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AWS Lambda vs Amazon EC2 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
6.5
AWS Lambda maximizes ROI by cutting infrastructure costs with serverless design, pay-per-use model, and efficient auto-scaling.
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 is well-regarded, with premium support praised, though integration assistance may have some issues.
Sentiment score
6.9
AWS Lambda support receives mixed reviews, praised for quick help but sometimes criticized for delays or high costs.
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
If it is a priority issue, they will give the response quicker, but if it is moderate, they take some time.
Consultant at Deloitte
When we raise a ticket or have an issue, the support team is responsive.
Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives
if we send an email, we can get a response within twenty-four hours.
Python Developer at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 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
7.7
AWS Lambda scales automatically, integrates with AWS services, and efficiently handles workloads, though cost concerns exist at high traffic.
Whenever the number of requests increases, the system automatically scales up to the target we have set and scales down once the requests are resolved.
Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives
When it comes to the increased needs of my customers trying to grow, AWS Lambda is not an issue to grow with them.
Assistant Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the scalability of AWS Lambda as eight because you can write as many limiters as you want, and they can trigger whenever that particular time zone event happens.
Python Developer at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 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
8.1
AWS Lambda is praised for stability, efficient scaling, serverless architecture, and seamless AWS service integration despite minor issues.
It is somewhat more reliable compared to Azure.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Principal Global Services
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek clearer pricing, better documentation, intuitive interfaces, seamless integration, and improved support for Amazon EC2's complex setup and scalability.
AWS Lambda users desire improved language support, reduced latency, better integration, enhanced performance, simplified setup, and cost 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
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
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
Regarding scaling, we can add up to 1,000 execution environments for every 10 seconds per function, per region.
Consultant at Deloitte
AWS Lambda needs to improve cold start time.
Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 offers flexible pricing but can be costly for high workloads and larger projects compared to competitors.
AWS Lambda provides cost-effective pay-as-you-go pricing, free first million requests monthly, and requires careful cost management for extensive use.
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
AWS Lambda pricing is high, similar to the servers for S3 buckets.
Python Developer at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 offers scalable compute power with flexible configurations, high availability, strong security, and cost-effective, seamless cloud deployment.
AWS Lambda offers serverless architecture, seamless AWS integration, automatic scaling, cost-effective pricing, and supports multiple programming languages and CI/CD integration.
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
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
As it is serverless, AWS Lambda has more scope for building scalable architectures.
Consultant at Deloitte
Automatic scaling is a valuable feature. When the number of requests increases, the system automatically scales up to the target we have set and scales down once the requests are resolved.
Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives
What I appreciate most about AWS Lambda is that you do not need to purchase the entire service; it only charges you whenever you call that API, which is excellent.
Python Developer at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 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
AWS Lambda
Ranking in Compute Service
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
92
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 AWS Lambda is 15.3%, down from 21.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS Lambda15.3%
Amazon EC213.7%
Other71.0%
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.
Rajaraman Ramachandran - PeerSpot reviewer
Co Founder And CTO at Gamucopia Creatives
Has enabled us to manage compute resources efficiently while supporting multiple languages
AWS Lambda needs to improve cold start time. Some AWS Lambda functions require a cold start, and if you need AWS Lambda to provide quick responses, you need some of the AWS Lambdas to be always on, which is risky. We need AWS Lambda's cold start time to be reduced so that we can use it much faster than now. We need a better way to handle the cold start. We should be able to start AWS Lambda much before in a predictable way instead of just calling and then having it start.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

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 Business36
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise45
 

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.
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lambda?
Regarding licensing or pricing, AWS Lambda pricing is high, similar to the servers for S3 buckets, and if we purchase them for two years or three years, there will be some kind of discount, but it ...
What needs improvement with AWS Lambda?
From my perspective, I believe there is nothing to improve in AWS Lambda.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Netflix
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2 and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.