are so many services right now in the product that it is quite difficult to navigate around in this. Its interface could be a subject of improvement."

"It just needs to be improved from the security perspective."

"The price could be better."

"Amazon needs to develop better tools for troubleshooting network traffic, application insights, performance, and even some aspects of integration mapping. I'm hoping AWS implements something like Azure's Network Watcher and a log analytics solution where a can pull logs from various services and present them in a single dashboard. I want to summarize the performance and usage of every service and application."

More Amazon AWS cons

"Amazon Lightsail should have some kind of scale service. To be more clear, if I need to scale up my instance or VPS, I need to create a snapshot and create a new instance from this snapshot with more resources, such as CPU, RAM, or disk."

"When you need to add some custom rules to Amazon Lightsail, the auto scaling feature is a bit difficult."

"It would be beneficial if Lightsail allowed easier upgrade and change processes, similar to EC2 instances, without needing to fully back up and reinstall configurations."

"Backward compatibility and the flexibility to choose software versions while installing would be improvements."

"Based on my limited exploration of Amazon Lightsail so far, I would like to see improvements in the console, particularly in user behavior and some cost-related aspects."

"Amazon Lightsail needs more security in the networking because hackers can attack in application layers three and four."

"The product's network features need enhancement."

More Amazon Lightsail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing fees depend on the contract. It can be monthly or on-demand resources."

"If you can plan capacity for one or three years, you can use the upfront payment option which allows you to save up to 50%."

"This is not an expensive product but it would be an improvement if the price were cheaper."

"We are on an annual subscription for Amazon AWS."

"It is comparable if you add in the price structure to an on-prem solution."

"Its pricing can be simplified a little bit more. Even though they have been reducing it, I still believe they can do better as compared to GCP, Google Cloud."

"It's paid on a monthly basis and you have to pay for the resources that you use."

"Its price is kind of okay. When we do a migration from on-premises to the cloud, we typically use the lift-and-shift model. Based on the studies that we have done, cost savings are definitely there when we moved from on-premises to the cloud."

More Amazon AWS pricing and cost advice

"The services that it provides are good for the price."

"The affordability of starting at five dollars makes it an attractive option for startups and medium-sized companies, aligning with budget considerations while offering essential cloud services."

"Amazon Lightsail is a bit cheaper than Amazon EC2."

"The prices are better than EC2 machines, for instance, because they are simplified management, but it works well, and I am able to run everything that I need on it."

"It's very cheap."

"Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month."

"A few months ago, Lightsail's pricing increased, likely due to the addition of the new VPC feature."

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Comparison Review

it_user8586

Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Aug 14, 2013

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

University

13%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	131
Midsize Enterprise	48
Large Enterprise	114

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?

Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...

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How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?

How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...

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Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure

We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...

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What do you like most about Amazon Lightsail?

In Lightsail, they simplified to do it in as few clicks as possible. So, around ten clicks, I have a virtual machine deployed.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Lightsail?

Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month. This cost may increase with additional features like a static IP.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Lightsail?

See all answers

Comparisons

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Amazon AWS

Compared 34% of the time

Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon AWS

Compared 6% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Amazon AWS

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon AWS

Compared 6% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Amazon AWS

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon AWS Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 22% of the time

Google Cloud vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 20% of the time

Google App Engine vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 9% of the time

Heroku vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon Lightsail Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS

February 2026

Download Amazon AWS product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Lightsail

February 2026

Download Amazon Lightsail product report

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS

No data available

Overview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an adopted cloud platform that offers more than 200 fully featured services from data centers located across the globe. This is a scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that is utilized by thousands of businesses of different sizes around the world. The product offers a wide variety of solutions for its customers, which allows them to launch applications regardless of their industry.

The most common use cases for AWS are:

Application hosting: Clients can take advantage of on-demand infrastructure to power their applications. The product supports multiple types of apps, varying from hosted internal applications to software as a service (SaaS) offerings.
Websites: With AWS, clients can satisfy their web hosting needs through a scalable platform for their websites.
Backup and storage: AWS offers reliable data storage services, which allow clients to store their data and build dependable backups for all of their valuable information.
Enterprise IT: The product allows companies to host internal- or external-facing IT applications in a highly secure environment.
Content delivery: Users who want to distribute content to end users worldwide can do so quickly and easily through the high data transfer speeds of this solution.
Databases: AWS offers a variety of database solutions, which include hosted enterprise database software as well as non-relational database solutions.

Amazon AWS supports a global cloud infrastructure with AWS Region and Availability Zone models, which contribute to the high availability of enterprise applications running on the solution. Amazon AWS has an extensive array of products that serve different purposes, including:

Analytics
Application integration
Blockchain
Business applications
Cloud financial management
Compute
Contact center
Containers
Database
Developer tools
End-user computing
Front-end web and mobile
Games
Internet of Things (IoT)
Machine learning
Management and governance
Quantum technologies
Robotics
Satellite
Security, identity and compliance, and others

The products and services that Amazon AWS delivers to these sectors provide a large computing capacity which is quicker and cheaper compared to building a physical server farm. Among the most popular services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2," and Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as "S3."

Amazon AWS Features

The wide array of products that Amazon AWS offers consist of different functions that utilize cloud computing across different sectors. The features of this solution can be categorized in the following ways:

Data and relationship management: With Amazon AWS, companies can manage multiple hierarchies of directory data, they can define attributes for objects and relationships, set custom inheritance rules for directories, and create multiple schemas.
Schema management: This group of features allows users to extend their directory schema according to their needs. They can extend it through multiple applications that share a single directory while avoiding duplication of data.
Fully managed infrastructure: This feature decreases time and costs for administrative tasks for companies regarding scaling infrastructure and managing servers.
Searching feature: The Cloud Directory feature of AWS offers built-in search capabilities which can cover sets of highly connected data and eliminate the need of creating nested queries.
Built-in data encryption: Users can benefit from high levels of protection of their data with AWS's products. The data in the cloud is automatically encrypted at rest and in transit through 256-bit encryption keys, managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
Object policies: This feature allows Amazon AWS users to organize objects in different hierarchies by providing a framework for applications to evaluate policy assignments.

Amazon AWS Benefits

This product delivers various benefits across all industries that utilize its services. The greatest advantages of using Amazon AWS include:

High product functionality is supported by machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, data lakes, and analytics.
The solution has a high level of security, which is backed by a deep set ofmore than 100 cloud security tools.
Amazon AWS has an easy-to-use interface that makes it possible for clients to host applications.
The product is very flexible in terms of which operating system, programming language, web app platform, and database clients can use.
AWS is a scalable and highly secure global computing infrastructure, supported by the reliability of Amazon.com.
Clients can utilize the Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing tools to personally scale up or down applications, depending on their demand.
Users can choose from an array of payment options, including paying for only the services they need, as well as a free trial to select the ones most useful for them.

Reviews from Real Users

Greg G., a chief executive officer at a tech services company, ranks Amazon AWS highly, as he states that the solution is flexible, scales well, and offers good stability.

A technology manager technology at a computer software company values Amazon AWS because it is extremely cost-efficient, easy to upgrade and expand storage with greatly improved interfaces.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Lightsail is ideal for simpler workloads, quick deployments, and getting started on AWS. It’s designed to help you start small, and then scale as you grow.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Buyer's Guide

Amazon AWS vs. Amazon Lightsail

February 2026

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