Amazon S3 vs AWS Lambda (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict
Amazon S3 is our pick, scoring 7.8/10 against 7.6/10 for AWS Lambda on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria. Its biggest advantage: higher Integration score (10/10 vs 9/10). Only AWS Lambda has a free plan.
Last updated: November 2026
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.
A
AWS Lambda
7.6/10
AWS Lambda is Amazon's serverless compute service. It runs event-driven code without servers to manage and charges per request and per GB-second of compute.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | A Amazon S3 | A AWS Lambda |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 7.8/10 | 7.6/10 |
| Integration | 10/10 | 9/10 |
| Support | 6/10 | 6/10 |
| Cost | 5/10 | 7/10 |
| Customization | 8/10 | 7/10 |
| Security | 9/10 | 9/10 |
| Reliability | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Ease of Use | 5/10 | 6/10 |
| Analytics | 8/10 | 7/10 |
| Scalability | 10/10 | 9/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Cheapest paid plan | Contact for pricing | Contact for pricing |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Contact for pricing | Free Free tier |
| Features | ||
| API and CLI | ||
| Multiple Regions | ||
| Uptime SLA | ||
| Automatic Backups | Not listed | |
| Dedicated Servers | Not listed | |
| Managed WordPress | ||
| Object Storage | Not listed | |
| Serverless Functions | Not listed | |
| Shared Hosting | ||
Amazon S3 vs AWS Lambda cost by team size
| Team size | Amazon S3 | AWS Lambda |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | Contact for pricing | FreeFree tier |
| 5 users | Contact for pricing | FreeFree tier |
| 10 users | Contact for pricing | FreeFree tier |
| 25 users | Contact for pricing | FreeFree tier |
| 50 users | Contact for pricing | FreeFree tier |
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 S3 and AWS Lambda suit
| Audience | Amazon S3 | AWS Lambda |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | 9/10It offers Object Lock, replication, audit logging and organisation-wide analytics through Storage Lens. | 8/10It holds SOC, HIPAA, PCI, and ISO certifications and offers a regional uptime SLA. |
| Small Business | 5/10The storage rates are cheap, but reviewers say the console and the pricing model are complex. | 4/10It needs development skills and AWS knowledge to use well. |
| Startups | 7/10There are no upfront costs, and new AWS accounts get Free Tier credits. | 8/10The pay-per-use model and monthly free tier keep costs low at low traffic. |
| Developers | 9/10S3 is managed through a widely adopted API and SDKs, and that API has become the standard interface for object storage. | 9/10It is a code-first serverless runtime that supports many languages and container images. |
| SaaS Companies | 8/10It scales without limit for application data, and transfers to other AWS services in the same Region are free. | 8/10It scales automatically and integrates deeply with AWS services for event-driven backends. |
Which One Should You Choose?
AWhy choose Amazon S3
- Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 9/10)
- Higher Customization score (8/10 vs 7/10)
AWhy choose AWS Lambda
- Has a free plan (Amazon S3 does not)
- Higher Cost score (7/10 vs 5/10)
- Higher Ease of Use score (6/10 vs 5/10)
Pros & Cons
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.
AAWS Lambda
Pros
- The permanent free tier of 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds a month makes low-traffic workloads nearly free.
- It scales automatically, and G2 reviewers often praise this.
- It triggers natively from other AWS services and sends logs, metrics, and traces to CloudWatch and X-Ray automatically.
- Functions run on dedicated Nitro-based compute, and the service holds SOC, HIPAA, PCI, and ISO certifications.
- SnapStart and Provisioned Concurrency give options for reducing cold-start latency.
Cons
- Each invocation is capped at 15 minutes and 10 GB of memory, so it does not suit long or heavy jobs.
- Function code plus layers is limited to 250 MB unzipped.
- Since August 2025 the initialization phase is billed, which raises costs for functions with slow startup such as Java or .NET.
- Reviewers say debugging is hard because they depend on logs in an abstracted environment.
- Costs can be hard to predict once third-party tools and architectural complexity are added.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon S3 scores higher on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria: 7.8/10 against 7.6/10 for AWS Lambda. The largest gap is in Cost: 5/10 for Amazon S3 and 7/10 for AWS Lambda.
AWS Lambda has a free plan; Amazon S3 does not list one.
