--- title: Amazon EC2 Reviews meta_title: 'Amazon EC2 Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 1196 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Amazon EC2 works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.6 review_count: 1196 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-06-19' parent_category: name: IT Infrastructure url: https://www.g2.com/categories/it-infrastructure --- # Amazon EC2 Reviews **Vendor:** Amazon Web Services (AWS) **Category:** [Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/infrastructure-as-a-service-iaas) **Average Rating:** 4.6/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 1,196 ## About Amazon EC2 AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS - EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. AWS EC2۪s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon۪s proven computing environment. AWS EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. AWS EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. AWS EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios. ## Amazon EC2 Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **user-friendly interface** of Amazon EC2, making server management straightforward and efficient. (55 reviews) - Users value the **flexibility and control** of Amazon EC2, especially when managing resources at scale. (37 reviews) - Users value the **flexibility** of Amazon EC2, appreciating its customizable services and efficient management capabilities. (30 reviews) - Users appreciate the **easy management of storage services** in Amazon EC2, enhancing reliability and user control. (25 reviews) - Users value the **wide variety and flexibility of services** offered by Amazon EC2, enhancing their cloud experience. (25 reviews) - Reliability (23 reviews) - Users appreciate the **deployment ease** of Amazon EC2, enabling quick and scalable server implementations with confidence. (20 reviews) - Users value the **seamless integrations** of Amazon EC2, enhancing efficiency by managing various services from one platform. (19 reviews) - Customer Support (16 reviews) - Security (16 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **complexity overwhelming** , especially with instance selection and resource management in Amazon EC2. (25 reviews) - Users find Amazon EC2 to be **expensive** , with complicated billing that can be confusing without technical knowledge. (25 reviews) - Users find **cost issues** with AWS Cloud, citing complicated billing and potential expenses from unused services. (18 reviews) - Users often face **confusing pricing issues** with Amazon EC2, including unexpected fees and complex cost management difficulties. (17 reviews) - Users find the **learning curve steep** , as the multitude of services can overwhelm those new to EC2. (14 reviews) - Users find EC2's interface **not user-friendly** , often feeling overwhelmed by its complexity and steep learning curve. (14 reviews) - Overwhelming Choices (12 reviews) - Complex Coding (11 reviews) - Users struggle with the **steep learning curve** of Amazon EC2, making installation and management challenging for beginners. (9 reviews) - Users report **unexpected costs** with Amazon EC2 due to scaling and configuration challenges, complicating budget management. (9 reviews) ## Amazon EC2 Reviews ### 1. Easy to Use but Complex Setup **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Duvan Dario D. | Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 16, 2025 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** I like the ease of use of Amazon EC2. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** several issues with Amazon Linux, the access methods and configuration are very extensive, and there is also a lack of cost preview. The initial setup is not easy either. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Amazon EC2 to solve various cloud deployment issues when I can't find another way to do it. ### 2. AWS Cloud - User Review **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ravi L. | Tax Operations & Technology Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 28, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** I like the security aspect of AWS cloud very much. Different levels of security infrastructure are built around to help and protect your data in one place. Also the ability to put restrictions around the usage **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** Based on my experience as a User, the only thing I would like to be improved in the Future is the downtime. At times, the updates take a lot of time to install and you have to wait until it is installed. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EC2:** If someone is looking to move all the data in one data lake then AWS cloud seems to be a feasible option as it has good storage capacity, integration with multiple other applications available, and better security and data protection. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** The pain point commonly faced by every business is the low change resistance to a new technology. But with AWS cloud it is a bit different as it is easy to adapt and use and mostly user friendly ### 3. Powerful. Confusing. Not for the faint of heart. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Darian R. | Senior Designer Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 28, 2019 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** I love that I can control what I use and only pay for what I use. So I don’t feel like I’m paying for time I don’t need. I love the flexibility to add or reduce resources as needed on the fly. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** Amazons services are vast. Vastly confusing to beginners. You are bombarded with warnings and required to make sure verything is in order. This is a strength of the service but it means this is not for the casual user. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** I don’t have any issues with EC2, and the benefits are I can create different tools as needed for testing or for redundancy and then scrap them when I’m done. Mainly I am using EC2 to save costs of having multiple systems that I own in order to develop and deploy code. I can turn on, ramp up and shut down servers as needed without owning or even having to find a place for things. ### 4. Review amazon **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Richardson A. | Full-stack Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** The securuty and Availabliti of the syst **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** I thin i dont have a spécifique dislike **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Storage solution for my structure. We have all control on our storage system never like before. ### 5. Easy cloud to learn **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Networking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 02, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** 11/9 durability best cloud we are mostly use AWS cloud **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** Nothing all services is beautiful don't have dislike **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EC2:** N/a **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Knowledge improvement ### 6. Very bad UI, not suitable for small projects. Very good on the server side, amazing services. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** EC2 instances on AWS, especially the prebuilt images for machine learning **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** The user interface is pretty bad. The experience sucks. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** AWS cloud allows me to train machine learning models easily, I like that. ### 7. High-powered cloud infrastructure **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Betty V. | Network Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2019 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** Amazon EC2 is a great platform to mount RDP and be able to access remote access tasks, I have many colleagues who use it and recommended it to me. The hard disk space offered by Amazon is laughable for a small fee, but with a server the purpose of my work is achieved. To sign up for the service, the process is very simple and with operator recorded making the process almost automatic. It is interesting that the vps are handled with a security certificate with public and private keys, so when downloading the files of the certificates your vps is protected in a certain way, but with respect to this I want to note that the keys provided by Amazon EC2 by default in their VPS are extremely vulnerable and must be changed from the control panel to avoid intrusions into the system. The location of the servers is very good and offers an excellent internet connection that almost never presents any significant problems. Hardware platforms are very good for just a few cents per hour. The interface is somewhat complicated for users who have not used these services but the main thing to highlight is the quality of service software and hardware where Amazon AWS has an excellent performance at a low cost. The interface allows you to configure great processing capacity with minimum effort, provides complete control over the computing resources that will affect the environment of your work. It allows you to quickly scale projects by changing the economy of your instance by paying only for the processing capacity you currently use. In general the platform is very resistant to failures or crashes unless you use the free version for $1 that offers little capacity in the Processor and Ram memory. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** As a suggestion it is proven that the Amazon EC2 platform is not the most intuitive among the competition, sometimes it takes hours to do simple things. In this aspect the Google Cloud platform is the winner, where the general interface is similar to that of Gmail. That's why I recommend taking an intensive course before making a purchase of Amazon AWS services. Another serious recurring problem with Amazon EC2 and Amazon AWS in general is the unjustified closure of accounts or simply requiring a phone call with an operator to indicate personal data. The EC2 platform has a lot of options that allow you to fully control your project but must be managed by experts to take advantage of the range of services they offer. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** The platform is very fast and with a very low level of error in data processing, with an interface that can be improved to speed up the process of making web pages or complex tasks without resorting to complex tutorials on handling the platform. It is recommended to use Amazon EC2 to carry out complex tasks that require great processing capacity. ### 8. Good but with high costs **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 31, 2019 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** It can help you deploy virtual servers worldwide without major issues, making remote administration simple and leaving you with full control over your virtual server. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** It is a bit opaque when it comes to hiring, the cost because of what the virtual server will cost you with the pay-as-you-go method. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** The administration of the servers is significantly reduced by only worrying about the content and not about the physical host or its network. ### 9. EC2 is lagging behind competitors in simplicity and functionality **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 13, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** I like how easy it is to spin up a virtual machine and making it functional. I especially like how large the AMI repository is, and how easy it is to deploy most appliances from the marketplace. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** I dislike how tedious it can be to configure the networking side of my EC2 instances. I feel like Amazon has made this unnecessary complex because they wanted to make the solution as flexible as possible. When working with Azure networking in regards to virtual machines, it's much simpler to configure, stage, and manage. