Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Linode

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.6 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
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Linode helps users simplify cloud infrastructure with Linux virtual machines and tools to develop, deploy, and scale applications. Linode aims to make virtual computing more accessible, affordable, and simple. The vendor states the Linode infrastructure-as-a-service platform is deployed across 11 global markets from data centers around the world and is supported by a Next Generation Network, advanced APIs, comprehensive services, and a library of educational resources. Linode products,…
$0
Monthly or Hourly
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Linode
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)
Dedicated CPU 4 GB RAM
$30/month or $0.05/hour
N/A
Dedicated CPU 8 GB RAM
$60/month or $0.09/hour
N/A
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Linode
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details—CPU, transfer, storage, and RAM bundled into one simple price. Increase storage capacity with additional Block Storage or S3-compatible Object Storage. Add instant Backups with complete independency to your stack. Ensure your applications and services are highly-available with Linode NodeBalancers. Deploy Kubernetes clusters with our fully-managed container orchestration engine.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Linode
Considered Both Products
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
I did not select AWS EC2 as my final choice of infrastructure. I picked Linode. Linode, Digital Ocean, AWS EC2 all provide the VPS infrastructure we need. But because I'm a small company, the cost is very important. I also didn't need the other AWS features. I also want to make …
Chose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
We tried a few other competitors on the web hosting side of our company and ultimately decided to go with AWS EC2 instances. AWS had the most flexibility, the most choices for different types of instances, a variety of Operating Systems, an incredible infrastructure across …
Linode
Chose Linode
AWS is more expensive and less predictable. I get the feeling AWS might scale better for huge sites but cannot say for certain. DigitalOcean Droplets seems to be on a par with Linode, and cost-wise they are very similar. I've tried using Thema few times but always come …
Chose Linode
Linode distinguishes itself with a sleek and intuitive interface that sets it apart from other providers. Its Dashboard UI is notably superior, particularly for tasks like monitoring and managing Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and Domain Name Servers (DNS). With a user-friendly …
Chose Linode
We migrated away from EC2 and S3 and onto Linode's instances and block storage. The reliability and speed is comparable, but Linode's price is cheaper and their customer service is far faster and better. I also prefer Linode's dashboard - particularly their DNS management, …
Chose Linode
Compared to AWS EC2, Linode has an easier creation of services and lots of options to pre-select and get a ready VM installed in minutes.
Chose Linode
We have used both DigitalOcean and EC2 in the past, and a client is currently using EC2.

DigitalOcean certainly has some attractive offerings, particularly price-wise, but it did not seem to suit our needs at the time.
Chose Linode
Linode delivers higher performance cloud servers, within an easier web interface, simpler API, and better cost-benefit. Amazon has a complex interface that many times make the customers spend much more time in order to finish simple tasks and use "AWS-terms" so even if you need …
Chose Linode
Azure and AWS are priced out of the residential market. if looking for "home" hosting I have seen that there is real value in using Linode over the competition.

For me advanced enterprise level tools were not needed. I was looking for and use Linode for VPS services to …
Chose Linode
I've tried all of Digital Ocean, AWS EC2 and AWS Lightsail - I found Linode to give the best price/performance for a VPS. However, compared to serverless functions like AWS Lambda, there's a lot of maintenance work if you want to keep your VPS up-to-date. If you're looking for …
Chose Linode
All the companies [and] service providers [have] some [unique] features. They [work well] but we are having [a good experience] with Linode. As compare to AWS and Google Cloud, Linode is very cheap and if we compare it with DigitalOcean then they both have similar …
Chose Linode
I used a lot of different services, a lot of services inside Amazon AWS and Digital ocean, but I found at Linode a different way to do all what I need, without having to be worried about weird costs calculations and other things like that.
Chose Linode
We tested a few infrastructure providers like DigitalOcean, Vultr and AWS.
  1. Digital Ocean servers is slow compared to Linode.
  2. Vultr high frequency server is fast but we prefer Linode as it is more reliable in terms of uptime.
Chose Linode
Completely prefer Linode to AWS. Currently still have some legacy services there but Linode is above and beyond better in the way you can manage your instance and with the predictable cost.
Chose Linode
Linode is much easier to use than AWS. The model is simpler, and configuration and maintenance is simple. But what we really like is the fixed cost. With AWS we never know how much we are going to spend. With Linode, we know exactly how much the bill will be each month (the …
Chose Linode
Linode has a very competitive price.
Chose Linode
Digital Ocean, AWS are used by some of our clients. Linode is good and I'm very comfortable using it for the last 2-3 years, so love to refer it to clients too.
Chose Linode
I find using Linode easier to use when your use case is what you would do on an EC2 instance. I try to avoid AWS all together because of the complexity. Spinning up a server on Linode is pretty easy and clear as opposed to an EC2 instance. The charges/billing is also clear.
Chose Linode
DigitalOcean had very bad communication both internally and externally. Vultr had good features but could not answer questions about Spectre/Meltdown with any specificity. EC2 and GCE's unpredictable costs and higher bandwidth fees make them annoying or expensive for most of my …
Chose Linode
We had previously used inMotion's shared hosting, so when we started to outgrow that service we considered using their VPS option. We found that it would be more expensive than Linode, and not as powerful.

