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AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 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
6.4
Investing in Amazon EC2 offers cost savings, operational efficiency, flexibility, and scalability, reducing traditional server management and expenses.
Sentiment score
8.0
AWS Fargate's serverless features boost ROI, scalability, and cost-efficiency, enhancing business operations and customer experience.
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%.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon EC2 support varies; premium users often praise responsiveness, while free support users experience slower responses and mixed satisfaction.
Sentiment score
7.1
AWS Fargate users appreciate support, proactive engagement, and smooth operation, with room for improvement in communication.
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.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon EC2 is praised for its robust, flexible, and cost-efficient scalability features, despite some challenges with instance updates.
Sentiment score
8.4
AWS Fargate offers efficient auto-scaling, high performance, and flexibility, effectively managing large-scale operations and fluctuating demands.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Amazon EC2 is highly reliable, offering features like auto-scaling and load balancing to ensure stability and dependability.
Sentiment score
8.2
AWS Fargate is stable and reliable for moderate traffic, rated nine out of ten with proper configuration and Lambda function use.
 

Room For Improvement

EC2 users seek affordable pricing, better AWS integration, enhanced support, easier customization, scalability, and improved interoperability with other systems.
AWS Fargate is costly, hard to configure, requiring expertise, with users desiring better documentation, scaling, monitoring, and error handling.
For a company that does not require complexity or managing Kubernetes clusters, AWS Fargate is a great way to go.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 pricing is complex, with variable costs and options requiring careful planning to manage budgets and ensure cost-effectiveness.
AWS Fargate is valued for enterprise flexibility despite higher costs, with discounts easing expenses compared to ECS and Lambda.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 is favored for its scalability, reliability, cost-effectiveness, robust security, and seamless AWS integration with minimal setup.
AWS Fargate simplifies deployment with serverless architecture, minimizing management and costs, while enhancing efficiency and supporting scalable cloud-native microservices.
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.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2
Ranking in Compute Service
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Fargate
Ranking in Compute Service
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 6.5%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Fargate is 12.9%, down from 18.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

KatlegoMabila - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Subrata Mukherjee - PeerSpot reviewer
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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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

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.
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?
The main thing that needs improvement is the cost. Other than that, there is nothing that needs improvement.
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?
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 wit...
What advice do you have for others considering AWS Fargate?
My team hasn't used AWS Fargate's capability for automatic scaling in our applications, even when they knew about it; they were very new to using these features. AWS Fargate's security features wer...
 

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: July 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.