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Amazon EC2 vs Spot by Flexera comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 19, 2026

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
7.6
Spot by Flexera enabled substantial savings in compute costs and enhanced efficiency, though ROI may take longer for some.
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
I have seen a return on investment as I was able to reduce my compute cost by 60 to 65% for some of my applications that needed light temporary processing tasks with ephemeral storage and stateless applications.
Dev Ops Engineer at a construction company with 11-50 employees
Our technology predicts demand, selects the cheapest instance mix, sizes the workloads appropriately, and scales it automatically based on policy, resulting in significant savings by reducing manual work and enhancing our flexibility, which has helped accelerate our deployments.
Global Hyperscaler Alliances Director at a tech vendor 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
8.4
Spot by Flexera's customer service is highly rated for its excellent technical support, responsiveness, and reliability, ensuring customer satisfaction.
I would rate the customer support a nine out of ten.
Global Hyperscaler Alliances Director at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 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
7.4
Spot by Flexera is highly scalable, effectively supporting multiple users across environments, particularly with AWS services, boosting user confidence.
Spot's scalability is quite good, and it can be expanded to multiple environments.
Dev Ops Engineer at a construction company with 11-50 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
7.0
Spot by Flexera is mostly stable and reliable, though some users report occasional bugs indicating room for improvement.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EC2 faces criticism for complexity, high costs, and limited integration, with calls for better automation and innovation.
Spot by Flexera needs OCI support, better multi-cloud integration, and UI improvements, though it's stable and mature.
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
Continuously making advancements based on customer feedback.
Global Hyperscaler Alliances Director at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
More guided onboarding would help teams adopt advanced features faster.
Dev Ops Engineer at a construction company with 11-50 employees
Spot could be improved by adding features that help identify data to optimize storage costs by detecting datasets within our environment based on criteria such as age and usage.
AVP DevOps and Product Support at a recruiting/HR firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 pricing is seen as cost-effective but complex, urging simplification for easier cost management and estimation.
Enterprise users praise Spot by Flexera's pricing and setup, with structured management of licensing, via AWS Marketplace.
The pricing is reasonable and convenient, and the value it offers is completely in line with what I am spending.
Dev Ops Engineer at a construction company with 11-50 employees
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 offers scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency with strong security, making it ideal for diverse workloads and AWS integration.
Spot by Flexera offers cost optimization, Kubernetes management, and security compliance with intelligent autoscaling, AWS integration, and AI-driven insights.
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
The fact that it can mix dozens of instance families dynamically is something which the AWS native autoscalers simply cannot do.
Dev Ops Engineer at a construction company with 11-50 employees
Spot's automated cost optimization works by continuously analyzing the workload and applying policies to minimize cloud spend without sacrificing performance.
Global Hyperscaler Alliances Director at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
One use case we plan to implement within the next few months is the overall commitment savings, which we used to manage manually, but with Spot, it automatically helps us detect when and what kind of instances to purchase, making it easier for us to manage our overall commitment for the savings plan.
AVP DevOps and Product Support at a recruiting/HR firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2
Ranking in Compute Service
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Spot by Flexera
Ranking in Compute Service
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (23rd), Server Virtualization Software (14th), Cloud Operations Analytics (1st), Cloud Analytics (2nd), Containers as a Service (CaaS) (4th), Cloud Cost Management (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 11.3%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spot by Flexera is 3.8%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon EC211.3%
Spot3.8%
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.
KS
Dev Ops Engineer at a construction company with 11-50 employees
Intelligent autoscaling has cut compute costs and now manages ephemeral workloads efficiently
I think overall Spot is quite good. The UI is powerful, but it can feel a bit dense for some new users. More guided onboarding would help teams adopt advanced features faster, and deeper insights into Kubernetes resource usage would be beneficial. Overall, it is a really good platform that is quite mature and stable. I chose a rating of nine because it may sometimes be a bit overwhelming for newcomers, and there are also a few areas in which the EKS Kubernetes level granularity is a little missing. Overall, I think Spot is a really good and stable tool.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
9%
Transportation Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
7%
Manufacturing Company
18%
Computer Software Company
16%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise28
No data available
 

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 do you like most about Spot Ocean?
The solution helps us to manage and scale automatically whenever there is a limit to the increase in the application workflow.
What needs improvement with Spot Ocean?
Spot can be improved by adding deeper multi-cloud integrations, enhancing real-time security automation, and continuously making advancements based on customer feedback.
What is your primary use case for Spot Ocean?
I have been using Spot for five years. My main use case for Spot is cloud optimization.We use Spot for optimization by leveraging real-time optimization as well as auto-optimization. The company al...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
Spot Ocean, Spot Elastigroup, Spot Eco
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Freshworks, Zalando, Red Spark, News, Trax, ETAS, Demandbase, BeesWa, Duolingo, intel, IBM, N26, Wix, EyeEm, moovit, SAMSUNG, News UK, ticketmaster
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EC2 vs. Spot by Flexera and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.