--- title: Amazon EC2 Reviews meta_title: 'Amazon EC2 Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 1198 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: 1198 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-01' 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:** 1,198 ## 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 **ease of use** of Amazon EC2, enabling quick server deployment and effortless scaling options. (54 reviews) - Users praise the **elastic scalability** of Amazon EC2, effortlessly adjusting capacity to meet varying demands and optimizing costs. (36 reviews) - Users value the **flexibility** of Amazon EC2, enabling easy adjustments from small tests to large-scale production workloads. (30 reviews) - Users appreciate the **easy management of storage services** on Amazon EC2, enabling reliable and independent cloud solutions. (25 reviews) - Users value the **superior performance and security** of Amazon EC2, benefiting from advanced features and flexibility. (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 Amazon EC2 to be **expensive** , with complex pricing and billing that requires technical understanding. (25 reviews) - Users find the **complexity of configuration** in Amazon EC2 challenging, especially for beginners and those lacking server knowledge. (24 reviews) - Users find the **cost issues** in Amazon EC2 challenging, particularly due to complex pricing and billing methods. (18 reviews) - Users find **pricing issues** with Amazon EC2 challenging, leading to unexpected costs and complexity in cost management. (16 reviews) - Users find the **learning curve steep** due to the overwhelming number of services and options available on 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 (10 reviews) - Users report **unexpected costs** with Amazon EC2 due to scaling and configuration challenges, complicating budget management. (9 reviews) - Users find the **difficult setup** of Amazon EC2 challenging, especially due to its complex configuration options and requirements. (8 reviews) ## Amazon EC2 Reviews ### 1. Flexible and powerful, but pricing transparency could be better **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jatin S. | Sr. SDR, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 06, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** The flexibility to scale instances up or down based on actual workload is probably what I appreciate most. We run a mix of on-demand and reserved instances, and being able to right-size our compute without over-provisioning has noticeably cut down our monthly bill. The variety of instance types is genuinely useful — we use memory-optimized ones for our database workloads and compute-optimized for batch jobs. Auto Scaling groups have also been solid for handling traffic spikes without manual intervention. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** The pricing model can be genuinely confusing, especially when you factor in data transfer costs, EBS volumes, and Elastic IPs on top of instance costs. We've had a few billing surprises early on before we got a proper tagging and cost allocation strategy in place. Also, the console UX hasn't aged that well — navigating between regions or finding the right AMI can be clunky. Documentation is thorough but sometimes hard to navigate when you're troubleshooting something specific. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Before moving to EC2, we were stuck managing physical servers in a co-lo facility which meant long lead times to provision new capacity and a lot of wasted headroom. EC2 let us shift to an infrastructure-as-code approach where environments can be spun up or torn down in minutes. It's been especially helpful for dev/test environments that don't need to run 24/7, which reduced our compute costs significantly. Deployment pipelines are faster and more consistent, and we can recover from failures without manual intervention thanks to Auto Scaling. ### 2. Powerful Resource Management, Excellent Flexibility **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Reetiraj G. | intern, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 02, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** I like using Amazon EC2 for managing physical servers and having control over my computer resources, which makes launching a server quick and easy, taking just minutes. I appreciate how I can choose CPU, RAM, storage, and OS with ease. These features are incredibly valuable to me because they directly affect performance costs and how quickly I can iterate on projects. Whether I'm working on lightweight tasks like a REST API or shifting to heavier workloads such as running simulations and models, EC2 offers the flexibility I need without redesigning the system. The ability to scale, optimize, and maintain consistency is crucial, and EC2's storage flexibility allows me to attach and store independently. I love that it moves rigid constraints and lets me adapt as my project evolves, rather than being tied down to fixed hardware. I also find the optimization process smooth and appreciate that aspect. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** Since I'm a first-time user of Amazon EC2, I can't make better assumptions, but I think customer support could be better. Navigating the Amazon Web Services ecosystem can be confusing for beginners due to fragmented fields like VPCs and security groups. Full understanding is required for proper use, and the system trades simplicity for control. It offers good accessibility and low-level access but is less convenient for quick, fully managed development with minimal configuration and better optimization. