AWS EC2 vs AWS Lambda
A detailed comparison to help you choose between AWS EC2 and AWS Lambda.
Quick Verdict
3.9/5
AWS EC2
0 reviews
4.1/5
AWS Lambda
0 reviews
AWS Lambda is rated higher (4.1 vs 3.9). 124 Availability Zones in 39 geographic regions AWS Lambda is the original FaaS service — run code without servers. Supports 15+ runtimes, 1M free requests/month, and integrates deeply with 200+ AWS services. Triggered by S3, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and more.
 AWS EC2 The original cloud — 750+ instance types | AWS Lambda The original serverless functions service | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.9 (0 reviews) | 4.1 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | usage-based (per-second On-Demand, Spot, Savings Plans; free tier credits for new accounts) | freemium (pay per request + GB-second; MicroVMs/Managed Instances metered differently) |
| Starting price | From $0.0042/mo | Free tier available✓ |
| Best for | Teams with AWS expertise needing the broadest instance selection, global regions, GPU/bare metal options, and commitment-based discounts for steady production workloads | AWS developers building event-driven, variable-traffic workloads — webhooks, media processing, scheduled jobs, API backends — who want to stop managing servers entirely |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | — | — |
| RAM | 0.5 GB | — |
| Storage | — | — |
| Bandwidth | — | — |
| SLA uptime | 99.99%✓ | 99.95% |
| Data-center count | — | — |
| €/GB RAM/mo | €0.01 | — |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ✓ | |
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | 39 AWS regions / 124 AZs plus Local Zones and Wavelength | All 39 AWS regions / 124 AZs |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierhourly billingipv6ddos protectionbackups includedmanaged optionbare metalgpu availables3 compatibleeu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi accessterraform providerkubernetes support | free tierapi accessus datacentereu datacenterapac datacenter |
| Visit AWS EC2 → | Visit AWS Lambda → | |
AWS EC2
Pros
- + Widest hardware catalog in the market — 1,000+ instance types including Arm, bare metal and GPU families
- + Per-second billing with real cost levers: Spot up to 90% off, Savings Plans up to 72% off
- + 99.99% region-level SLA across 124 AZs in 39 regions with explicit service credits
- + Mature ecosystem: AMIs, Marketplace, Terraform, Systems Manager, and deep service integration
Cons
- - Total cost is a system of meters — EBS, snapshots, elastic IPv4, data transfer and add-ons dwarf the instance price
- - Requires real AWS expertise: VPC design, security groups, IAM and patching are all self-managed
- - Single-instance SLA is only 99.5%; the 99.99% commitment requires multi-AZ architecture
- - Data transfer out is expensive enough to shape architecture decisions
AWS Lambda
Pros
- + Zero idle cost with a free tier that covers small products: 1M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds monthly
- + Graviton pricing at $0.0000133334 per GB-second undercuts x86 by roughly 20%
- + Automatic multi-AZ scaling with a 99.95% per-region SLA and no capacity planning
- + Deep event integration across AWS services, with three form factors (Event/Web Functions, MicroVMs)
Cons
- - Per-request and GB-second pricing gets expensive against committed compute at steady high utilization
- - Cold starts — hundreds of milliseconds to seconds depending on runtime — with provisioned concurrency as an extra meter
- - 15-minute execution limit and payload caps make it wrong for long-running batch work
- - AWS-specific event plumbing creates real lock-in; distributed event chains are hard to debug
Stay in the loop
Get weekly updates on the best new hosting and infrastructure providers, deals, and comparisons.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.