Amazon EKS vs Google Kubernetes Engine (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict

A

Why choose Amazon EKS

• Higher Integration score (9/10 vs 8/10)
• Higher Support score (6/10 vs 5/10)

G

Why choose Google Kubernetes Engine

• Has a free plan (Amazon EKS does not)
• Lower estimated cost for 10 users: Free vs $73/mo
• Higher Ease of Use score (6/10 vs 4/10)
• Higher Cost score (5/10 vs 4/10)
• Better fit for developers (8/10 vs 6/10)

A

Amazon EKS

Pros

• Scales to clusters of up to 100,000 worker nodes, and reviewers consistently name scalability as its main strength.
• Integrates deeply with AWS: IAM and Pod Identity for pod credentials, ECR, load balancers, VPC Lattice, GuardDuty, and CloudWatch.
• Offers several compute options in one service: EC2 node groups, Fargate serverless pods, Auto Mode, Outposts, Hybrid Nodes, and air-gapped EKS Anywhere.
• Backs the control plane with a financially backed SLA of 99.95%, or 99.99% with Provisioned Control Plane, with credits of up to 100%.
• Holds broad compliance coverage, including SOC, PCI, ISO, FedRAMP Moderate, HITRUST, and HIPAA eligibility.
• Allows version rollback within 7 days of an upgrade at no extra cost.

Cons

• Practitioners call it the least managed of the big three Kubernetes services, because control plane, node, and add-on upgrades are separate manual steps.
• Charges about $73 per month per cluster before any workloads run, and $438 per month once a version falls into extended support. AKS charges no control plane fee on its free tier.
• The default VPC CNI assigns real VPC IPs to pods and can exhaust subnet address space unless IP space is planned in advance.
• Real bills can climb well above estimates because of NAT gateway, cross-AZ transfer, and CloudWatch ingestion costs.
• Reviewers say prior Kubernetes knowledge is needed and the learning curve is steep. Some also note there is no built-in in-console cluster shell like GKE's.

G

Google Kubernetes Engine

Pros

• Autopilot mode removes node management and bills only for the resources pods request, so unscheduled pods and system overhead are not charged.
• The $74.40 monthly credit pays the management fee for one zonal or Autopilot cluster.
• Comparison articles rate its setup the simplest of GKE, EKS, and AKS, and its hybrid and multi-cloud tooling the most mature.
• Since September 2025, fleet management and policy tools come with Standard at no extra cost.
• G2 reviewers give it an average of about 4.5 stars and praise the stability of the managed control plane.

Cons

• Every cluster pays about $73 a month in management fees, while AKS's standard tier control plane is free.
• Load balancers, storage, and network egress are billed separately, so reviewers find total costs hard to forecast.
• Users report a steep Kubernetes learning curve, and advanced tuning still takes real expertise.
• Reviewers describe support as mixed, especially for clusters on older Kubernetes versions.
• Forum threads describe Autopilot problems such as pods being preempted and scale-up and scale-down loops.