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Amazon EC2 vs Apache NiFi 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
6.3
Amazon EC2 offers cost-effective flexibility, reducing costs and deployment time, justifying investment through increased efficiency and agility.
Sentiment score
4.8
Apache NiFi users experience significant time savings and improved efficiency, although exact cost benefits aren't always quantifiable.
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
Thanks to improvements on both our side in how we run processes and enhancements to Apache NiFi, we have reduced the time commitment to almost not needing to interact with Apache NiFi except for minor queue-clearance tasks, allowing it to run smoothly.
Data Engineer at The Kudelski Group
It supports not just ETL but also ELT, allowing us to save significant time.
Team Lead Technical Specialist (Production Support) at a recreational facilities/services company with 11-50 employees
There may be return on investment based on the technology and easily moving our workloads onto Apache NiFi from our previous system.
Data Consultant at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Amazon EC2 customer service is well-regarded, with premium support praised, though integration assistance may have some issues.
Sentiment score
5.7
Apache NiFi users find support adequate, using documentation and forums, with mixed reviews on official support and positive Cloudera experiences.
I would rate technical support from Amazon a 10, as we have on-prem AWS experts.
Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the AWS support team a seven.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
The customer support is really good, and they are helpful whenever concerns are posted, responding immediately.
Cloud Data Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Customer support for Apache NiFi has been excellent, with minimal response times whenever we raise cases that cannot be directly addressed by logs.
Team Lead Technical Specialist (Production Support) at a recreational facilities/services company with 11-50 employees
I would rate the customer support of Apache NiFi a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Partner at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EC2 offers scalable, flexible, and reliable auto-scaling capabilities, despite challenges with instance type switching, benefiting large deployments.
Sentiment score
6.7
Apache NiFi's scalability varies; some users succeed with clusters, while others struggle without Kubernetes, impacting implementation.
Depending on the workload we process, it remains stable since at the end of the day, it is just used as an orchestration tool that triggers the job while the heavy lifting is done on Spark servers.
Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Scaling up is fairly straightforward, provided you manage configurations effectively.
Data Engineer at The Kudelski Group
Based on the workload, more nodes can be added to make a bigger cluster, which enhances the cluster whenever needed.
Cloud Data Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EC2 offers reliable and stable performance with robust infrastructure, though minor issues may arise from misconfigurations or availability zones.
Sentiment score
7.4
Apache NiFi is generally stable but may face occasional crashes and reliability challenges, especially in distributed environments.
It is somewhat more reliable compared to Azure.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
I have seen Apache NiFi crashing at times, which is one of the issues we have faced in production.
Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Apache NiFi is stable in most cases.
Data Consultant at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek clearer pricing, better documentation, intuitive interfaces, seamless integration, and improved support for Amazon EC2's complex setup and scalability.
Apache NiFi needs improved integration, UI, scalability, security features, and seamless CI/CD processes for enhanced usability and efficiency.
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
There was not proper documentation on how to install the patch managers and automate patching with System Managers.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
Apache NiFi should have APIs or connectors that can connect seamlessly to other external entities, whether in the cloud or on-premises, creating a plug-and-play mechanism.
Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
The history of processed files should be more readable so that not only the centralized teams managing Apache NiFi but also application folks who are new to the platform can read how a specific document is traversing through Apache NiFi.
Team Lead Technical Specialist (Production Support) at a recreational facilities/services company with 11-50 employees
The initial error did not indicate it was related to memory or size limitations but appeared as a parsing error or something similar.
Data Engineer at The Kudelski Group
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 offers flexible pricing but can be costly for high workloads and larger projects compared to competitors.
Apache NiFi is an open-source solution with no setup costs, offering time-saving efficiencies despite potential integration expenses.
The licensing fees for Amazon EC2 are affordable, especially for lower tiers where there are fewer requirements or where the load is very low for product development.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
The pricing in Italy is considered a little bit high, but the product is worth it.
Partner at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 offers scalable compute power with flexible configurations, high availability, strong security, and cost-effective, seamless cloud deployment.
Apache NiFi simplifies data flow orchestration with drag-and-drop features, scalability, and integration, enhancing productivity and reliability.
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
The main benefits Amazon EC2 provides for me as an end user are cost savings, as they are more OpEx costs rather than CapEx for us.
Consultant at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Amazon EC2 offers flexibility.
Senior Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Apache NiFi has positively impacted my organization by definitely bridging the gap between the on-premises and cloud interaction until we find a solution to open the firewall for cloud components to directly interact with on-premises services.
Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Development has improved with a reduction in time spent being the main benefit; before we needed a matter of days to create the ingestion flows, but now it only takes a couple of hours to configure.
Senior Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The ease of use in Apache NiFi has helped my team because anyone can learn how to use it in a short amount of time, so we were able to get a lot of work done.
Data Consultant at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2
Ranking in Compute Service
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
73
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apache NiFi
Ranking in Compute Service
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 13.7%, up from 5.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache NiFi is 7.7%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon EC213.7%
Apache NiFi7.7%
Other78.6%
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.
YV
architect with 51-200 employees
Unified data flows have simplified large-scale ingestion and have improved SLA reliability
Improvements can be made in the way of the UI. From the deployment perspective, Git configurations are available in 2.6 versions and 2.0 and later versions of Apache NiFi. Before 2.0, templates had to be created and stored in Apache NiFi Registry, which is available. However, templates still need to be imported and exported manually if moving from one environment to another environment. Even in 2.0 versions, although GitHub configurations are available, how it will function needs to be evaluated. Seamless CI/CD deployments are somewhat tricky and challenging when it comes to Apache NiFi with the proper approvals, moving that flow to another environment, and giving the proper RBAC controls. These are areas that could be improved. Documentation is adequate, but the only pain point is the deployment aspect.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise18
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2?
The licensing fees for Amazon EC2 are affordable, especially for lower tiers where there are fewer requirements or where the load is very low for product development. The pricing is very much affor...
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?
During the initial setup, we downloaded a certificate because we could not find proper documentation for it. There should be clear direction based on whether you are using Linux or Windows. There w...
What is your primary use case for Amazon EC2?
We use Amazon EC2 for our databases as well as CRM DNS to host our applications. For 3D architecture, we use the EC2 constraints.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache NiFi?
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was fine, as the integration with the AWS Marketplace was very good. The pricing in Italy is considered a little bit high, but the product is ...
What needs improvement with Apache NiFi?
Improvements can be made in the way of the UI. From the deployment perspective, Git configurations are available in 2.6 versions and 2.0 and later versions of Apache NiFi. Before 2.0, templates had...
What is your primary use case for Apache NiFi?
Apache NiFi is used to fetch data from different sources and ingest it into different destinations. The entire platform depends on Apache NiFi for data transformation and data movement. Multiple so...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Macquarie Telecom Group, Dovestech, Slovak Telekom, Looker, Hastings Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EC2 vs. Apache NiFi and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.