Amazon EKS vs Kubernetes comparison

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Amazon EKS

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Kubernetes and Amazon EKS compete in the cloud container management category. Kubernetes offers broader flexibility in deployment environments, while Amazon EKS provides tighter AWS integration, giving each an edge depending on the user's needs.

Features: Kubernetes excels in scalability and flexibility across various environments, offering strong automation and container management with self-healing capabilities. It supports major cloud providers, enhancing its adaptability. Amazon EKS integrates seamlessly with AWS services, offering an efficient managed platform for deploying and scaling containerized applications. It features robust auto-scaling and orchestration but emphasizes AWS service integration.

Room for Improvement: Kubernetes users report challenges with its interface and significant learning curve, alongside integration issues with some tools. They seek improved dashboards, network policies, and built-in monitoring tools. Amazon EKS is criticized for high costs and a less intuitive management interface, with common requests for better node management and enhanced out-of-the-box monitoring and logging.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Kubernetes supports flexible deployment across hybrid, private, and public clouds with extensive community support, albeit limited direct customer assistance. Amazon EKS primarily operates in the public cloud with strong AWS integration. EKS users benefit from AWS support but often request better user interfaces and more responsive customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Kubernetes is open-source and generally free, primarily incurring costs through infrastructure and support services, offering cost-effectiveness at scale. Amazon EKS operates on a pay-as-you-go model, with costs based on resource usage. It may be more expensive for small setups but offers strong ROI for users within the AWS ecosystem, enhancing resource management reliability and efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon EKS vs. Kubernetes Report (Updated: September 2025).

Amazon EKS vs. Kubernetes

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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 EKS

Ranking in Container Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Container Security (12th)

Kubernetes

Ranking in Container Management

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Amazon EKS is 11.9%, down from 14.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kubernetes is 6.2%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon EKS	11.9%
Kubernetes	6.2%
Other	81.9%

Container Management

Featured Reviews

Sameer Mirza

Aws DevOps Engineer at Nova Techset Ltd

Managed service ensures efficient monitoring and security with outstanding scalability

Amazon EKS's self-healing nodes help minimize administrative burdens in my organization by automating through all of Amazon EKS. We have used multiple types of automation tools which we directly integrate for the deployment purpose of the Amazon EKS cluster. We have integrated them with the Docker side of Amazon EKS, allowing the container service to run over there, so it is directly deployed for the administrative level of the Amazon EKS cluster. The benefits I have seen from Amazon EKS include a fully managed Kubernetes service for the control plane, the API server level, etcd scheduler, and controller. There's no need to worry about patching, scaling, and maintaining the master node. There is high availability over multiple availability zone control panels, and security compliance is guaranteed for IAM; AWS IAM users authenticate and access the control from the support VPC isolation and security group network policy. The integration with IAM helps enhance our authentication process because IAM basically helps with access. Nobody can enter with any kind of access, and any kind of vulnerability will be showing in my application. If I set an IAM user to that Amazon EKS cluster, that user will have limited access, and that application will run through that IAM user only. It is very beneficial, and for security purposes, it's also important because vulnerabilities will be found and block all the vulnerability and security issues if you set an IAM user to the Amazon EKS cluster with limited access.

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Venu Boddu

AWS DevOps Engineer at Hexaware Technologies Limited

Manage infrastructure automation and smooth application deployment with robust auto-scaling capabilities

Kubernetes is highly valuable for its node-based setup, which allows for the running of multiple pods. This feature is essential for infrastructure automation and application deployment. Kubernetes also offers rollback control and auto-scaling capabilities, which are crucial for maintaining an application's availability even if nodes or pods go down. Additionally, Kubernetes supports load balancing to distribute traffic efficiently across multiple pods.

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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

"AWS cloud services are flexible and have thorough documentation. AWS also has data centers all over the world."

"Amazon EKS is very stable, and when properly configured, I rate it ten out of ten."

"The best features of Amazon EKS are simplicity and the management portal; it is a neat solution, so you don't have to fiddle around with too many open-source tools."

"The value of Amazon EKS for us is due to our microservice-level architecture, where we need to automate and have a fast, scalable application, allowing us to directly configure the Amazon EKS cluster in the application, which will make it very easy to run our application smoothly and scalably."

"The self-healing feature on Amazon EKS identifies when one of the nodes goes down and spawns a new node, degrading the older node, which helps to minimize our administrative burdens by reducing one stage of complexity on our SRE team."

"The solution is easy-to-set up."

"You can save in terms of time because you can raise up a cluster or more nodes, and you can raise up the storage of the particular node in a few minutes."

"The best features of Amazon EKS are simplicity and the management portal."

More Amazon EKS pros

"A good interface, better than comparable solutions."

"Offers automated rollouts and storage orchestration"

"The tool's most valuable feature is the auto-scaling feature. However, Kubernetes is not used alone; it is part of a complete deployment pipeline integrated with DevOps. This pipeline includes automation and deployment capabilities."

"The most valuable feature is the Zero Touch Operations, which involves a new way of performing operations and support. We do not have to do maintenance, the operations are very simple."

"The ease of use if the solution is a very valuable aspect for us."

"With the use of our blueprint, my experience with the initial setup has been a ten out of ten where one is difficult and ten is easy."

