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.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon EC2
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AWS Elastic Beanstalk
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Category
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Compute, Virtual Machines |
Compute, PaaS |
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Description
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Secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload |
Easily migrates, deploys, and scales full-stack applications on AWS |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, Savings Plans |
No additional charge; pay for underlying resources |
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Free tier
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Yes |
Yes |
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Expert take
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“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.” |
“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.” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon EC2 or AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Use Amazon EC2 when:
- Web hosting
- Batch processing
- HPC
- Machine learning training
- Gaming servers
Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk when:
- Web applications
- API backends
- Microservices
- Rapid deployment
Next steps with AWS for Compute
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