Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Google Compute Engine

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
Google Compute Engine
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Google Compute Engine is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) product from Google Cloud. It provides virtual machines with carbon-neutral infrastructure which run on the same data centers that Google itself uses.
$0
per month GB
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Google Compute Engine
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)
Preemptible Price - Predefined Memory
0.000892 / GB
Hour
Three-year commitment price - Predefined Memory
$0.001907 / GB
Hour
One-year commitment price - Predefined Memory
$0.002669 / GB
Hour
On-demand price - Predefined Memory
$0.004237 / GB
Hour
Preemptible Price - Predefined vCPUs
0.006655 / vCPU
Hour
Three-year commitment price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.014225 / CPU
Hour
One-year commitment price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.019915 / vCPU
Hour
On-demand price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.031611 / vCPU
Hour
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Google Compute Engine
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPrices vary according to region (i.e US central, east, & west time zones). Google Compute Engine also offers a discounted rate for a 1 & 3 year commitment.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Google Compute Engine
Considered Both Products
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
We ended up not selecting EC2, we chose Google Compute Engine instead. Reason for us choosing GCE was due to:
  1. Ability to define custom compute units in GCE.
  2. More transparent pricing due to automatic usage discounts.
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
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.
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
AWS EC2 is fully interfaced with the Amazon Web Services platform and Google Compute Engine fits in more with Google. While either provider would have been fine, we are pretty much all built on top of AWS at this point barring some clients. It just flowed easier.
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon EC2 is super flexible compared to the PaaS offerings like Heroku Platform and Google App Engine since with Amazon EC2, we have access to the terminal. In terms of pricing, it's basically just the same as Google Compute Engine. The deciding factor is Amazon EC2's native …
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
The availability of AWS startup credits led my choice of AWS EC2.
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon was the first one in the market to provide virtual machines in the cloud and certainly gained a lot of popularity before the rest even came to the picture. The different service providers are quite mutually exclusive, and one cannot easily use more than one at the same …
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
EC2 has better modes, a variety of instances and UI support as compare to GCE. GCE is completely command driven. As compared to it EC2 provides a better user interface.
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Security and cost are the major components which impact end users. We evaluated all the cloud platforms, and found AWS EC2 to be very cheap and more secure than GCP. Due to the improper configuration in AWS, we were compromised several times, then fixed it via some partners. …
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
It is better than other products in terms of their support team, documentation and initially, you can set up your services almost without paying anything. Apart from them, AWS services do have the best availability in any region in compared to other cloud products available …
Google Compute Engine
Chose Google Compute Engine
Ec2 has much more compatibility with different tech stacks than Google Compute Engine.
Chose Google Compute Engine
The price difference is not very high between them. Both of them provide good services.
Chose Google Compute Engine
GCE is available in 3 different regions whereas Ec2 is available in 11 different regions. The compute resources offered by the GCE has lower maximum capacity compared to AWS Ec2. The pricing model of GCE offers first 10 mins free and then charging in increments of 10 mins.
Both …
Chose Google Compute Engine
I prefer the Compute Engine Over these as it provides us with Better Scalability, Performance, and Reliability Security-related Issues don't arise with the Compute Engine, but yes, in terms of accessing or running, it can be improved a bit as compared to EC2 offered by AWS.
Chose Google Compute Engine
the main reason of choosing GCE is availability and user friendly UI with a very good documentation and API explanations. Great visibility over the infra and security.
Chose Google Compute Engine
The features specific to Google Compute Engine vs Amazon EC2 along with cost and availability are comparable, there may be other services within the vendor which may mean that one is more suitable for specific applications than the other one. We have used both for different …
Chose Google Compute Engine
Google was easy to start with in terms of ease of use and support access.
Chose Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability.

