AWS Lambda vs Amazon EC2 comparison

Amazon EC2 and AWS Lambda are both solutions in the Compute Service category. Amazon EC2 is ranked #6 with an average rating of 9.1, while AWS Lambda is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.6. Amazon EC2 holds a 5.4% mindshare in CS, compared to AWS Lambda’s 21.2% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon EC2 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of AWS Lambda users who would recommend it.

Amazon EC2

Read 67 Amazon EC2 reviews

966 Views
502 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

AWS Lambda

Read 88 AWS Lambda reviews

3,176 Views
1,487 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Amazon EC2

AWS Lambda

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

AWS Lambda and Amazon EC2 are prominent competitors in cloud computing. AWS Lambda's serverless and cost-efficient operation provides it with a distinct edge in rapid application deployment without the need for infrastructure management.

Features: AWS Lambda operates on a serverless, event-driven model, allowing applications to scale automatically and eliminating infrastructure concerns. It supports multiple programming languages and integrates effectively with other AWS services. Amazon EC2, however, offers powerful compute capabilities with customizable virtual servers, enabling applications to operate with high performance and a range of instance types that cater to more complex workloads.

Room for Improvement: AWS Lambda could enhance runtime capabilities beyond the current 15-minute execution limit and expand stability and integration options. Users also seek improved resource allocation for demanding applications. Amazon EC2, on the other hand, faces challenges with pricing complexity, migration support, and seamless transitions across instance types.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS Lambda facilitates rapid deployment due to its serverless nature, requiring no infrastructure management and leverages Amazon's strong support infrastructure, although complex issues may slow resolutions. Amazon EC2 offers granular control during deployment, but demands more expertise from users. Its customer service is reliable, with additional benefits for enterprises needing extensive support.

Pricing and ROI: AWS Lambda's cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model provides significant savings, particularly for variable workloads by avoiding infrastructure costs. The return on investment is optimal due to its usage-based billing. Conversely, Amazon EC2 can become expensive, with pricing intricacies tied to usage and configuration considerations, but offers flexibility and dependability that can justify its higher costs for complex needs.

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2

June 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 856,874 peers since 2012

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 Lambda

Ranking in Compute Service

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 5.4%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Lambda is 21.2%, up from 20.5% 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.

Read full review

Andrew-Wong

AWS Developer at Centrica

Convenience in deployment process with room for code preview improvement

Having a better preview would be helpful. Sometimes, if my Lambda code is too big, it can be inconvenient as I'm unable to see my code when it exceeds a certain size. AWS has a limit, like a three-megabyte limit, beyond which I cannot view or edit the code easily.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Amazon EC2 is its ability to spin a new virtual machine in a few seconds."

"I would recommend this solution to others who want to start using it."

"Amazon EC2 allows us to create different regions and availability zones based upon application needs."

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

"I like the AMI-related features. A very good feature of this solution is the customizable AMI. It is a very good feature provided by Amazon. The encryption technologies are also very good. We are using KMS, etc."

"Its ease of use is valuable."

"Amazon EC2's flexibility and ease of configuration were found to be very valuable."

"EC2 instances on AWS allow users to run virtual servers based on the CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity."

More Amazon EC2 pros

"The programming language and the integration with other AWS services are the most valuable features."

"The basic feature that I like is that there is no server installation. It also has good support for various languages, such as Java, .NET, C#, and Python."

"The most valuable features of AWS Lambda are a serverless and event-driven architecture."

"It's a serverless solution which is the best feature. It helps us because it offers free aspects. From the infrastructure perspective, it helps us manage costs. There is no overhead of estimating how much infrastructure we're going to need. We can focus on building the business functionality that we want to build."

"AWS Lambda is itself serverless, and it is connected to the API gateway, and you can directly call the API through the API gateway and connect through AWS Lambda."

"Lambda is trigger-based, which means it only activates when accessed, ensuring cost savings."

"I think the most valuable feature is the agility of the solution."

"It is serverless and scalable. It can scale infinitely. You don't have to worry about the size of the servers that you're pre-allocating. You don't have to build server scale-out models. Auto scale and other similar features are just inherent in Lambda. So, for atomic and fairly non-persistent transactional units of work, Lambda works very well."

More AWS Lambda pros

Cons

"The support could be more responsive."

"The solution is pretty expensive."

"We have had some downtime using the solution."

"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 solution’s pricing and downtimes could be improved."

"Accessibility must be improved."