"This product has a rich toolset from the community including CNI plug-ins, Helm packages, operators, dashboards, various integrations, etc."

"Scalability is the most valuable feature."

More Kubernetes pros

Cons

"The main area for improvement in Amazon EKS relates to master node control. When setting up a Kubernetes cluster independently, you have access to the master, but with AWS, you do not have control over it."

"They should include some essential configuration features to it."

"Improvements could include better support and pricing, which is always important."

"There is room for improvement in stability. I faced some problems with the App."

"I'd like improved traffic handling and additional application details within the system."

"There is room for improvement in the interface of Amazon EKS."

"Improvement is needed in reducing the complexity of using EKS. While services like EC2 are user-friendly, EKS and ECS present a steep learning curve with significant responsibilities."

"There is room for improvement in making Amazon EKS less error-prone when writing on the YAML file."

More Amazon EKS cons

"This product should have a more advanced built-in scheduler that uses real application metrics in the scheduling strategy."

"This solution is not very easy to use."

"It would be very interesting if they could introduce a template engine to set dynamic values in the deployment time. It would be ideal if it could be native in Kubernetes as it would be much easier."

"I'm a beginner, and I recently started working with Kubernetes. As of now, I don't see any bugs. However, it would be better if it could be deployed without coding."

"The solution does not work with third-party tools, or alternative cloud providers, which limits the extent that we can utilize it to."

"Kubernetes can be complicated to understand. Improved documentation would help in gaining scalable knowledge and making it more understandable."

"It increases developers' overhead."

"The setup and operation of the product should be simplified."

More Kubernetes cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon EKS is very cost-effective."

"The product is available at such a huge scale in the market since the resources that are offered under the tool are competitively priced and available at a much cheaper rate compared to other solutions."

"Cloud based pay-as-you-go pricing"

"The solution is more expensive than other competitors and does not require a license."

"Amazon EKS is expensive."

"The solution's pricing is fair enough and a little less costly."

"My company paid for the license."

"The product pricing depends on the specific requirements."

More Amazon EKS pricing and cost advice

"There is no licensing fee."

"If you have a solid AKS and a solid DevOps process, you'll automatically get an ROI, not just in terms of cost but also in how quickly you can see your business application progress."

"I would say the solution is worth the money, but it depends on the required workloads, the type of workload, and the scaling requirements etc."

"Kubernetes is open source and is an orchestration platform. It is a cost effective solution and its pricing depends on your company and how you use it"

"We use the solution's open-source version."

"Google Kubernetes Engine is free in the simplest setup, AWS Kubernetes Engine costs about $50 (depending on the region), in a three master setup, so it's almost the same as the cost of the EC2 instances and it's totally fine from my point of view."

"Kubernetes is an open-source solution that can be free. We have some distribution with licenses, such OpenShift and Tucows in Amazon. They are billing services."

"There is a license to use Kubernetes."

More Kubernetes pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

11%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	38

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	25
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	47

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EKS?

The product's most valuable features are scalability, observability, and performance.

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

The majority of my time setup cost was very affordable, taking just two hours. It was easy as I didn't have to worry about setting all the infrastructure underneath, just using what's there. This s...

What needs improvement with Amazon EKS?

When we need to deploy the application, we require a large number of instances. Therefore, I hope and believe I will not face out-of-capacity issues in AWS, especially since I have not yet experien...

What do you like most about Kubernetes?

There are many good features. I feel that the scale-out features, like replica sets, are very good. The number of running containers can be autoscaled.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kubernetes?

Since we use Kubernetes on-premises, the costs are related to our expertise and the personnel we hire.

What needs improvement with Kubernetes?

Although we face issues when migrating to new versions of Kubernetes, such as misunderstandings on using new features or integration with proxy services, these issues can be addressed with proper p...

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs Amazon EKS

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Compared 2% of the time

HashiCorp Nomad vs Amazon EKS

Compared 1% of the time

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Compared 33% of the time

Portainer vs Kubernetes

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) vs Kubernetes

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 8% of the time

Rancher Labs vs Kubernetes

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Amazon EKS

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Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service

Overview

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service. Customers such as Intel, Snap, Intuit, GoDaddy, and Autodesk trust EKS to run their most sensitive and mission critical applications because of its security, reliability, and scalability.

EKS is the best place to run Kubernetes for several reasons. First, you can choose to run your EKS clusters using AWS Fargate, which is serverless compute for containers. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design. Second, EKS is deeply integrated with services such as Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling Groups, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), providing you a seamless experience to monitor, scale, and load-balance your applications. Third, EKS integrates with AWS App Mesh and provides a Kubernetes native experience to consume service mesh features and bring rich observability, traffic controls and security features to applications. Additionally, EKS provides a scalable and highly-available control plane that runs across multiple availability zones to eliminate a single point of failure.
EKS runs upstream Kubernetes and is certified Kubernetes conformant so you can leverage all benefits of open source tooling from the community. You can also easily migrate any standard Kubernetes application to EKS without needing to refactor your code.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

Sample Customers

GoDaddy, Pearson, FICO, Intuit, Verizon, Honeywell, Logicworks, RetailMeNot, LogMeIn, Conde Nast, mercari, Trainline, Axway

China unicom, NetEase Cloud, Nav, AppDirect

Amazon EKS vs. Kubernetes