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Amazon EC2 to manage servers while controlling my resources, solving my infrastructure problem by launching servers in minutes. It lets me scale, optimize, and maintain consistency without redesigning systems, providing storage flexibility and performance control for various workloads.We previously struggled with manual hardware provisioning, but now we leverage seamless integrations with the broader AWS ecosystem specifically Amazon S3 for scalable storage and AWS IAM for robust security. This interconnectedness allows us to maintain consistency without redesigning systems for every new project.The ROI has been significant; by utilizing Savings Plans and Spot Instances, we’ve reduced our monthly compute spend by approximately 20-30% compared to traditional on premises costs.Furthermore, we now use AWS Compute Optimizer, which utilizes AI-driven analytics ### 3. Flexible, Easy Service Deployment with Amazon EC2 **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kaleb-John L. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 02, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** Amazon EC2 allows users to easily deploy services in a variety of ways. There are a lot of different options that can be used to best serve your particular use case. There are default images that can be used as a starting point if you need. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** The state management of an instance can sometimes be confusing. In order to properly cleanup an EC2 instance manually, you have to make sure that you properly turn off, disable, and delete in one by one steps. Ideally there would be better options to just completely wipe an instance without having to manually cleanup multiple spots. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Amazon EC2 is useful at a variety of stages of deploying a product. It is easy to utilize for quick prototyping of an idea most of all. You can quickly startup an instance with an image that you built. You can then setup the proper networking or other connections that allow full integration of you application. You can run full end to end tests and experiments without worrying too much about the permanence. If you need to make adjustments it is easy to deploy those, if you need to destroy everything you have that option as well. ### 4. My professional journey with Amazon EC2 **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** ANUJ J. | Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** There are quite a long list of points which may define my personal alignment with/ interest with Amazon EC2 ,upon which I would list a few which are like :-it offers hundreds of distinct instance types optimized for different workloads. For example when we talk of the following,we get a series of fitted options . ​Compute Optimized (C-Series): For heavy mathematical modeling, batch processing ; Memory Optimized (R and X-Series): Essential for running massive in-memory databases (ex- SAP HANA) and open-source data frameworks ; Accelerated Computing : Packed with cutting-edge GPUs etc **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** Few problems/concerns are there because of which my liking of EC2 differs like for its pricing prediction related issues as even we are billed for moving data out of the server, and critically, are even billed for transferring data across different availability zone **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** There are a lot of solutions which is easily done by using it ,for example EC2 turns hardware into an on-demand utility. We pay for computing power by the second. EC2 distributes infrastructure across a massive global footprint of Regions and Availability Zones , also it constantly updates its backend fleet. ### 5. Amazon EC2: Flexible, Scalable Power for ETL Workloads **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** mani s. | data engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** The best thing I like about Amazon EC2 is how flexible and scalable it is when it comes to handling data loads. We mainly use it to execute Python-, Spark-, and SQL-based ETL jobs that extract from and load data into different sources. It scales well and can handle large amounts of data easily, without me having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** There isn’t much to dislike about Amazon EC2; it’s a good product. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** As a data engineer, it has benefited me by quickly providing the resources I need for ETL pipelines, Spark jobs, and large-scale data processing tasks. When there is a major demand spike on weekends, it scales resources according to the demand, which I like the most and has been especially helpful for me. ### 6. EC2: Fast, Affordable, and Versatile Cloud VMs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Leonidas R. | Network Analyst, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** EC2 is the best option for cloud VMs. That you can set up a VM in minutes says a lot about EC2 as a cloud platform. EC2 supports almost everything (OS, software, etc.), is really affordable, and can be provisioned quickly. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** Some hardware configurations may not be available in certain regions, and that limited availability can affect your IT requirements. Also the prices may change between regions. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Most of our systems are in the cloud now, so we don't have to worry about hardware maintenance, and the money we save each year on parts can be spent on other things in our IT department. ### 7. Easy-to-Set-Up EC2 with Strong Security and Flexible Server Options **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ishan A. | Senior Developer , Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 13, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** 1. I like the complete AWS ecosystem, where EC2 plays an important role by letting me provision servers with pay-as-you-go flexibility. 2. It’s easy to set up, and it offers very strong security. 3. It provides a wide variety of options to choose from for memory and CPU, depending on our requirements. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** It feels a bit technical at the start, and the pricing is on the higher side compared to competitors. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use EC2 to deploy our application. We also rely on monitoring and logging to keep track of our system logs and stay on top of what’s happening in the environment. Finally, we use scalability options so we can scale the application when traffic spikes. ### 8. Beginner-Friendly Cloud Hosting with Flexible Billing **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Akash G. | Joint secretary, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 03, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** I used Amazon EC2 to host my Docker container for a personal project and found it very helpful as a beginner in cloud services. It's very easy to start and stop my instance, which gives me full control. I also really like the pay-as-you-go pricing since it means I don't have to spend money on days when the instance is down. The initial setup was very easy and the detailed tour of the application helped me understand it much faster. I also reached out to customer support in between for an issue while accessing my instance through the web instead of powershell and they were really helpful. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** Understanding the billing part took me some time as it doesn't reflect immediately and takes a while. Hence, I wasn't able to check how many credits of mine were being consumed and how fast. After a few days, I started to see the difference, but earlier I couldn't because the billing page hadn't fully been created for my instance. Amazon takes a while to update it. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Amazon EC2 helped me understand cloud services by easily creating and running instances. It simplifies starting and stopping instances, ensures control with pay-as-you-go pricing, and was pivotal in landing an internship. I use it within my place of work i.e CSES Society, here i use it to provide job opportunities to my college students at the earliest so that they can apply earlier. Applying earliest to jobs once they are posted will help them stay at the top of the HR's list and priority would be given to them. ### 9. Ideal solution of EC2 for agriculture **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jay B. | Animation, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 19, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** Amazon EC2 is very useful for my farm. It does everything for me and I don't need to do much. It helps a lot with everything and clarifies many things. I like its features the best, which are going to be very useful today and in the future. Moreover, its setup process is very easy, so easy that even a child can do it. Because of this, I would give it ten out of ten points. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** Amazon EC2 sometimes malfunctions, causing inconvenience. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Amazon EC2 does everything in my farming, so I don't need to do much. It helps a lot with everything and clarifies things. ### 10. AWS Cloud is the best **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ajay D. | Technical Lead, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 12, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon EC2?** Recent Amazon EC2 advancements focus on superior performance and security through the Nitro System, offering over 1,000 instance types including ARM-based Graviton chips for better price-performance. Key,,popular features include up to 400 Gbps networking, specialized AI/ML training instances, and enhanced security with confidential computing. Top New & Noteworthy EC2 Features • AWS Nitro System: The foundation of modern EC2, offloading virtualization functions to dedicated hardware, resulting in faster, more consistent performance. • Graviton Processors (ARM-based): Offers significantly better price-performance compared to traditional x86 chips for diverse workloads. • 400 Gbps Networking: Provides ultra-high-speed networking capabilities for high-performance computing (HPC) and demanding applications. • Confidential Computing: Enhances security by allowing data to be processed in isolated environments, ensuring data protection even during processing. • EC2 Mac Instances: Offers the ability to run macOS workloads directly on AWS infrastructure. • Faster Launch for Windows: Enables rapid deployment of Windows instances, reducing configuration times. These updates reinforce EC2's position as a flexible, secure, and high-performance computing platform. **What do you dislike about Amazon EC2?** Recent Amazon EC2 advancements focus on superior performance and security through the Nitro System, offering over 1,000 instance types including ARM-based Graviton chips for better price-performance. Key,,popular features include up to 400 Gbps networking, specialized AI/ML training instances, and enhanced security with confidential computing. Top New & Noteworthy EC2 Features • AWS Nitro System: The foundation of modern EC2, offloading virtualization functions to dedicated hardware, resulting in faster, more consistent performance. • Graviton Processors (ARM-based): Offers significantly better price-performance compared to traditional x86 chips for diverse workloads. • 400 Gbps Networking: Provides ultra-high-speed networking capabilities for high-performance computing (HPC) and demanding applications. • Confidential Computing: Enhances security by allowing data to be processed in isolated environments, ensuring data protection even during processing. • EC2 Mac Instances: Offers the ability to run macOS workloads directly on AWS infrastructure. • Faster Launch for Windows: Enables rapid deployment of Windows instances, reducing configuration times. These updates reinforce EC2's position as a flexible, secure, and high-performance computing platform. **What problems is Amazon EC2 solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has huge cloud resources due to which my storage capabilities has increased. ## 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/amazon-ec2-review-553430?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-04+21%3A55%3A16+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=d9e17f4b-c9fb-4c45-b90b-34dfa350c887&secure%5Btoken%5D=bcb923c454dc86cafea46d6b680d4200b0b761bbbaba27adcb46d38eb27a5237&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)