AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2 comparison

Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate are both solutions in the Compute Service category. Amazon EC2 is ranked #6 with an average rating of 9.1, while AWS Fargate is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6. Amazon EC2 holds a 5.1% mindshare in CS, compared to AWS Fargate’s 13.4% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon EC2 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of AWS Fargate users who would recommend it.

Amazon EC2

Read 67 Amazon EC2 reviews

895 Views
427 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

AWS Fargate

Read 18 AWS Fargate reviews

2,203 Views
1,215 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon EC2

AWS Fargate

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate compete in the cloud infrastructure space, providing scalable and flexible solutions. AWS Fargate seems to have an advantage in ease of use due to its serverless architecture, requiring less management intervention compared to EC2.

Features: Amazon EC2 offers quick instance provisioning, variety in instance types, and seamless integration capabilities. It supports both Windows and Linux systems and allows custom configurations. AWS Fargate delivers simplicity with its serverless architecture, focusing on container deployment and management without the need for EC2 instances. Its integration with other AWS services enhances its capability to scale applications automatically.

Room for Improvement: Amazon EC2 could simplify customization and reduce instance startup time. Better pricing clarity and network configuration would enhance its offering. AWS Fargate needs easier setup processes and improved monitoring features. Its cost management and application scaling integrations could also use refinement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon EC2 is adaptable, supporting public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments. While it offers excellent technical support, integration support is sometimes lacking. AWS Fargate simplifies public cloud application deployments without infrastructure management. Its customer service is commendable, especially noted for prompt email assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon EC2's multifaceted pricing includes pay-as-you-go and reserved instances, but it may become expensive if not efficiently managed. AWS Fargate operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. While potentially costlier for smaller applications, it offers savings in infrastructure management, making it valuable for enterprises seeking simplified management.

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2

June 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

Ranking in Compute Service

6th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

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

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 5.1%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Fargate is 13.4%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Compute Service

Featured Reviews

KatlegoMabila

Senior AWS Account Manager at Silicon Overdrive

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.

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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 ability to quickly spin up instances on demand with zero upfront costs or infrastructure is the most valuable for me."

"This is a user-friendly solution."

"The most valuable feature is autoscaling."

"The best features of Amazon EC2 are its high performance and security."

"I can quickly create a VM instance with just one click."

"EC2 has the typical advantages of using the cloud. It's easy to provision and set up."

"EC2 is secure and stable, and we have no complaints about it on AWS."

"Amazon EC2 is highly scalable."

More Amazon EC2 pros

"It allows for focusing on applications instead of managing infrastructure."

"The most valuable feature of AWS Fargate is its ease of use."

"AWS Fargate is an easy-to-use tool to simplify setup. You only pay for the resources you use. If you need to quickly create, delete, or scale applications without managing resources like EC2 instances, Fargate is the best service to use."

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

"AWS Fargate has definitely impacted our organization positively because before that, we couldn't accommodate the workload requirements as flexibly as we can with Fargate."

"The most valuable feature of AWS Fargate is its ability to run on demand without the constant run time of basic resources."

"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 monitoring part could be improved. When we're building and configuring things or doing database replication, EC2's monitoring could provide more information. It's hard to find the information I need in the graphs they provide."

"Regional acceleration could improve. If I am hosting a website and I want the experience to be faster they should have this feature to allow for increased speeds."

"An area for improvement in Amazon EC2 is the cost because it's a bit higher than competitor pricing."

"The only issue with EC2 is that it makes it difficult to install an LLS certificate on your WordPress website that you have deployed inside that virtual machine. That becomes complicated."

"Technical itself could be a bit more helpful, especially when it comes to integration assistance. When we talk to the technical team, often it's some issue with integration and they'll tell us to talk to the other company. Often, the other company will look at everything and not see an issue from their end and then we are at an impasse."

"In terms of improvement, they could build some client-side desktop tools that provide easier connectivity to Amazon."

"It's not the best of the best because we still have issues with downtime. We still have issues with the cost of storage, with all these different instance styles, and how much it costs. They cost an arm and a leg the higher you go."

"The scalability could improve."

More Amazon EC2 cons

"As I have not worked with Fargate extensively, I do not have any specific improvements."

"Sometimes, Fargate can be really hard to configure."

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

"AWS Fargate's security features weren't the most important criteria or value we got from AWS Fargate."

"I would like to see the older dashboard instead of the newer version. I don't like the new dashboard."

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

"Challenges include higher costs for smaller clients, limited control over underlying infrastructure customization, and potential latencies during task startup."

"There is a tool named Compose that helps in converting the Docker Compose file into a Kubernetes file. For ECS and Fargate, AWS reads a Dockerfile and helps with conversion. However, I am uncertain if it's ready for deployment after conversion."

More AWS Fargate cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price can be improved."

"The license fee for Amazon EC2 is higher than its competitors."

"When we did the deployment of Amazon EC2 we found it to be less expensive than other solutions."

"For our usage, the cost is approximately $20,000 to $23,000 per month."

"The clients have found the billing of Amazon EC2 good, but the price could be less high. There is a monthly subscription to use the solution."

"It has helped to reduce costs with infrastructure."

"Amazon EC2 has a pay-as-you-use cost model."

"The solution has different pricing models, and its cost differs when you purchase it for one year or three years."

More Amazon EC2 pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

12%

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?

The scalability and elasticity are helpful.

See all answers

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

Amazon EC2 is a bit expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?

The main thing that needs improvement is the cost. Other than that, there is nothing that needs improvement.

See all answers

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?

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 28% of the time

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Compared 19% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

Google App Engine vs Amazon EC2

Compared 12% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EC2

Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 40% of the time

Heroku vs AWS Fargate

Compared 19% of the time

AWS Batch vs AWS Fargate

Compared 9% of the time

Apache NiFi vs AWS Fargate

Compared 9% of the time

Apache Spark vs AWS Fargate

Compared 5% of the time

More AWS Fargate Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate

June 2025

Download AWS Fargate product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2

No data available

Overview

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate them from common failure scenarios.

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

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Buyer's Guide

AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2

June 2025

Free Report: AWS Fargate vs. Amazon EC2

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