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EC2:** I feel that as of September of 2018, Microsoft Azure is the better cloud offering. It offers most of what AWS offers but makes it far easier to deploy and manage. It integrates better with your on-premise shop, especially if you're a Wintel shop. I think AWS was the market leader at first, but Azure is quickly catching up because it's just that much easier to work with. We maintain "clouds" in both AWS and Azure, and I'd much rather do something in Azure vs doing it in AWS. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use AWS EC2 instances to solve a number of business challenge. The first challenge that we experience is that we want to easily be able to set up high availability sets of instances on a regular basis. AWS makes it incredibly easy to accomplish this goal while making the process easy to understand (as long as the networking is properly set up initially). Additionally, we have the need to ensure that in the event of a natural disaster, we can easily fail over our on-premise infrastructure to AWS to maintain business operations. AWS gives us several tools to allow us to do this. ### 10. EC2 for small research project **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 11, 2019 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** The information about the nodes being used is readily available and built into the descriptions. Setting up AMI's allowed me to easily get different sets of instances with the same pre-loaded code off the ground. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** The complexity of setting up zones and keys took a long time to get a small project off the ground. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Running research codes which require specific configurations of distributed nodes. The flexibility of cluster size is helpful. ### 11. EC2 for stateless Wordpress **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Spiros P. | Innovation section manager, Telecommunications, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 03, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** - Easy to setup and work with - Can auto-scale horizontally with minimum configuration and based on metrics (e.g. number of requests being received, CPU load etc.) - CloudWatch dashboards is great for end-to-end application monitoring **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** - The Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) frontend to the EC2 instances is flaky. It is not mentioned clearly that the load balancer needs to be "pre-warmed", as per Amazon lingo, in order to accommodate spikes in traffic, which is counter-intuitive and, in my opinion, defeats the purpose of having auto-scaling in the first place. - As far as auto-scaling goes, - Expensive, unless you opt for the spot instances option - Pricing is very complicated to communicate to clients - Tech support is not included unless one opts for a plan **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EC2:** The major thing to consider is the behaviour of your application: are backend services required to respond to heavy spikes in network requests or to continuous, smooth traffic? My view is that for the latter, EC2 can be a great choice. However, be prepared to explain the complicated cost structure to your clients as well as potentially face high usage costs, depending always on your use case. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** The goal was to have a stateless Wordpress installation, as described in the "WordPress: Best Practices on AWS" whitepaper (https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/wordpress-best-practices-on-aws.pdf). Although we followed the guide to the letter, the end result was frankly disappointing, mostly due to performance issues with the ELB and EFS. ### 12. Good service at a reasonable price **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Arts and Crafts | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 17, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** It works perfectly with my hosted sites. The data traffic is smooth and you forget about issues with attacks and maintenance of proprietary servers. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** The requirements they demand for registration are quite stringent. But this guarantees us an extra level of security that we don't get with other services for that price. The price per megabyte is somewhat high, although it falls within the reasonable range. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EC2:** It is very easy to install and its basic use is simple and user-friendly, accessible to any administrator with basic knowledge. It has enough configuration parameters to satisfy the most demanding users. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** The benefits, as I pointed out before, are tangible in terms of server maintenance costs and security. ### 13. For tests and fast deploy **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 17, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** Fast deploy of machines, the free plan is ideal for test. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** When you go to higher plans, prices are a bit high. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EC2:** Go for the free tier and test the service. If it meets your needs, look carefully to the costs and go to a higher plan. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Test envoirments mainly, and some little projects in virtual servers. ### 14. Not much experience but very simple and easy to use. **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 09, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** Has a very fast response time to the server. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** The fees are too high for the amount of time used. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EC2:** It is a stable software to use for your websites but be aware the charge per second could be costly in the long run. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** The fees too high. ### 15. Good but could be better **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Julien D. | Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 18, 2016 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** It's an industry standard. A lot of compagnies use it. You always have ressources available. The amazon ecosystem is big and you can get a single invoice for it. A lot of cloud service run on EC2 and they are located in the same datacenter as you. