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Amazon EC2 vs Amazon Virtual Private Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 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
5.7
Effective use of Amazon VPC, especially with appropriate EC2 instances, yields significant financial returns, particularly beneficial for startups.
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
 

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
Amazon VPC support receives mixed reviews, praised for expertise but facing issues with communication delays and need for self-navigation.
The technical support from Amazon has been excellent.
Cloud and Network Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
When we use business support, the availability of the engineers is very good.
CloudOps Expert at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
 

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
7.8
Amazon VPC offers excellent scalability with tools like Auto Scaling, efficiently managing demand for companies of all sizes.
The scalability and ability to expand within Amazon Virtual Private Cloud performs very well.
Cloud and Network Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

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
8.4
Amazon VPC is praised for security and uptime, with minimal downtime and quick resolution of configuration issues ensuring reliability.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EC2 faces criticism for complexity, high costs, and limited integration, with calls for better automation and innovation.
Amazon VPC users face challenges with compatibility, usability, pricing, and integration, desiring improved documentation, security, and customization.
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
It would be great if we could use the AWS Direct Connect in Mongolia.
Unitel Group at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Based on my experience, there are aspects of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud that could be improved to enhance the solution.
Cloud and Network Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 pricing is seen as cost-effective but complex, urging simplification for easier cost management and estimation.
Enterprise users find Amazon VPC pricing complex and costly, but competitive when extensively using AWS products with minimal configuration setup.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 offers scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency with strong security, making it ideal for diverse workloads and AWS integration.
Amazon VPC offers security, scalability, and easy integration with AWS, featuring flexible pricing and customizable policies for efficient management.
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
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud allows the nodes to talk to each other, enhances our security with its security group feature, and the network access list can isolate attackers, while the subnet service organizes our nodes' network topology and provides access to customers.
Unitel Group at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
The ability to define and work with subnets is particularly helpful in managing the networking environment.
Cloud and Network Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
For security and ACLs, Routing Tables, route tables, subnet, and subnetting, these are very useful functions.
CloudOps Expert at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2
Ranking in Compute Service
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
Ranking in Compute Service
8th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 12.5%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud is 2.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon EC212.5%
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud2.6%
Other84.9%
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.
reviewer2754069 - PeerSpot reviewer
Unitel Group at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Network flexibility and security have been enhanced
The most beneficial feature of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud for our use case is the site-to-site connection, allowing our data centers to connect to the AWS EC2 nodes, which is currently the most useful feature for us. The Elastic Network Interface is the main component of our networking services within Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, allowing us to connect to our nodes and enabling all node-to-node communication, node-to-customer, and customer-to-node interactions. It is a really helpful feature for us. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud allows the nodes to talk to each other, enhances our security with its security group feature, and the network access list can isolate attackers, while the subnet service organizes our nodes' network topology and provides access to customers. It is a really great feature, and I would highly recommend it.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
8%
Transportation Company
7%
University
7%
No data available
 

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 Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise16
 

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 needs improvement with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud?
Looking for a cloud native scheduler services for ec2 and rds instances within aws virtual private network. That would help to put our instances down in the non business hours very effectively rath...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
Amazon VPC
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EC2 vs. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,797 professionals have used our research since 2012.