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Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs Apache NiFi comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

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
5.6
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers substantial ROI, over 50% for high loads, outperforming GCP, with cost-effective instance deployment.
Sentiment score
4.8
Apache NiFi users experience significant time savings and improved efficiency, although exact cost benefits aren't always quantifiable.
Thanks to improvements on both our side in how we run processes and enhancements to Apache NiFi, we have reduced the time commitment to almost not needing to interact with Apache NiFi except for minor queue-clearance tasks, allowing it to run smoothly.
Data Engineer at The Kudelski Group
It supports not just ETL but also ELT, allowing us to save significant time.
Team Lead Technical Specialist (Production Support) at a recreational facilities/services company with 11-50 employees
There may be return on investment based on the technology and easily moving our workloads onto Apache NiFi from our previous system.
Senior Consultant - Data Analytics at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling support is highly rated for responsiveness and effectiveness, despite challenges with third-party integrations.
Sentiment score
5.7
Apache NiFi users find support adequate, using documentation and forums, with mixed reviews on official support and positive Cloudera experiences.
I would rate the technical support of AWS a nine, as their team resolves issues effectively and meets our expectations.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
They have very good support.
Cloud Architect Consultant at T-Systems International
The customer support is really good, and they are helpful whenever concerns are posted, responding immediately.
Cloud Data Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Customer support for Apache NiFi has been excellent, with minimal response times whenever we raise cases that cannot be directly addressed by logs.
Team Lead Technical Specialist (Production Support) at a recreational facilities/services company with 11-50 employees
I would rate the customer support of Apache NiFi a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Partner at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling efficiently adapts to demand changes, supporting scalability with features like load balancing and server automation.
Sentiment score
6.7
Apache NiFi's scalability varies; some users succeed with clusters, while others struggle without Kubernetes, impacting implementation.
The scaling feature appears to be embedded in the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling price.
Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Depending on the workload we process, it remains stable since at the end of the day, it is just used as an orchestration tool that triggers the job while the heavy lifting is done on Spark servers.
Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Scaling up is fairly straightforward, provided you manage configurations effectively.
Data Engineer at The Kudelski Group
Based on the workload, more nodes can be added to make a bigger cluster, which enhances the cluster whenever needed.
Cloud Data Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is praised for its stability, resilience, and effective performance, with up to 99% reported uptime.
Sentiment score
7.4
Apache NiFi is generally stable but may face occasional crashes and reliability challenges, especially in distributed environments.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling should automatically scale out systems during high demand and scale in new instances when demand decreases.
Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group
The stability of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling rates a 10.
Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I have seen Apache NiFi crashing at times, which is one of the issues we have faced in production.
Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Apache NiFi is stable in most cases.
Senior Consultant - Data Analytics at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Enhancements needed in scalability, customization, integration, documentation, UI, pricing, predictive scaling, security, and vertical scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
Apache NiFi needs improved integration, UI, scalability, security features, and seamless CI/CD processes for enhanced usability and efficiency.
Amazon should provide more detailed training materials for people who are just starting to work with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
Cloud Architect at Acmegrade
In enterprise environments such as healthcare or banking with numerous instances running different applications, customizable policies allow appropriate scaling.
Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group
The ability to ask questions about documentation through a chat interface would be valuable.
Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Apache NiFi should have APIs or connectors that can connect seamlessly to other external entities, whether in the cloud or on-premises, creating a plug-and-play mechanism.
Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
The history of processed files should be more readable so that not only the centralized teams managing Apache NiFi but also application folks who are new to the platform can read how a specific document is traversing through Apache NiFi.
Team Lead Technical Specialist (Production Support) at a recreational facilities/services company with 11-50 employees
The initial error did not indicate it was related to memory or size limitations but appeared as a parsing error or something similar.
Data Engineer at The Kudelski Group
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers flexible pricing based on usage, with careful management needed to control potential costs.
Apache NiFi is an open-source solution with no setup costs, offering time-saving efficiencies despite potential integration expenses.
It operates on a pay-as-you-go model, meaning if a machine is used for only an hour, the pricing will be calculated for that hour only, not the entire month.
Cloud Architect at Acmegrade
In some projects, incorrect decisions were made by not consulting them first, resulting in higher setup and maintenance costs.
Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group
The pricing in Italy is considered a little bit high, but the product is worth it.
Partner at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling ensures efficient demand scaling, cost-effectiveness, and seamless integration with CloudWatch for optimal resource management.
Apache NiFi simplifies data flow orchestration with drag-and-drop features, scalability, and integration, enhancing productivity and reliability.
This pre-configuration makes on-demand scaling refined, and the configuration includes automatic traffic distribution because when the first system is overloaded, new incoming traffic is redirected to the newly created systems.
Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group
The service offers 99.9999% availability. We have high availability, and I haven't experienced any downtime during my usage periods.
Senior Analyst - Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The best feature I appreciate about Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is its health check functionality; when a server becomes unreachable or enters an unhealthy state, it automatically triggers an alert, and the load balancer responds by spinning up a new server, ensuring that traffic is distributed effectively.
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
Apache NiFi has positively impacted my organization by definitely bridging the gap between the on-premises and cloud interaction until we find a solution to open the firewall for cloud components to directly interact with on-premises services.
Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Development has improved with a reduction in time spent being the main benefit; before we needed a matter of days to create the ingestion flows, but now it only takes a couple of hours to configure.
Senior Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The ease of use in Apache NiFi has helped my team because anyone can learn how to use it in a short amount of time, so we were able to get a lot of work done.
Senior Consultant - Data Analytics at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Ranking in Compute Service
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apache NiFi
Ranking in Compute Service
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is 7.7%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache NiFi is 9.5%, up from 7.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling7.7%
Apache NiFi9.5%
Other82.8%
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

