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What's the Difference Between Amazon EFS and Amazon S3?

Compare Amazon EFS 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 EFS
Amazon S3
Category

Storage, File Storage

Storage, Object Storage

Description

Serverless, fully elastic file storage

Virtually unlimited secure object storage for AI, analytics, and archives

Best for
  • Content management
  • Web serving
  • Home directories
  • Machine learning
  • Container storage
  • Data lakes
  • Backup & restore
  • Static website hosting
  • Archive
  • Big data analytics
Key features
  • Elastic scaling
  • Multi-AZ
  • Lifecycle management
  • NFS compatible
  • Throughput modes
  • 11 nines durability
  • Storage classes
  • Lifecycle policies
  • Versioning
  • S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Pricing model

Pay per GB stored; no provisioning required

Pay per GB stored + requests + data transfer

Free tier

Yes

Yes

Expert take

“EFS is the answer when multiple EC2 instances or containers need concurrent read/write access to the same file system. It grows and shrinks automatically, so you never have to provision capacity or worry about running out of space.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“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.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

Product page

When to use Amazon EFS or Amazon S3

Use Amazon EFS when:

  • Content management
  • Web serving
  • Home directories
  • Machine learning
  • Container storage

Learn more about Amazon EFS »

Use Amazon S3 when:

  • Data lakes
  • Backup & restore
  • Static website hosting
  • Archive
  • Big data analytics

Learn more about Amazon S3 »

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