Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Amazon Elastic Transcoder

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.
$0.01
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
The Amazon Elastic Transcoder from AWS is a cloud-based media transcoding service available to AWS users which is priced on the volume of media transcoded by minute and the media's resolution. The service is scalable and anticipates transcoding of very large files or high volumes of files.
$0
per minute
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Editions & Modules
Data Transfer
$0.00 - $0.09
per GB
On-Demand
$0.0042 - $6.528
per Hour
EBS-Optimized Instances
$0.005
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
Carrier IP Addresses
$0.005 - $0.10
T4g Instances
$0.04
per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES
T2, T3 Instances
$0.05 ($0.096)
per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES (Windows)
Audio Only
$0.0045
per minute
Less than 720p
$0.015
per minute
720p and above
$0.03
per minute
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAmazon Elastic Transcoder offers a monthly free usage tier. The free tier consists of: 20 minutes of free audio-only output per month, 20 minutes of free SD output per month and 10 minutes of free HD output per month. Once you exceed the number of minutes in this free usage tier, you will be charged at the prevailing rates.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
9.1
18 Ratings
11% above category average
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
9.2
3 Ratings
12% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.617 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.317 Ratings10.02 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.217 Ratings9.53 Ratings
Pre-configured templates9.517 Ratings9.03 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.117 Ratings9.53 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images9.817 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Operating system support9.617 Ratings9.03 Ratings
Security controls9.617 Ratings8.03 Ratings
Automation8.47 Ratings9.52 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Small Businesses
Akamai Cloud Computing
Akamai Cloud Computing
Score 9.0 out of 10
Akamai Cloud Computing
Akamai Cloud Computing
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(65 ratings)
8.5
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(12 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
I think nowadays, Amazon EC2 is best-suited for most app development and deployment use cases, especially if your resource requirements are not fixed over a long period of time. The flexibility provided by the on-demand pricing and rescaling option makes Amazon EC2 a great service, especially if your tech stack already runs on AWS. On the other hand, I think Amazon EC2 is not the best option if your tech infrastructure runs on another public cloud.
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Amazon AWS
It is well suited in a large setting where people use different file formats and various apps to record and transfer their audio or video files across devices. In such scenarios, the transcoder would of real help to eliminate the hassle of converting the files into desired formats for viewing or doing some other analysis.
The transcoder would not be of much use if all the files have the same format and does not need any conversion from their source file formats. It would prove costly and not useful if it's just an additional step that is of no particular use
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • A great variety of choices in Amazon Machine Image (AMI) types. Users can select a more basic type to run generic workloads, but also have the choice to pick an AMI pre-installed with specific services in the AWS Marketplace.
  • The range of instance types can support the usage from a student's exploration (inexpensive general-purpose nano instances) to an enterprise's most intense workloads (memory or storage-optimized instances with terabytes of memory and ultra-fast network connection).
  • The pricing options, from regular instances, reserved instances to spot instances allow users to get the job done and make smart choices about how much they want to pay and when they want to pay.
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Amazon AWS
  • Works at scale, you can can transcode a high number of videos at the same time.
  • Supports a good number of formats.
  • Good integration with AWS S3 and other AWS Services.
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • This service is a bit difficult to consume. New users need a big learning curve to use this service effectively.
  • UI for EC2 service is a little complex and at many places, it misses detailed explanation.
  • Sometimes it takes too long to create images of EC2 instances. This keeps your EC2 up for that extra time. When instances are heavy, it penalizes a lot of money.
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Amazon AWS
  • Amazon Elastic Transcoder requires a fair amount of setup.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows various ways of gaining incidents, such as slow growth, money, and the reserved ones, mostly depend entirely on the necessity, because it makes highly intelligent choices possible at these times, which enable considerable cost savings whilst addressing the situation as best I like.
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.
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Amazon AWS
Support for Amazon Elastic Transcoder is the same as any other service within AWS. If you are familiar with AWS, it is easy to start using Elastic Transcoder
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Azure VM and Google Compute Engine are alternatives to EC2. AWS EC2 is most matures and advanced of the 3. All these provide easy-to-deploy and automatically configured third-party applications, including single virtual machine or multiple virtual machine solutions.
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Amazon AWS
Amazon Elastic Transcoder is in a league of its own when compared to other alternatives in the market. The most noticeable competitor would be either Microsoft or Adobe or Google. When I had a chance to compare Azure products and Amazon products, the difference is obvious and the experience provided by both the products are very different in terms of user experience and interaction with the application. The cost and availability also were taken into consideration when choosing between the two shortlisted choices. So we went with Amazon's product as it is widely used and has support and maintenance which is basically better than the competition.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • AWS has had a very positive return on investment for every client we have that uses it. They are saving money in the long run.
  • AWS includes the underlying operating system licenses with their EC2 instances so no longer do we have to navigate through Microsoft licensing headache.
  • EC2 allows us to easily create a golden image of servers and store them as AMIs. This makes spinning up new servers that need a particular set of software in the future extremely easy and cost-effective.
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Amazon AWS
  • Less time for integration with this service if you are already in AWS stack
  • No real time transcoding is a negative
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ScreenShots