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** Not reliable, if you spawn 100 hosts you always got one not working. All your architectures need to be made to be duplicate and failure proof even when you are at the start of the project. Sometimes a whole datacenter is unavailable. The support is not great and in case of accident slow to announce what happen. Amazon has is own vocabulary. You need to learn it. An EC2 server is really really slower and more expensive than a baremetal server. If you don't need **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EC2:** Do not listen the buzz words. If you don't need flexibility amazon can be a not so great solution and not cost effective. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Crawling web services in order to collect informations for recording stuff to users. For the scalability EC2 was great you can turn on 100 server for one hour and kill them all. It cost effective. ### 16. Good but not great **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Roger B. | Engineering Lead, AEM, Marketing and Advertising, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 29, 2015 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** It definitely has a lot of good uses, I just think with such a competitive market there are better alternatives. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** The whole setup process can be very challenging for a beginner. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EC2:** Check out digital ocean. A much better cloud virtualization platform. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** When you need servers either for testing for full usage AWS provides you with all the tools you need to get your applications up and running. ## Amazon EC2 Discussions - [What are the benefits of using Amazon EC2 ?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-the-benefits-of-using-amazon-ec2) - 5 comments, 1 upvote - [What is the easy way to creat a GUI instance just like creating normal instance](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-easy-way-to-creat-a-gui-instance-just-like-creating-normal-instance) - 4 comments, 1 upvote - [As an end user perspective I want to get brief notes in a simple layman's language to understand](https://www.g2.com/discussions/as-an-end-user-perspective-i-want-to-get-brief-notes-in-a-simple-layman-s-language-to-understand) - 2 comments, 1 upvote - [What is Amazon EC2 used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-amazon-ec2-used-for) - 5 comments - [View Amazon EC2 pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-ec2/reviews?filters%5Bnps_score%5D%5B%5D=3&open_modal_url=%2Fit%2Fproducts%2Famazon-ec2%2Fwishlists%3Fhost_path%3D%252Fproducts%252Famazon-ec2%252Freviews%253Ffilters%25255Bnps_score%25255D%25255B%25255D%253D3%26source%3Dsticky_header_pin§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-19+16%3A31%3A07+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=3eda1e93-5d62-4a12-b523-07a39a6dc9ef&secure%5Btoken%5D=0531e6eb560cfa749f508bd0db3d0f09b742651cbe08bb4c406d296f20926b99&format=llm_user) ## Amazon EC2 Integrations - [Amazon CloudWatch](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-cloudwatch/reviews) - [Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-elastic-kubernetes-service-amazon-eks/reviews) - [Amazon RDS on Outposts](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-rds-on-outposts/reviews) - [Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-relational-database-service-rds/reviews) - [Amazon S3 Glacier](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-s3-glacier/reviews) - [AWS Amplify](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-amplify/reviews) - [AWS Auto Scaling](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-auto-scaling/reviews) - [AWS Batch](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-batch/reviews) - [AWS Cloud9](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-cloud9/reviews) - [AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-cloud-development-kit-aws-cdk/reviews) - [AWS CloudFormation](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-aws-cloudformation/reviews) - [AWS Config](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-config/reviews) - [AWS Elastic Beanstalk](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-elastic-beanstalk/reviews) - [AWS Elastic Load Balancing](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-elastic-load-balancing/reviews) - [AWS Fargate](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-fargate/reviews) - [AWS Glue](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-glue/reviews) - [AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-identity-and-access-management-iam/reviews) - [AWS Lambda](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-lambda/reviews) - [Docker](https://www.g2.com/products/docker-inc-docker/reviews) - [Elasticsearch](https://www.g2.com/products/elastic-elasticsearch/reviews) - [Firebase](https://www.g2.com/products/firebase/reviews) - [IBM Terraform (formerly HashiCorp Terraform)](https://www.g2.com/products/ibm-terraform-formerly-hashicorp-terraform/reviews) - [Python](https://www.g2.com/products/python/reviews) - [SSM 2.0](https://www.g2.com/products/ssm-2-0/reviews) - [Wazuh](https://www.g2.com/products/wazuh/reviews) ## Amazon EC2 Features **Infrastructure Provision** - Public Cloud - Private Cloud - Hybrid Cloud - Bare Metal - High-Performance Computing (HPC) - Virtual Machines (VMs) - Edge Computing - Virtual Networks **Agentic AI - AWS Marketplace** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration **Management** - Pay by Usage - Usage Tracking - Performance Tracking **Functionality** - Resource Auto-Scaling ## Top Amazon EC2 Alternatives - [Google Compute Engine](https://www.g2.com/products/google-compute-engine/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (875 reviews) - [DigitalOcean](https://www.g2.com/products/digitalocean/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (738 reviews) - [Akamai Cloud Computing](https://www.g2.com/products/akamai-cloud-computing/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (387 reviews)