What's the Difference Between Amazon EBS and Amazon S3?
Compare Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
|
Comparisons
|
Amazon EBS
|
Amazon S3
|
|---|---|---|
|
Category
|
Storage, Block Storage |
Storage, Object Storage |
|
Description
|
High-performance block storage at any scale |
Virtually unlimited secure object storage for AI, analytics, and archives |
|
Best for
|
|
|
|
Key features
|
|
|
|
Pricing model
|
Pay per GB provisioned per month + IOPS |
Pay per GB stored + requests + data transfer |
|
Free tier
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
Expert take
|
“Choose gp3 for most general workloads since you get 3,000 IOPS baseline at a lower cost than gp2. For databases needing consistent sub-millisecond latency, io2 Block Express delivers up to 256,000 IOPS with 99.999% durability.” |
“S3 delivers eleven 9s of durability and scales without limits. It serves as the foundation for data lakes, backup pipelines, and ML training data because you can store anything at any scale and access it from anywhere with fine-grained permissions.” |
|
Product page
|
When to use Amazon EBS or Amazon S3
Use Amazon EBS when:
- Boot volumes
- Databases
- Enterprise applications
- Throughput-intensive workloads
Use Amazon S3 when:
- Data lakes
- Backup & restore
- Static website hosting
- Archive
- Big data analytics
Next steps with AWS for Storage
AWS product comparisons
Did you find what you were looking for today?
Let us know so we can improve the quality of the content on our pages