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
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Comparisons
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Amazon EFS
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Amazon S3
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Category
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Storage, File Storage |
Storage, Object Storage |
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Description
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Serverless, fully elastic file storage |
Virtually unlimited secure object storage for AI, analytics, and archives |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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Pay per GB stored; no provisioning required |
Pay per GB stored + requests + data transfer |
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Free tier
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Yes |
Yes |
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Expert take
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“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.” |
“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.” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon EFS or Amazon S3
Use Amazon EFS when:
- Content management
- Web serving
- Home directories
- Machine learning
- Container storage
Use Amazon S3 when:
- Data lakes
- Backup & restore
- Static website hosting
- Archive
- Big data analytics
Next steps with AWS for Storage
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