We considered Amazon EC2, but it is much easier to get started with …
Chose Linode
For simple VMs or Kubernetes, Linode is cheaper and it also has consistently good performance. As long as this is what you need, you get all you'd want.
AWS and GCP shine when you need their other services. Oracle Cloud was bare bone and expensive. Droplets are easy to start …
Chose Linode
I like the control that Linode gives over the alternatives to make sure your system does what you need and doesn't require complicated pricing schemes or integration times.
Chose Linode
The pricing wasn't even close. With EC2 you had to pay for every piece and I was afraid of network traffic driving my costs up. The management interface was also much less user friendly for a novice user.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Linode
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
Linode
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.717 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.317 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.217 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates9.517 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.217 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images9.817 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support9.617 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls9.617 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation8.37 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Linode
Small Businesses
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
Score 8.9 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)Linode
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(65 ratings)
9.6
(213 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(27 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(3 ratings)
8.9
(20 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(12 ratings)
8.7
(212 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(11 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Linode
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
Linode
Linode provides a wide range of configurations and prices, suitable for many budgets and needs. They also have a lot of experience in providing these services for many years. We have almost exclusively used Debian distributions for our work, but they offer a large number of other versions of Linux. Beside "raw" distributions of Linux, they also offer other VMs containing specialized installations of a variety of applications, such as Wordpress, Drupal and Docker.
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
Linode
  • It's super easy-to-use - set up a complete virtual environment in a few minutes.
  • Linode is the ONLY service I know that will let you DOWNSIZE a VM - super useful.
  • The price is right - spin up any size server and add additional block storage if needed.
  • Object memory is cheap and integrates very well with S3 CLIs and applications.
  • I've been very happy with the knowledgeable and friendly customer service.
  • The more recent additions of a firewall and Kubernetes is a welcome plus.
  • The load balancer ("Load Balancer") service is easy to spin up and configure.
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
Linode
  • I have not succeeded in using the DNS of Linode with a website not hosted in their server. I hope their DNS is as user-friendly as DO and Vultr.
  • Cloud storage user interface is not as easy as DO. I want to see their cloud storage on a pay-per-usage scheme, not monthly.
  • For VPS, I wish Linode to increase the SSD space storage of their basic VPS larger than those of competitors.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Linode
I've been with them a long time. They provide me with the capabilities I need coupled with knowledgeable support that's not pay-for-extra. However, if I move to a non-Linux OS, the level of support by necessity will drop off. I can still ask questions about the infrastructure but I my ability to ask about OS features will decrease.
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
Linode
It's pretty easy for me, but I preferred their old interface before it was called 'cloud' (not a computer science term.) The new interface looks easier but I had to ask for help for things I used to be able to find myself. If someone was new to it--without having used their old interface--it might be easier for them than it originally was for me.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Linode
There is very little planned downtime. Whenever planned downtime is necessary I'm always given lots of advanced notice and an explanation that I can pass along to my users that they'll understand. I really appreciate that Linode appreciates my commitment to reliable service to my users. It shows that they believe they've been successful when I'm successful.
Read full review
Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Linode
Linode is an infrastructure provider issues related to performance are really on me. Linode provides a capable infrastructure and allows me to tailor performance of the services I provide to my customers to my specific situation. Linode allows me to implement "tweaks" that, from experience, I know will do the job with little risk without a whole bunch of static from idiot support 'droids who just get in the way ("this isn't supported at the present time").
Read full review
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
Linode
Support from Linode has always been excellent for us. We've barely had to wait any time between ticket requests and replies, and we've always received replies that actually answered our problems. Whenever maintenance has occurred on Linode's side, they've always alerted us beforehand and left a ticket open as a source of communication in case we had any issues after maintenance or any other questions that we needed answered.
Read full review
Online Training
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Linode
We got kick started with an initial walkthrough along with some free credits. The initial walkthrough helped us to understand Linode's ecosystem and start our hands on with Linode. We tried out some apps from Marketplace initially with the free credits, which not only helped us understand Linode better, but also those apps. We had implemented many such apps to our customers with Linode
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Linode
We're a small organization. The implementation of our Linode solution was trivial. Once I justified a cloud server to my bosses over a co-location -- the co-lo wasn't as fast as our linode server in load tests -- it was a matter of moving one Linux implementation to another. Trivial.
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
Linode
Compared to the big cloud players like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, MS Azure, Oracle Cloud, and co., Linode's product is simpler and cheaper. For quick and straightforward client engagements, the power and flexibility afforded by the previously mentioned vendors are overkill. Compared specifically to some of its closest rivals: Versus DigitalOcean, Linode has better pricing for VMs; while compared to Vultr, while Vultr's backups are cheaper (20% of VM cost versus effective ~25% of VM cost), Vultr's DDoS protection is an add-on product, which made the overall cost of the deployment more expensive. The runner-up competitor for our use cases, Hetzner, offers superior pricing; However due to their flaky KYC and anti-fraud which was a pain to deal with, I lost faith in them. They also do not have a region in East Asia, which would impact performance.
Read full review
Scalability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Linode
Although I use only a fraction of their product offerings, the total set makes scalability an easy goal to shoot for. As I said, I have a few customers that use the services my Linode provides...and I like it that way. However, should I need to scale up, I can...without incurring any more cost than I need to.
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
Linode
  • With the partnership of Linode, Configr is today the best performance hosting solution in Brazil.
  • With Linode, Configr can provide a PaaS solution without the cost of taking care of all the infrastructure issues such as IaaS.
  • Linode allowed Configr to be one of the biggest hosting companies in Brazil.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Linode Screenshots

Screenshot of Manage all of your Linode resources in one easy interface.Screenshot of In Cloud Manager, you can easily create Linode instances, managed Kubernetes clusters, add backups to your Linodes, deploy Marketplace Apps, create Object Storage buckets, and more.Screenshot of Deploy Kubernetes clusters with our fully-managed container orchestration engine.Screenshot of Dedicated CPU instances run on their own CPU cores in the Linode infrastructure. No sharing the processor with other instances.Screenshot of We're reshaping how cloud service providers are supporting partners. Our Partner Program provides a growth path for businesses to receive additional benefits as they scale the Linode Cloud.