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AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 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
6.5
Amazon EC2 reduces long-term costs through scalability, efficient resource management, and decreased infrastructure expenses, enhancing innovation and agility.
Sentiment score
7.0
AWS Fargate enhances organizational efficiency and customer experience with cost-effective, scalable, serverless solutions, increasing operational capacity and reducing processing costs.
I would say I have saved more than a week with Amazon EC2 compared to my previous on-premises setup.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The pay-as-you-go pricing model of AWS Fargate was one of the major drivers for us to move there because we reduced costs while increasing the quality of the processing services by about 30%.
Head of Infrastructure at Teamcore
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Amazon EC2 customer service satisfaction varies; premium support praised, free support criticized, and experiences differ based on needs.
Sentiment score
6.8
AWS Fargate offers highly rated support and documentation, with proactive engagement enhancing user experience for all customers.
Even though we didn't contract support, every two weeks I had a 30-minute meeting with a cloud architect from AWS to help our team use different products of AWS, especially with SageMaker for a forecasting algorithm we were developing.
Head of Infrastructure at Teamcore
For pro support, AWS charges additional fees.
Network and system administrator at AyanWorks
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon EC2's scalability impresses users with autoscaling, resource flexibility, and efficient cost-performance optimization for diverse organizational needs.
Sentiment score
8.4
AWS Fargate efficiently handles demand fluctuations with dynamic scaling, maintaining high user satisfaction and scalability for containerized environments.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EC2 is highly stable and reliable, with minor issues mitigated by best practices like multiple availability zones.
Sentiment score
8.2
AWS Fargate offers high stability and reliability, ideal for low-traffic applications, but may not suit large-scale traffic.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EC2 faces criticism for complexity, high costs, and limited integration, with calls for better automation and innovation.
AWS Fargate needs cost efficiency, easier setup, improved documentation, better monitoring, scaling, and UI enhancements for user-friendliness.
I have heard from multiple people that if you have an Amazon EC2 instance running and you stop it, the billing continues unless you terminate the Amazon EC2 instance.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I think improvements can be made to Amazon EC2 by increasing the memory, offering more instance types, and including GPUs as mentioned in the keynote.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
For a company that does not require complexity or managing Kubernetes clusters, AWS Fargate is a great way to go.
Head of Infrastructure at Teamcore
AWS Fargate is pretty straightforward for simple tasks and it should remain this way; an additional feature would make it complex and possibly not so stable.
Senior DevOps Engineer at Blankfactor
They need to improve some UI-based interaction.
Network and system administrator at AyanWorks
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 pricing is seen as cost-effective but complex, urging simplification for easier cost management and estimation.
AWS Fargate offers flexible consumption-based pricing, valuable for enterprises, though costlier than alternatives, with discounts improving affordability.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 offers scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency with strong security, making it ideal for diverse workloads and AWS integration.
AWS Fargate offers serverless, auto-scaling container deployment, boosting productivity and cost-efficiency by removing infrastructure management concerns.
With the cloud, deployment is easy, and within a minute, we can deploy the server and give it to the developers so they can work on it right away after deployment.
Architect at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Amazon EC2 offers flexibility.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
It's very fast in terms of scaling my containers; it's much faster than other solutions.
Senior DevOps Engineer at Blankfactor
What I find best about AWS Fargate is that compared to deploying containers on EC2, where we need to check everything manually such as uptime, error logs, and other issues, AWS Fargate manages all these aspects automatically.
Network and system administrator at AyanWorks
One of the best features of AWS Fargate is that it was useful for us because we didn't require to run container workloads and we didn't need to deal with the management of a Kubernetes cluster directly, and the ability to run those workloads just in a scheduled manner is also a great feature.
Head of Infrastructure at Teamcore
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2
Ranking in Compute Service
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Fargate
Ranking in Compute Service
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
20
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 is 11.3%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Fargate is 9.8%, down from 15.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
AWS Fargate9.8%
Amazon EC211.3%
Other78.9%
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

BS
AWS Architect at Corvit Networks
Elasticity and auto scaling enhance performance and cost efficiency
Amazon EC2 features that I have found the most valuable and useful include elasticity and scalability, a variety of instance types, pay-as-you-go pricing, security, isolation, AMIs, integration with other services, Spot Instances, and high availability of reliability, user data, and EC2 metadata. These include Amazon EC2 images, image builder, and auto scaling as instance types, pricing models, and security with VPC, IAM roles, and security groups. The most beneficial features of Amazon EC2 for cloud operations are EC2 Auto Scaling with Elastic Load Balancing, which allows scale up and scale down, maintains high availability, and optimizes costs. Auto Scaling provides fault tolerance, performance optimization, and cost efficiency. A real-world benefit is that an instance automatically handles the load. When traffic drops, it reduces the number of instances. Other highly beneficial Amazon EC2 features include Spot Instances, multiple instance types, custom AMIs, VPC security groups, strong network and access security, and Elastic IPs, which are the static IPs for dynamic instances.
JG
Head of Infrastructure at Teamcore
Flexibility in workload accommodation and supportive user experience drive efficiency
Currently, I think that the program is great the way it is, and maybe we use less than 50% of the current features of the platform. For example, we have been evaluating Dask with Python to work with distributed processing, and I don't know if AWS Fargate could be used to build Dask clusters, which would be great because there are many people on our team working with Python workloads. Having something that can manage distributed processing using Dask in a containerized deployment could be valuable. For a company that does not require complexity or managing Kubernetes clusters, AWS Fargate is a great way to go with the use of containers in a simple way, providing the power of containers and scalability without the complexity of going into Kubernetes.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
9%
Transportation Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
7%
Government
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise28
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EC2?
The scalability and elasticity are helpful.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2?
Advice on Setup Cost, Pricing, and Licensing for EC2: 1. Start Small & Use Free Tier if Possible For new users or small applications, the AWS Free Tier offers limited EC2 usage free for 12 mont...
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?
I think improvements can be made to Amazon EC2 by increasing the memory, offering more instance types, and including GPUs as mentioned in the keynote. In the future, I think you could explore quant...
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...
What needs improvement with AWS Fargate?
They need to improve some UI-based interaction.
What advice do you have for others considering AWS Fargate?
Using AWS Fargate is becoming easier as the platform improves. On a scale of 1-10, I rate AWS Fargate a 7.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2 and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.