AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling comparison

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS Fargate are both solutions in the Compute Service category. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.8, while AWS Fargate is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling holds a 10.5% mindshare in CS, compared to AWS Fargate’s 14.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of AWS Fargate users who would recommend it.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Read 46 Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling reviews

1,507 Views
1,275 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

AWS Fargate

Read 17 AWS Fargate reviews

2,958 Views
1,720 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

AWS Fargate

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

AWS Fargate and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling both compete in the cloud service category, aiming to streamline deployments for various enterprise needs. AWS Fargate seems to have the upper hand in user-friendly deployment and ease of use, while Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers greater control and flexibility for complex, customizable needs.

Features: AWS Fargate provides significant benefits by eliminating server management and Kubernetes clusters, appealing to those seeking simplicity, ease of deployment, scalability, and cost-efficiency for dynamic workloads. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers control with features like elasticity, integration capabilities, and customization for extensive operations across EC2 instances.

Room for Improvement: AWS Fargate is criticized for its cost and complexity, especially for enterprises without a dedicated DevOps team, with room for improvements in privileged mode and documentation. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling could enhance its pricing model, resource customization, monitoring support, and documentation simplification for better use of customization features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS Fargate is praised for user-friendly deployment in public and hybrid clouds, with high customer satisfaction and support for strategic alliances. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling provides comprehensive support across private and public clouds with clear documentation. Fargate customers often do not need frequent support, while EC2 Auto Scaling users value robustness in diverse cloud settings.

Pricing and ROI: AWS Fargate is seen as cost-effective for enterprises with expected ROI in serverless operations, appearing expensive for smaller startups. Organizations benefit from simplified management and serverless scalability. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is moderately priced, emphasizing a pay-as-you-go model, offering flexibility and value for established enterprises despite potentially accumulating resource costs.

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

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 Auto Scaling

Ranking in Compute Service

3rd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

8.2

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 Auto Scaling is 10.5%, down from 13.4% 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

Erick Karanja

Technical Lead at Cellulant Kenya

Scaling is as easy as hitting a button and setup is straightforward

AWS has already made improvements. In the past, if you provisioned a large EC2 instance and underutilized it, you still paid a premium. Now, AWS encourages using Kubernetes, where you primarily pay for the compute power you actually use in production. There is room for improvement. You might end up paying a high price if you're not careful and you provision a server that's underutilized. AWS has left it to engineers to figure out solutions. If you find the cost too high, you can move to Kubernetes, which might be a better solution for you than large EC2 instances. So, the improvements need to come from the user side, not the provider. Software engineers and engineering teams need to know their limits with EC2 instances. They need to recognize when it's time to transition their applications to Kubernetes. This means building with the cloud in mind from the start, making it easier to move solutions to the cloud without suffering upgrades and integration issues.

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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

"The auto-scaling feature is particularly useful. Additionally, CloudWatch and CloudTrail are also important features for us."

"One of the most important benefits is that a company can optimize resources because Auto Scaling deploys resources when needed. For example, for Black Friday, a company can deploy 100 servers for a couple of days. When Black Friday is over, the company can delete those servers."

"The product is flexible."

"Sometimes, Auto Scaling is more beneficial, and sometimes, Reserved Instances are preferred, especially for longer-term usage."

"The most valuable features include the availability of various services like compute, memory, and database services in the AWS landscape."

"The solution incorporates ease of maintenance and reduction in operational overhead and costs. Patching is also easy."

"Most of what I've deployed are CI/CD pipelines. AWS is scalable. You can always increase or adjust the resources to meet the specific requirements. I also like choosing an instance in any location, preferably the closest one. We don't have any AWS locations in South Africa, but the latency is about the same as hosting in Europe."

"Auto-scaling is a good feature."

More Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling pros

"Fargate itself is a stable product. We are quite satisfied with its performance."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Fargate is beneficial for hosting our solutions and providing workflow management, creating legal documents, and delivering business intelligence."

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

"If you create your deployment with a good set of rules for how to scale in, you can just set it and forget it."

More AWS Fargate pros

Cons

"The solution's pricing is expensive. You pay based on how much you use it, like paying for the time or hours you use the service. There's no need to buy hardware separately."

"If your EC2 instance doesn't boot up, you're in the dark about what's happening. It would be amazing if you could get a view of the console to see the status. There's something called the AWS Console, which is a web portal. I would like to see a virtual screen of an instance that hasn't started properly, so I can see where it crashed."

"The solution's configuration process could be better."

"The solution could improve by having more automation. Nowadays there is a vast variety of automation. Additionally, infrastructure monitoring could improve."

"The support to manage the processes could be better."

"The launch configuration feature doesn't work properly. It needs to improve the load configuration feature along with launch templates. The tool needs to tag feature as well."

"We have found that the sizing in Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is far off. For example, we will see some at one terabyte and the other one is two terabytes. There is nothing between one and two terabytes. Sometimes it's a struggle if I need one and a half, I still am supposed to pay for two. There are five terabytes, six terabytes, and 12 terabytes, and if I need something at eight or nine, I'm still paying 30 to 40 percent more by taking the one which is 12 terabytes. Microsoft Azure does similar sizes but the gap can be more, such as six terabytes, and the next one is 12 terabytes."

"There is room for improvement. You might end up paying a high price if you're not careful and you provision a server that's underutilized."

More Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling cons

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

"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."

"Service computing is not as straightforward compared to other computing services. It requires more effort to use effectively."

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

"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."

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

"AWS Fargate needs improvement in terms of setup complexity."

"If there are any options to manage containers, that would be good. That relates more to the cost point. For example, over the next three months, I'll be making a comparison between solutions like CAST AI and other software-as-a-service platforms that offer Kubernetes management with an emphasis on cost reduction."

More AWS Fargate cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution pricing varies by service region is mid-range."

"The product is expensive."

"The solution's licensing is based on a pay-as-you-go model. You only pay for the resources you use, whether it's RAM, processing power, or storage. So, it's calculated based on the time you use those resources, typically billed in hours or minutes."

"It's cost-effective."

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"The product is cheap."

"Amazon EC2 instances can be very expensive."

"When we want to use more services, we need to pay more. It's a monthly subscription, rather than licensed-based. Pricing or fees for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling could be improved."

More Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling pricing and cost advice

"I rate the price of AWS Fargate a four out of five."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

Real Estate/Law Firm

Financial Services Firm

22%

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 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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?

The pricing of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is moderate. It's not too expensive because we only pay for what we use. While there are cheaper options, the services provided are worth the cost. Previously...

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What needs improvement with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?

While Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is continually updated and has improved over time, the dashboard has become more complex and tricky for new users. The interface was easier to navigate in earlier vers...

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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

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Compared 20% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Apache NiFi vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Compared 6% of the time

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Heroku vs AWS Fargate

Compared 17% of the time

Oracle Compute Cloud Service vs AWS Fargate

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon EC2 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 Auto Scaling

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate

May 2025

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Also Known As

AWS RAM

No data available

Overview

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to conditions you define. ... Dynamic scaling responds to changing demand and predictive scaling automatically schedules the right number of EC2 instances based on predicted demand.

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

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

April 2025

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