"EC2 could be improved with easier migration."

"The product could benefit from offering more mixed instance types that combine features from different series to suit diverse workload requirements better."

More Amazon EC2 cons

"There is room for improvement in user-friendliness. When comparing this solution to others it is not as user-friendly."

"We need to better understand Lambda for different scenarios. We need some joint effort between Amazon and the users to have the users identify how they can really leverage Lambda. It's not about Lambda itself; it's about the practice, the guidance. There needs to be very good documentation. From the user perspective, what exists now is not always enough."

"There were some timeout issues with AWS Lambda as the options provided didn't suit our business cases."

"I want to see support for longer applications. I need the 15-minute time-out window to improve."

"The first time Lambda is started up, it takes some time to spin up an instance for serving the consumer requests. AWS has been trying to solve this in a variety of ways but have not yet managed to do so."

"They should work on the solution's stability and pricing."

"The running time of AWS Lambda runs fine. It takes around five minutes but it would be great if that time could be extended."

"We've had to revamp the way that it works due to that 15-minute timeout limitation."

More AWS Lambda cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are paying about $1,500 a month for one of the services."

"Reducing the price of the solution could lead to an improvement."

"The price is reasonable, but there is definitely an opportunity to lower it in instances which are of a higher configuration, because they have been typically used for the long term."

"Pricing appears to be cheap, however, it is extremely difficult in calculating what something will cost."

"EC2 pricing is somewhat transparent, in that AWS provides pricing for all instance types. However, the number of pricing options can be confusing."

"The licensing of Amazon EC2 is expensive. Microsoft Windows Servers are expensive to license."

"The tool's pricing is not cheap."

"The pricing of this solution is variable. There is an open-source variant that is accessible via the public cloud, and then tiers that range in price depending on the level and amount of usage that is required."

More Amazon EC2 pricing and cost advice

"It costs maybe less than $10 per month in my use case."

"The solution is free of cost for the first year, and after that, it becomes expensive."

"AWS Lambda is inexpensive."

"The solution follows a pay-as-you-go licensing model, which results in cost savings."

"Lambda is an affordable solution. They offer free requests every month and charge per the compute time. If you are working in a big organization, usually AWS offer a savings plan where you get approximately 70% discount on pricing."

"It computes by the cycle, and it's very cheap."

"The price is expensive and is based on usage. The more users you have the higher the cost."

"The price of AWS Lambda is priced very low."

More AWS Lambda pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Compute Service solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

856,874 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

23%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

57%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

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

Which is better, AWS Lambda or Batch?

AWS Lambda is a serverless solution. It doesn’t require any infrastructure, which allows for cost savings. There is no setup process to deal with, as the entire solution is in the cloud. If you use...

See all answers

What do you like most about AWS Lambda?

The tool scales automatically based on the number of incoming requests.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lambda?

The pricing of AWS Lambda is reasonable. It's beneficial and cost-effective for users regardless of the number of instances used.

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Batch vs Amazon EC2

Compared 27% of the time

AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2

Compared 19% of the time

Google Compute Engine vs Amazon EC2

Compared 14% of the time

Google App Engine vs Amazon EC2

Compared 11% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EC2

Compared 11% of the time

More Amazon EC2 Competitors

AWS Batch vs AWS Lambda

Compared 49% of the time

Apache NiFi vs AWS Lambda

Compared 18% of the time

Apache Spark vs AWS Lambda

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs AWS Lambda

Compared 10% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs AWS Lambda

Compared 4% of the time

More AWS Lambda Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2

June 2025

Download Amazon EC2 product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda

June 2025

Download AWS Lambda 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)

AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda executes your code only when needed and scales automatically, from a few requests per day to thousands per second. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With AWS Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. AWS Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all of the administration of the compute resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and automatic scaling, code monitoring and logging. All you need to do is supply your code in one of the languages that AWS Lambda supports (currently Node.js, Java, C# and Python).

You can use AWS Lambda to run your code in response to events, such as changes to data in an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon DynamoDB table; to run your code in response to HTTP requests using Amazon API Gateway; or invoke your code using API calls made using AWS SDKs. With these capabilities, you can use Lambda to easily build data processing triggers for AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB process streaming data stored in Amazon Kinesis, or create your own back end that operates at AWS scale, performance, and security.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

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

Netflix

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2

June 2025

Free Report: AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2 and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

856,874 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2 report.

See our list of best Compute Service vendors.

We monitor all Compute Service reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.