Amazon API Gateway vs. AWS Lambda

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon API Gateway
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
AWS offers the Amazon API Gateway supports the creation and publication of an API for web applications, as well as its monitoring and maintenance. The Amazon API Gateway is able to support thousands of API calls concurrently and provides traffic management, as well as monitoring and access control.
$0.90
Per Million
AWS Lambda
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
AWS Lambda is a serverless computing platform that lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. With Lambda, users can run code for virtually any type of app or backend service—all with zero administration. It takes of requirements to run and scale code with high availability.
$NaN
Per 1 ms
Pricing
Amazon API GatewayAWS Lambda
Editions & Modules
Past 300 Million
$0.90
Per Million
First 300 Million
$1.00
Per Million
128 MB
$0.0000000021
Per 1 ms
1024 MB
$0.0000000167
Per 1 ms
10240 MB
$0.0000001667
Per 1 ms
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon API GatewayAWS Lambda
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon API GatewayAWS Lambda
Considered Both Products
Amazon API Gateway
Chose Amazon API Gateway
Our organization uses AWS infrastructure for many projects across different business units so we choose Amazon API Gateway for initial web services development. After exploring all features especially integration with other Amazon services like Lamda and Cloud watch we chose to …
Chose Amazon API Gateway
Compared to other solutions, Azure is much easier to use and setup, but probably for hybrid solution Talend API in the cloud is the best solution and Talend API can take advantage of Amazon API Gateway, thus all this hard work is done by other software solution. Additionally, …
Chose Amazon API Gateway
Since we have been using AWS products since the beginning, we did not think about using any competitors of API Gateway. It has great and strong integration with other AWS products.
Chose Amazon API Gateway
As AWS API comes with more security and API key authentication functions, it's easy for the organization to handle the various customers based with different level of permission. And also very easy comparable to others for tracking the API calls. Also, scalability and …
AWS Lambda
Chose AWS Lambda
It's fine, it works as the others would have, except EC2. We are migrating back to EC2 for dedicated compute because we have scaled to a point where we have consistent traffic. The tradeoff of maintaining infrastructure in-house outweighs the benefits of moving quickly through …
Chose AWS Lambda
These are all AWS sister products, so I wouldn't say they are competitors but tools in the same box. They all work quite well together and I would say combined they are greater than the sum of their parts. Cloudformation (and SAM) templates make tying them together pretty …
Chose AWS Lambda
All were part of the stack we used. Integration was seamless and have not had any load issues.
Features
Amazon API GatewayAWS Lambda
API Management
Comparison of API Management features of Product A and Product B
Amazon API Gateway
9.1
14 Ratings
8% above category average
AWS Lambda
-
Ratings
API access control9.013 Ratings00 Ratings
Rate limits and usage policies10.013 Ratings00 Ratings
API usage data8.013 Ratings00 Ratings
API user onboarding8.013 Ratings00 Ratings
API versioning9.013 Ratings00 Ratings
Usage billing and payments10.012 Ratings00 Ratings
API monitoring and logging10.014 Ratings00 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Amazon API Gateway
-
Ratings
AWS Lambda
8.8
7 Ratings
3% below category average
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings8.67 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings9.13 Ratings
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Amazon API Gateway
-
Ratings
AWS Lambda
5.0
6 Ratings
32% below category average
Dashboards00 Ratings5.56 Ratings
Standard reports00 Ratings5.25 Ratings
Custom reports00 Ratings4.45 Ratings
Function as a Service (FaaS)
Comparison of Function as a Service (FaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon API Gateway
-
Ratings
AWS Lambda
8.7
7 Ratings
0% above category average
Programming Language Diversity00 Ratings9.07 Ratings
Runtime API Authoring00 Ratings8.07 Ratings
Function/Database Integration00 Ratings8.97 Ratings
DevOps Stack Integration00 Ratings8.97 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon API GatewayAWS Lambda
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Cloud Functions
IBM Cloud Functions
Score 6.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon API GatewayAWS Lambda
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(14 ratings)
7.7
(52 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.3
(17 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.7
(20 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon API GatewayAWS Lambda
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Experienced a lack of available programming languages while working on a minor project. I had to halt the project and wait for it to be added later. It took ages and had a hit on our productivity. It has a centralized management system which helps and an easy interface which helps to manage multiple tasks in case of large-scale operations and projects.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
Lambda excels at event-driven, short-lived tasks, such as processing files or building simple APIs. However, it's less ideal for long-running, computationally intensive, or applications that rely on carrying the state between jobs. Cold starts and constant load can easily balloon the costs.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • API Gateway integrates well with AWS Lambda. This allows us to build a web server in the language and framework of our choice, deploy it as a Lambda function, and expose it through API Gateway.
