Amazon Web Services (AWS) vs STACKIT Comparison

Why choose Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Has a free plan (STACKIT does not)
• Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 6/10)
• Higher Customization score (10/10 vs 6/10)
• Better fit for startups (8/10 vs 4/10)
• Better fit for developers (9/10 vs 6/10)

Why choose STACKIT

• Higher Ease of Use score (5/10 vs 4/10)

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Pros

• The service catalogue is unusually broad, with over 200 services across 38 regions, so most infrastructure needs can be met on one platform.
• EC2 has a 99.99% region-level SLA with credits of up to 100%, and instances unavailable for more than six minutes in an hour are not billed for that hour.
• The free plan gives up to $200 in credits, and more than 30 always-free services let new teams experiment at low cost.
• Support scales from a $29 minimum up to dedicated Enterprise and Unified Operations tiers for mission-critical workloads.
• G2 rates it 4.4 across more than 17,000 reviews, and reviewers praise its scalability and global reach.

Cons

• Reviewers widely cite a steep learning curve across the console and services.
• Usage pricing is complex and can produce unexpected bills unless spend is monitored closely.
• Paid support is billed as a percentage of total AWS spend, so support costs rise with usage.
• A July 2025 billing console bug showed customers estimated charges in the billions, which hurt trust in its cost tooling.

STACKIT

Pros

• Broad compliance list, including BSI C5 Type 2, ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018, TISAX Level 3 and DORA readiness, which is useful for regulated buyers.
• All data is processed in German and Austrian data centres by an operator owned by the privately held Schwarz Group, which avoids US CLOUD Act exposure.
• Pricing is transparent, with hourly pay-as-you-go metering, a public calculator and a downloadable price list. One review also reports free data egress.
• An official Terraform provider and CLI are described by users as well maintained and covering most needed resources.
• Managed Kubernetes is CNCF-compliant and built on open-source Gardener, which helps portability.

Cons

• The service catalogue and partner ecosystem are much smaller than those of AWS, Azure or GCP.
• There are only two regions, both in Germany and Austria, which limits global reach and cross-continent disaster recovery.
• There is no free tier or reserved-instance discount, and one review estimates compute costs 15 to 20 percent above AWS or GCP.
• Some APIs and products, such as the container registry, are still in beta, and the registry has no Terraform resource.
• Independent customer reviews are scarce, and the single-AZ VM SLA is reported at 99.5 percent.