Best Amazon EC2 Alternatives (2026): 10+ options compared

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon's public cloud platform, with over 200 pay-as-you-go services for compute, storage, databases, networking and AI, used by startups through large enterprises and governments.

• Better at: Higher Cost score (5/10 vs 4/10)
• Better at: Higher Analytics score (8/10 vs 7/10)

Northflank

Northflank is a Kubernetes-based developer platform for deploying services, jobs, databases and GPU workloads on its managed cloud or on customers' own cloud accounts.

• Better at: Higher Ease of Use score (8/10 vs 4/10)
• Better at: Higher Cost score (7/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 7/10)

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service is AWS's managed Kubernetes service. It runs the cluster control plane for teams that deploy containers on EC2, Fargate, or their own hardware.

• Gives up: Has a free plan (Amazon EKS does not)

Google Cloud's managed Kubernetes service. It runs containerized workloads in Standard or Autopilot mode for engineering teams of any size.

• Better at: Higher Ease of Use score (6/10 vs 4/10)
• Better at: Higher Cost score (5/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 8/10)

Amazon Elastic Container Service is AWS's fully managed container orchestrator. Teams use it to run Docker workloads on EC2, serverless Fargate, or their own on-premises hardware.

• Better at: Higher Ease of Use score (7/10 vs 4/10)
• Better at: Higher Cost score (6/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Has a free plan (Amazon ECS does not)

Google Cloud

Google's public cloud platform providing pay-as-you-go virtual machines, Kubernetes, serverless, databases, storage, networking, data analytics and AI services for businesses of every size.

• Better at: Higher Analytics score (9/10 vs 7/10)
• Better at: Higher Cost score (5/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 8/10)

Baseten

Baseten is an AI inference platform that lets engineering teams serve, scale and train open-weight and custom models on managed multi-cloud GPUs, billed per minute.

• Better at: Higher Ease of Use score (6/10 vs 4/10)
• Better at: Higher Cost score (5/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Has a free plan (Baseten does not)

Red Hat OpenShift

Enterprise Kubernetes application platform from Red Hat, offered as self-managed software or as managed services on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud.

• Better at: Higher Support score (8/10 vs 6/10)
• Better at: Higher Ease of Use score (5/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 8/10)

AWS's managed machine learning platform for building, training, and hosting ML and foundation models on pay-as-you-go cloud instances and serverless endpoints.

• Gives up: Higher Customization score (10/10 vs 8/10)

Amazon CloudFront is the AWS content delivery network. It caches and serves websites, APIs and media from more than 750 edge locations, and includes DDoS protection, WAF and edge compute.

• Better at: Higher Cost score (6/10 vs 4/10)
• Better at: Higher Ease of Use score (5/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 9/10)

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.

• Better at: Higher Cost score (5/10 vs 4/10)
• Better at: Higher Ease of Use score (5/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Has a free plan (Amazon S3 does not)

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.

• Better at: Higher Cost score (7/10 vs 4/10)
• Better at: Higher Ease of Use score (6/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Higher Customization score (10/10 vs 7/10)

SkyPilot

Open-source and enterprise system for running, scheduling and scaling AI training, inference and batch jobs across Kubernetes, Slurm, on-prem and 20+ clouds.

• Better at: Higher Cost score (8/10 vs 4/10)
• Better at: Higher Ease of Use score (7/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Higher Customization score (10/10 vs 8/10)

AWS Amplify is a pay-as-you-go platform from Amazon Web Services for hosting web apps from Git and building full-stack backends on AWS.

• Better at: Higher Cost score (7/10 vs 4/10)
• Better at: Higher Ease of Use score (5/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Higher Customization score (10/10 vs 7/10)

Neon

Neon is a managed serverless PostgreSQL service with autoscaling, scale-to-zero and instant database branching, aimed at developers, startups and SaaS teams.

• Better at: Higher Ease of Use score (9/10 vs 4/10)
• Better at: Higher Cost score (7/10 vs 4/10)
• Gives up: Higher Customization score (10/10 vs 6/10)