  • API Gateway manages API keys. Building rate limiting and request quota features are not trivial (or interesting).
  • API Gateway's pricing can be very attractive for services that are accessed infrequently.
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Amazon AWS
  • No provisioning required - we don't have to pay anything upfront
  • Serverless deployment - it gets executed only when request comes and we pay only for the time the request is getting executed
  • Integrates well with AWS CloudWatch triggers so it is easy to setup scheduled tasks like cron jobs
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Client certificates are troublesome when trying to attach them to API GW stages.
  • Debugging across several services can be difficult when API GW is integrated with Route 53 and another service like Lambda or EC2/ELB.
  • Creating internal/private APIs, particularly with custom domains, can be unintuitive.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • Developing test cases for Lambda functions can be difficult. For functions that require some sort of input it can be tough to develop the proper payload and event for a test.
  • For the uninitiated, deploying functions with Infrastructure as Code tools can be a challenging undertaking.
  • Logging the output of a function feels disjointed from running the function in the console. A tighter integration with operational logging would be appreciated, perhaps being able to view function logs from the Lambda console instead of having to navigate over to CloudWatch.
  • Sometimes its difficult to determine the correct permissions needed for Lambda execution from other AWS services.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
It is a great product very reliable and stable for connecting various aws services like we connected with lambda function and it is working very well, never faced any issue after the setup. It also saves out lots of money as well as time after we implemented the automatic ec2 server recovery system
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Amazon AWS
I give it a seven is usability because it's AWS. Their UI's are always clunkier than the competition and their documentation is rather cumbersome. There's SO MUCH to dig through and it's a gamble if you actually end up finding the corresponding info if it will actually help. Like I said before, going to google with a specific problem is likely a better route because AWS is quite ubiquitous and chances are you're not the first to encounter the problem. That being said, using SAM (Serverless application model) and it's SAM Local environment makes running local instances of your Lambdas in dev environments painless and quite fun. Using Nodejs + Lambda + SAM Local + VS Code debugger = AWESOME.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
We always had a great experience with the AWS support team. They were always on time and very dependable. It was a good partnership while we worked to resolve our issues.
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Amazon AWS
Amazon consistently provides comprehensive and easy-to-parse documentation of all AWS features and services. Most development team members find what they need with a quick internet search of the AWS documentation available online. If you need advanced support, though, you might need to engage an AWS engineer, and that could be an unexpected (or unwelcome) expense.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
When we tested Azure API Management at the time, it had serious connectivity issues, it was very unstable, and it needed to do a lot using the command line. Comparing with the AWS solution, which was more mature, and the fact that we have services in use on AWS, we ended up choosing to continue using AWS products. This so as not to run the risk of increasing latency in accesses, and of some functionality not working, due to being developed yet.
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Amazon AWS
AWS Lambda is good for short running functions, and ideally in response to events within AWS. Google App Engine is a more robust environment which can have complex code running for long periods of time, and across more than one instance of hardware. Google App Engine allows for both front-end and back-end infrastructure, while AWS Lambda is only for small back-end functions
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • ROI is negative, you need either to hire them to work with you or spend days/weeks to figure out issues.
  • For some of the projects in the end it is not worth it, it is just a "buzz" to use serverless but not practical.
  • Service is easy to set up authorization and it is easy to manage.
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Amazon AWS
  • Positive - Only paying for when code is run, unlike virtual machines where you pay always regardless of processing power usage.
  • Positive - Scalability and accommodating larger amounts of demand is much cheaper. Instead of scaling up virtual machines and increasing the prices you pay for that, you are just increasing the number of times your lambda function is run.
  • Negative - Debugging/troubleshooting, and developing for lambda functions take a bit more time to get used to, and migrating code from virtual machines and normal processes to Lambda functions can take a bit of time.
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ScreenShots