Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) vs. AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon S3
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.N/A
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the platform-as-a-service offering provided by Amazon and designed to leverage AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
$35
per month
Pricing
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No Charge
$0
Users pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2, S3 buckets, etc.) used to store and run the application.
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon S3AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Considered Both Products
Amazon S3
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
I did not review or test with any other services. We started this business as a loyal and excited AWS customer and we remain the same today.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk
We now default to Amazon ECS, due to flexibility this gives us with how workloads scale, and more network flexibility as many of our workloads are internal / external facing. We selected Elastic Beanstalk at beginning of our containerization phase, which suited our needs …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Data Center Backup
Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
9.7
2 Ratings
13% above category average
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
-
Ratings
Universal recovery9.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Instant recovery9.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Recovery verification10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Multiple backup destinations10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Backup to the cloud10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Snapshots10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Flexible deployment10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Management dashboard7.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform support10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Retention options10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Encryption10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Enterprise Backup
Comparison of Enterprise Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
9.5
2 Ratings
16% above category average
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
-
Ratings
Continuous data protection10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Replication10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Operational reporting and analytics8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-location capabilities10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
-
Ratings
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
9.6
28 Ratings
16% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings10.018 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.928 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings9.727 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings9.522 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings9.327 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings9.827 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings9.527 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings9.528 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings9.127 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings9.525 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings9.426 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Small Businesses
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Score 9.7 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.7 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.7 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(68 ratings)
9.8
(28 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
7.9
(2 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(10 ratings)
7.7
(9 ratings)
Support Rating
9.8
(21 ratings)
8.0
(12 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
I have been using AWS Elastic Beanstalk for more than 5 years, and it has made our life so easy and hassle-free. Here are some scenarios where it excels -
  • I have been using different AWS services like EC2, S3, Cloudfront, Serverless, etc. And Elastic Beanstalk makes our lives easier by tieing each service together and making the deployment a smooth process.
  • N number of integrations with different CI/CD pipelines make this most engineer's favourite service.
  • Scalability & Security comes with the service, which makes it the absolute perfect product for your business.
Personally, I haven't found any situations where it's not appropriate for the use cases it can be used. The pricing is also very cost-effective.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
  • Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
  • It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
  • Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • Getting a project set up using the console or CLI is easy compared to other [computing] platforms.
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports a variety of programming languages so teams can experiment with different frameworks but still use the same compute platform for rapid prototyping.
  • Common application architectures can be referenced as patterns during project [setup].
  • Multiple environments can be deployed for an application giving more flexibility for experimentation.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
  • Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • Limited to the frameworks and configurations that AWS supports. There is no native way to use Elastic Beanstalk to deploy a Go application behind Nginx, for example.
  • It's not always clear what's changed on an underlying system when AWS updates an EB stack; the new version is announced, but AWS does not say what specifically changed in the underlying configuration. This can have unintended consequences and result in additional work in order to figure out what changes were made.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
As our technology grows, it makes more sense to individually provision each server rather than have it done via beanstalk. There are several reasons to do so, which I cannot explain without further diving into the architecture itself, but I can tell you this. With automation, you also loose the flexibility to morph the system for your specific needs. So if you expect that in future you need more customization to your deployment process, then there is a good chance that you might try to do things individually rather than use an automation like beanstalk.
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
It is a great tool to manage your applications. You just need to write the codes, and after that with one click, your app will be online and accessible from the internet. That is a huge help for people who do not know about infrastructure or do not want to spend money on maintaining infrastructure.
Read full review
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
As I described earlier it has been really cost effective and really easy for fellow developers who don't want to waste weeks and weeks into learning and manually deploying stuff which basically takes month to create and go live with the Minimal viable product (MVP). With AWS Beanstalk within a week a developer can go live with the Minimal viable product easily.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
- Do as many experiments as you can before you commit on using beanstalk or other AWS features. - Keep future state in mind. Think through what comes next, and if that is technically possible to do so. - Always factor in cost in terms of scaling. - We learned a valuable lesson when we wanted to go multi-region, because then we realized many things needs to change in code. So if you plan on using this a lot, factor multiple regions.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
We also use Heroku and it is a great platform for smaller projects and light Node.js services, but we have found that in terms of cost, the Elastic Beanstalk option is more affordable for the projects that we undertake. The fact that it sits inside of the greater AWS Cloud offering also compels us to use it, since integration is simpler. We have also evaluated Microsoft Azure and gave up trying to get an extremely basic implementation up and running after a few days of struggling with its mediocre user interface and constant issues with documentation being outdated. The authentication model is also badly broken and trying to manage resources is a pain. One cannot compare Azure with anything that Amazon has created in the cloud space since Azure really isn't a mature platform and we are always left wanting when we have to interface with it.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
  • The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
  • If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • till now we had not Calculated ROI as the project is still evolving and we had to keep on changing the environment implementation
  • it meets our purpose of quick deployment as compared to on-premises deployment
  • till now we look good as we also controlled our expenses which increased suddenly in the middle of deployment activity
Read full review
ScreenShots