Amazon EC2 vs Amazon S3 (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict
Amazon S3 is our pick, scoring 7.8/10 against 7.6/10 for Amazon EC2 on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria. Its biggest advantage: higher Cost score (5/10 vs 4/10). Only Amazon EC2 has a free plan.
Last updated: November 2026
A
Amazon EC2
7.6/10
Amazon EC2 is AWS's on-demand virtual server service, offering resizable compute instances billed per second for businesses of any size.
A
Amazon S3
7.8/10
Amazon S3 is AWS's pay-as-you-go object storage service. Businesses use it to store files, backups, data lakes and static website assets at almost any scale.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | A Amazon EC2 | A Amazon S3 |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 7.6/10 | 7.8/10 |
| Integration | 10/10 | 10/10 |
| Support | 6/10 | 6/10 |
| Cost | 4/10 | 5/10 |
| Customization | 10/10 | 8/10 |
| Security | 9/10 | 9/10 |
| Reliability | 9/10 | 9/10 |
| Ease of Use | 4/10 | 5/10 |
| Analytics | 7/10 | 8/10 |
| Scalability | 10/10 | 10/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | Yes | No |
| Cheapest paid plan | Contact for pricing | Contact for pricing |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Free Free Tier | Contact for pricing |
| Features | ||
| API and CLI | ||
| Multiple Regions | ||
| Uptime SLA | ||
| Automatic Backups | Not listed | |
| Cloud Compute | Not listed | |
| Dedicated Servers | Not listed | |
| Managed Kubernetes | Not listed | |
| Managed WordPress | ||
| Object Storage | Not listed | |
| Shared Hosting | ||
Amazon EC2 vs Amazon S3 cost by team size
| Team size | Amazon EC2 | Amazon S3 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | FreeFree Tier | Contact for pricing |
| 5 users | FreeFree Tier | Contact for pricing |
| 10 users | FreeFree Tier | Contact for pricing |
| 25 users | FreeFree Tier | Contact for pricing |
| 50 users | FreeFree Tier | Contact for pricing |
The plan that fits each team size, billed monthly, before add-ons and usage charges. Each cost opens that tool's pricing calculator for the team size.
Who Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 suit
| Audience | Amazon EC2 | Amazon S3 |
|---|---|---|
| SaaS Companies | 9/10Auto Scaling and multi-AZ deployment support production SaaS workloads. | 8/10It scales without limit for application data, and transfers to other AWS services in the same Region are free. |
| Small Business | 4/10The complexity and unpredictable bills make simpler VPS hosts a better fit for many small firms. | 5/10The storage rates are cheap, but reviewers say the console and the pricing model are complex. |
| Developers | 9/10Offers full root control, API, CLI, and SDK access, and a wide range of instance types for building and testing. | 9/10S3 is managed through a widely adopted API and SDKs, and that API has become the standard interface for object storage. |
| Enterprise | 9/10Provides a 99.99% region-level SLA, Dedicated Hosts for software licensing, and commitment discounts suited to large estates. | 9/10It offers Object Lock, replication, audit logging and organisation-wide analytics through Storage Lens. |
| Startups | 7/10Free Tier credits and per-second billing help early teams, but cost management takes expertise. | 7/10There are no upfront costs, and new AWS accounts get Free Tier credits. |
| IT Teams | 8/10Broad infrastructure control and monitoring through CloudWatch. | Not rated |
Which One Should You Choose?
AWhy choose Amazon EC2
- Has a free plan (Amazon S3 does not)
- Higher Customization score (10/10 vs 8/10)
AWhy choose Amazon S3
- Higher Cost score (5/10 vs 4/10)
- Higher Ease of Use score (5/10 vs 4/10)
Pros & Cons
AAmazon EC2
Pros
- Billing is per second with a 60-second minimum, so short-lived workloads cost less than under hourly billing.
- Spot capacity at up to 90% off and Savings Plans at up to 72% off give large discounts to teams that plan for them.
- The region-level SLA of 99.99% for multi-AZ deployments includes credits of up to 100%.
- A very wide choice of instance families covers GPU, ARM, memory-heavy, and bare-metal workloads, as well as macOS.
- Native integration with S3, EBS, load balancers, Auto Scaling, and container services is a strength reviewers often mention.
Cons
- Reviewers cite cost as the most common drawback, especially EBS storage and charges that keep running on stopped instances with attached storage.
- Bills are hard to predict because no flat-rate plans are published.
- The learning curve is steep, and some users find the number of options overwhelming.
- Some reviewers find configuration such as AMI upgrades and load balancing complicated.
- The single-instance SLA is only 99.5%, so high availability requires a multi-AZ design.
AAmazon S3
Pros
- Very high scale: about 500 trillion objects stored and around 200 million requests per second, according to Wikipedia.
- The S3 API is the industry standard, so a wide range of tools and competing storage providers support it.
- Strong data protection: versioning, MFA Delete, Object Lock in compliance mode, and cross-Region replication with a time-bound SLA.
- Many storage classes, from Express One Zone to Glacier Deep Archive at about $0.001 per GB-month, let teams match cost to how often data is accessed.
- Reviews are consistently positive: about 4.7 out of 5 from more than 1,100 Capterra reviews.
Cons
- Internet egress costs about $0.09 per GB after the first free 100 GB a month, and competitors widely criticise these fees.
- Request, retrieval and lifecycle-transition fees make monthly bills hard to predict.
- Reviewers on Capterra and TrustRadius call the console navigation and user interface complex.
- The SLA pays only service credits toward future bills, never refunds, and infrequent-access classes have a lower 99% uptime threshold.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon S3 scores higher on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria: 7.8/10 against 7.6/10 for Amazon EC2. The largest gap is in Customization: 10/10 for Amazon EC2 and 8/10 for Amazon S3.
Amazon EC2 has a free plan; Amazon S3 does not list one.
