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What's the Difference Between Amazon EC2 and AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Compare Amazon EC2 and AWS Elastic Beanstalk side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

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Comparisons
Amazon EC2
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Category

Compute, Virtual Machines

Compute, PaaS

Description

Secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload

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

Best for
  • Web hosting
  • Batch processing
  • HPC
  • Machine learning training
  • Gaming servers
  • Web applications
  • API backends
  • Microservices
  • Rapid deployment
Key features
  • Auto Scaling
  • Elastic Load Balancing
  • GPU instances
  • Bare metal instances
  • Nitro System
  • Managed platform updates
  • Health monitoring
  • Auto scaling
  • Multiple language support
  • Docker support
Pricing model

On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, Savings Plans

No additional charge; pay for underlying resources

Free tier

Yes

Yes

Expert take

“EC2 gives you full control over the compute environment with 750+ instance types. For workloads that need sustained CPU, GPU acceleration, or specific OS configurations, EC2 remains the most flexible option on AWS.”
— Riku Kobayashi, 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 Amazon EC2 or AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Use Amazon EC2 when:

  • Web hosting
  • Batch processing
  • HPC
  • Machine learning training
  • Gaming servers

Learn more about Amazon EC2 »

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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