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What's the Difference Between AWS CloudFormation and AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Compare AWS CloudFormation and AWS Elastic Beanstalk side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

Compare side-by-side

Comparisons
AWS CloudFormation
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Category

Management & Governance, Infrastructure as code

Compute, PaaS

Description

Infrastructure-as-code service for AWS resources

Easily migrates, deploys, and scales full-stack applications on AWS

Best for
  • Infrastructure as code
  • Environment replication
  • Disaster recovery
  • CI/CD
  • Web applications
  • API backends
  • Microservices
  • Rapid deployment
Key features
  • JSON/YAML templates
  • Stack sets
  • Drift detection
  • Change sets
  • Custom resources
  • Managed platform updates
  • Health monitoring
  • Auto scaling
  • Multiple language support
  • Docker support
Pricing model

No additional charge; pay for resources created

No additional charge; pay for underlying resources

Free tier

Yes

Yes

Expert take

“CloudFormation is the native IaC tool that supports every AWS resource on day one of launch. Use Change Sets to preview changes before applying, Drift Detection to find manual modifications, and StackSets to deploy the same template across hundreds of accounts and regions.”
— Oleksii Bebych, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“Elastic Beanstalk is the right choice when you want full EC2 control (instance types, security groups, VPC settings) but don't want to wire up deployment pipelines from scratch. It manages the orchestration while you keep the configuration knobs.”
— Oleksii Bebych, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

Product page

When to use AWS CloudFormation or AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Use AWS CloudFormation when:

  • Infrastructure as code
  • Environment replication
  • Disaster recovery
  • CI/CD

Learn more about AWS CloudFormation »

Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk when:

  • Web applications
  • API backends
  • Microservices
  • Rapid deployment

Learn more about AWS Elastic Beanstalk »

AWS product comparisons

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