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Amazon Elastic Container Service vs Microsoft Azure Container Service comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 Elastic Container Se...
Ranking in Containers as a Service (CaaS)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Container Management (10th)
Microsoft Azure Container S...
Ranking in Containers as a Service (CaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Containers as a Service (CaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon Elastic Container Service is 15.6%, down from 36.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Container Service is 19.5%, down from 25.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Containers as a Service (CaaS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Elastic Container Service15.6%
Microsoft Azure Container Service19.5%
Other64.9%
Containers as a Service (CaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

AG
Lead Developer at Virtual Restaurant Solutions
Starts strong with functionalities but reveals cost limitations
The main challenge with Amazon Elastic Container Service is the significant learning curve. Everything mentioned took months to understand. It is not for the faint of heart. Though they have graphical interfaces and numerous dashboards that help create all the services graphically, learning to use Bash can be challenging. Because these are headless servers by nature, there is no graphical interface. It is not similar to Windows where you can hit the start button and look for your program, or Mac where you can look for programs on your desktop. Instead, users must understand this new paradigm of a Linux headless server, which requires using command-based prompts for builds and development.
MV
Architect at Hexaware Technologies Limited
Has supported seamless microservices deployment and improved cost control through managed infrastructure
Microsoft Azure Container Service includes being a very mature tool and a fully managed service, making it ready to use. You can simply opt for it and use it. As a managed service, you don't need to take care of the managed components. You only need to take care of whatever user-space you are managing. All the managed components are taken care of by Microsoft. They provide support for different upgrade operations, and anything related to managed components such as the controller nodes, those things they can take care of automatically. This is actually a very challenging task that is handled by Microsoft itself. Microsoft Azure Container Service has positively impacted my organization as it is a very mature tool and, when using the Azure platform, it's highly secure. It can offer end-to-end encryption and take care of all kinds of compliance. It also offers Azure Defender for Cloud that can provide security recommendations on a daily basis, making it a very mature product.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution is easy to scale and implement and provides performance monitoring and management tools."
"I like the per-second billing."
"The product's most valuable feature is service discovery functionality. It is an excellent feature impacting cost reduction."
"The most valuable aspect is that Amazon Elastic Container Service allows the opportunity for low cost, as it is less expensive than EC2, to get used to all these concepts, paradigms and techniques."
"The solution is simple to access."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"The tool helps us with maneuverability. Its most valuable feature is autoscaling."
"Amazon EC2 Container Service has multiple valuable features like load balancers and autoscalers."
"It's a great product if you are in a Microsoft environment."
"The most valuable features are that it is simple, and the compression of the data."
"The most valuable feature is that you don't have to maintain the infrastructure."
"Microsoft Azure Container Service helps to optimize resources and save costs by allowing our product to handle it through this containerization method."
"Microsoft Azure Container Service has a good level of stability."
"Visualization is the most important feature."
"The product makes things easier since it's self-managed. Therefore, there is less administration workload and operational costs."
"Storage is one of the most beneficial features of cloud providers, specifically Azure because when you are working in their cloud environment, you can easily use a storage interface and a storage object that is provided by Microsoft Azure. In a local environment, you have to be involved in establishing and setting up distributed storage file systems for containers which are very difficult and complex. In a cloud environment, you are not concerned about the storage and the dashboard provides you with storage objects with high availability."
 

Cons

"The existing domain-joined capability the solution provides during the initial boot-up of the compute should be streamlined and made a little robust."
"While it is generally stable, there have been some issues, especially when working on client projects where troubleshooting was needed."
"The solution's pricing could be improved."
"They could provide easier options for third-party integrations similar to internal AWS services."
"Support could be better with response time and knowledge of staff."
"The solution's stability is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The product should improve its price."
"The orchestration of the workloads running in ECS needs improvement."
"In the future, I would like to see it generalized and have the ability to better integrate with open-source tools."
"f Microsoft Azure can provide GUI dashboards for end-users and administrators to work separately to manage all the Kubernetes clusters without a need to connect to Azure environments and through CLI it would be better."
"The customization is an area that needs improvement."
"In terms of the container strategy, they need to make it more compliant with the Linux OS."
"Standard support could be more helpful and responsive."
"I wasn't very impressed with the documentation."
"Since the product is fully managed, it is expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the product's pricing an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"I don't know the exact amount we were charged for our use of ECS, but I do know that it can be costly, especially when there is a bug or an error caused by default configurations."
"Amazon EC2 Container Service is worth the money."
"Amazon Elastic Container Service's price is good."
"Licensing can be purchased directly from AWS or used with existing licenses, depending on the company's preference. The licensing structure is complex and depends on factors such as machine size, number of processors, and Container size. Companies have dedicated staff members managing license considerations full-time to find the most cost-effective options. Also, I have seen some companies opt for a combination of AWS and Azure, using more of Azure for Microsoft licenses due to potentially lower costs compared to AWS."
"We have to pay a monthly licensing fee for Amazon EC2 Container Service."
"The solution's cost could be reduced."
"Although AWS has successfully captured over 60 percent of the market in the cloud part, the tool is competitively way cheaper for the resources it provides compared to the other solutions."
"Microsoft Azure Container Service has costs but in the container environment, there are no costs because it is open source and we are using Docker as the container engine in the master and worker nodes established in the Azure environment."
"The costs depend on the resources that you use, and there is a cost-management system to help calculate it."
"The solution's pricing is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Government
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Elastic Container Service?
Implementing the product has helped me monitor the parameters. I utilize tools like CloudWatch and AWS systems to track these parameters. If any issues arise, I alert our developer team to address ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Elastic Container Service?
The solution must improve backup and compatibility around OS like Windows and Mac.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Container Service?
The experience with pricing for Microsoft Azure Container Service depends on the use case and current workload. Based upon that, it can offer different types of SKU sizes because under the hood it ...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Container Service?
Sometimes the integration could be better between the Azure environment; there is some tweaking needed when building Docker files and creating mount points, and it is not always that easy. From a G...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Azure Container Service?
My use case for Microsoft Azure Container Service is for creating applications for internal use; it could be security-related or a service of some sort. The source code might be available in GitHub...
 

Also Known As

Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2 Container Service
MS Azure Container Service
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ubisoft, GoPro, TIBCO, Remind
Esri, BIO CATCH
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Elastic Container Service vs. Microsoft Azure Container Service and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.