It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and …
Chose Google Compute Engine
AWS has become the de facto standard. Skills in Google Compute Engine and AWS are not easily transferable. Still, after getting to know Google Compute Engine well, productivity can be very high and ROI impressive. There are many additional services offered around Google Compute …
Chose Google Compute Engine
We decided to use GCE mainly for its price and good looking UI.
Chose Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine is better than other in terms of the pricing and the performance. But when it comes to ease of use i would prefer Azure Virtual Machines. Other than this I find GCE very competitive with these other solutions
Chose Google Compute Engine
Similar in capabilities, slightly slicker APIs and CLIs. More observability in the default UI and the CLIs. Easier to setup, the google console is slick. Azure has a good user interface as well with lots of documentation to help. CLI is slightly less intuitive, but decent. AWS …
Chose Google Compute Engine
We have never used EC2, however, we chose Google Cloud over Amazon mostly because we felt Google was stronger in the data analytics tools and their platform seemed to be on the rise overall.
Chose Google Compute Engine
The best GCP products - GKE for containerization workload fit to the VM machines specified for different application type (monolithic). These services can be easily integrated with each other with additional benefits.
Chose Google Compute Engine
After all the discounts, GCE is a bit cheaper with much less incidental expenses to deploy and maintain compared to Amazon, Microsoft Azur and Oracle (OCI). It is also easy to manage as the interface is simpler compared to AWS or Azur.
Chose Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine has similar capabilities and features as Amazon EC2. Their ecosystems differ, and Amazon has a lead in more innovative products, but Google is working on closing the gap. If sticking to the essential functionality of computing, Google Compute Engine and …
Chose Google Compute Engine
We have used Amazon in the past. GCE has come such a long way since then, we have not looked back. IAM and access are on par, cost management is slightly better on GCE. Where we have really seen improvements are the VM types (GCE allows for deep customization that does not …
Chose Google Compute Engine
The two products are very similar. For what we use each for, the difference is negligible, and we actually use both AWS EC2 and Google Compute Engine GCE.
Chose Google Compute Engine
Neither of them has managed a user-friendly approach to setting up the global distribution of computing systems. Modern day business must be able to cater to the entire world instead of being regional to be competitive. Only Google offers this capability, hence why we have no …
Chose Google Compute Engine
GCE was an easy choice for us after evaluating our options. We needed something that was dynamic enough to handle our specialized stack, but easy enough that our engineers weren't spending too much time configuring and launching. We found AWS's offering to be similar but …
Chose Google Compute Engine
Pricing scale is good. Google Cloud Compute provides additional facilities free of cost (limited storage). Received one year free credits to get started. Nearest regions are available. Others amenities including free repository service available. UI is modern and fast to load. …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Google Compute Engine
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
Google Compute Engine
7.0
51 Ratings
15% below category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.517 Ratings8.126 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.317 Ratings8.448 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.217 Ratings8.044 Ratings
Pre-configured templates9.517 Ratings6.149 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.117 Ratings3.027 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images9.817 Ratings6.550 Ratings
Operating system support9.617 Ratings7.751 Ratings
Security controls9.617 Ratings7.651 Ratings
Automation8.47 Ratings7.92 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Google Compute Engine
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)Google Compute Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(65 ratings)
7.8
(51 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(3 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(13 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(13 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(12 ratings)
8.4
(10 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Google Compute Engine
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.
Read full review
Google
Google Compute Engine is so easy to implement and run. It doesn't require much knowledge to build an app since they provide multiple options to choose from with their prebuilt sample list. We can easily make customization on any website app we built for our client according to their needs and make changes if required.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Google
  • Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts
  • Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy
  • Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Google
  • Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides.
  • Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount.
  • Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Google
Overall services are good to go. Received good feedback from users. Have regional server locations. It has free extra service included.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Google
Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Google
The Google Compute Engine is constantly up, healthy, and available. I have never experienced any issues with it loading or functioning.Since it is accessible everywhere in the world, it is always available with low latency for all regions.However, I have occasionally seen problems with various NoSQL databases' availability, such as MongoDB, in terms of speed.Overall though, it's always accessible.
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Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Google
Google Compute Engine's performance is up to the standard and I don't really have any complain about that. But website itself does not load quickly and there is a very noticeable delay when the website loads. And no, our system did not our slow down when we integrated Google Compute Engine in our system.
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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.
Read full review
Google
  • The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product.
  • Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Google
Google Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability. It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and IoT services provider, which helps with ease of integration and updates in the future.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Google
  • With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems.
  • As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Google Compute Engine Screenshots

Screenshot of How to choose the right VM
With thousands of applications, each with different requirements, which VM is right for you?Screenshot of documentation, guides, and reference architectures
Migration Center is Google Cloud's unified migration platform with features like cloud spend estimation, asset discovery, and a variety of tooling for different migration scenarios.