Karthikeyan Ganesan - PeerSpot reviewer
Scrum Master/ Agile Coach at Porch Group
Offers automatic scaling features but can improve user interface and setup guidance
Customizable policies help us determine how scaling should occur. In enterprise environments such as healthcare or banking with numerous instances running different applications, customizable policies allow appropriate scaling. For critical servers, we can set up a higher number of new instances to scale out to prevent downtime. For less critical servers that perform simple tasks such as file copying, we can use customizable policies to scale out minimal instances to avoid unnecessary expenses or cloud costs. Regarding integration, there are some disadvantages in AWS where certain availability zones or regions experience glitches. This can cause production halts because of problems on Amazon's side. In particular regions, when integrating Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling or other services, there might be delays in creating new Amazon EC2 instances, sometimes becoming inefficient.
YV
architect with 51-200 employees
Unified data flows have simplified large-scale ingestion and have improved SLA reliability
Improvements can be made in the way of the UI. From the deployment perspective, Git configurations are available in 2.6 versions and 2.0 and later versions of Apache NiFi. Before 2.0, templates had to be created and stored in Apache NiFi Registry, which is available. However, templates still need to be imported and exported manually if moving from one environment to another environment. Even in 2.0 versions, although GitHub configurations are available, how it will function needs to be evaluated. Seamless CI/CD deployments are somewhat tricky and challenging when it comes to Apache NiFi with the proper approvals, moving that flow to another environment, and giving the proper RBAC controls. These are areas that could be improved. Documentation is adequate, but the only pain point is the deployment aspect.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise27
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise18
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?
The solution removes the need for hardware. We can easily create servers or machines. Just by clicking or specifying our requirements, like memory size or disk space, it's set up for us. The tool e...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?
Regarding licensing and setup costs, we always study in detail using lower environments such as User Acceptance Testing or sandbox environments. Before creation, we consult AWS official documentati...
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?
I don't work with predictive scaling. I know this feature, but I have never worked with it. For me, availability is something different. If you want to set up your application to be highly availabl...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache NiFi?
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was fine, as the integration with the AWS Marketplace was very good. The pricing in Italy is considered a little bit high, but the product is ...
What needs improvement with Apache NiFi?
Improvements can be made in the way of the UI. From the deployment perspective, Git configurations are available in 2.6 versions and 2.0 and later versions of Apache NiFi. Before 2.0, templates had...
What is your primary use case for Apache NiFi?
Apache NiFi is used to fetch data from different sources and ingest it into different destinations. The entire platform depends on Apache NiFi for data transformation and data movement. Multiple so...
 

Also Known As

AWS RAM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Macquarie Telecom Group, Dovestech, Slovak Telekom, Looker, Hastings Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs. Apache NiFi and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.