AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs. AWS Lambda

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Score 8.9 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
AWS Lambda
Score 8.8 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
AWS Elastic BeanstalkAWS Lambda
Editions & Modules
No Charge
$0
Users pay for AWS resources (e.g. EC2, S3 buckets, etc.) used to store and run the application.
128 MB
$0.0000000021
Per 1 ms
1024 MB
$0.0000000167
Per 1 ms
10240 MB
$0.0000001667
Per 1 ms
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS Elastic BeanstalkAWS Lambda
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AWS Elastic BeanstalkAWS Lambda
Considered Both Products
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk
We ended up with AWS Lambda to take workload off the developers and develop in tandem, then later integrate. We use both though.
Chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk
I use both EB and Lambda for different use cases. I normally use AWS Lambda for my smaller software needs.
Chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk
The AWS Elastic Beanstalk containerization capability is the best and effective Automatic scalling, high level security management and the platform itself is very easy on initial starting. The Application isolation from workloads and the ability on connecting the AWS Elastic …
Chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk
There are many services like AWS Elastic beanstalk, but there are none with the maturity in the platform or the cost-effectiveness of AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Also, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the oldest among them, so there are more people with AWS experience than the other …
Chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk
The AWS platform provides a great deal of configurability that is abstracted and provided very well through AWS Elastic Beanstalk. This is the main reason for choosing Elastic Beanstalk over competing services. Another reason for selecting AWS Beanstalk was vendor …
Chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Honestly, I haven't tried any other alternative products. As already mentioned, I am already heavily invested in AWS, so EBS was a natural choice for me. In other reviews, I have found, AWS is better than its competitors. There are more flavors, and options in AWS, better …
Chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk
We didn't use Lambda much till now. We, however, found better control of resources in EBS.
AWS Lambda
Chose AWS Lambda
AWS is great product and a close match our expectations. It is close to Azure in function but more feature rich with API and support documents. From my experience, it is cheaper compared with our competitors and provides better interface. Overall our dev engineers prefer AWS …
Top Pros
Top Cons
TrustRadius Insights
AWS Elastic BeanstalkAWS Lambda
Highlights

TrustRadius
Research Team Insight
Published

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Lambda are both platform as a service products that enable businesses to utilize cloud computing. Both are AWS products, but they serve slightly different use cases.  AWS Elastic Beanstalk is ideal for deploying and managing fully functional applications. AWS Lambda is a serverless product that allows for the deployment of small applications or pieces of larger applications at a low cost.  Both products are popular with businesses of all sizes, depending on their use case.  It is possible to use both platforms, with AWS Lambda being used for the heaviest computing portions of an application.

Features

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Lambda both provide a platform for cloud computing, but they also have some standout features that are important to consider.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides a complete platform for computing and application deployment.  Businesses using AWS Elastic Beanstalk benefit from the ability to control and manage the application environment in a granular manner.  Additionally, if businesses don’t want to worry about aspects such as provisioning and load balancing, AWS Elastic Beanstalk can manage those aspects of the environment automatically.

AWS Lambda allows businesses to run code in a serverless environment, so management requirements are minimal.  Lambda can also integrate with other tools that can trigger functions in AWS Lambda, or applications that can make function calls to code in Lambda.  For businesses that want to run code without worrying about managing servers or the codes environment, AWS Lambda is a great choice.

Limitations

Though AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Lambda can be used together, and both simplify cloud computing, they also have some limitations that are important to consider.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides some automation features and allows for customization of the application environment, but it is difficult to use it as a “set it and forget it” tool.  In contrast, AWS Lambda is a serverless environment with minimal management requirements, so users can run code without worrying about the environment.  AWS Elastic Beanstalk is best for businesses that need a robust computing platform.

AWS Lambda allows users to easily run code in a serverless environment, but it doesn’t include as many options for customizing the environment.  For businesses looking for a flexible platform that they can manage however they want, AWS Elastic Beanstalk may be preferred.  Additionally, while Lambda is a good choice for pieces of code that applications will call, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is more usable for fully featured application deployment.

Pricing

AWS Elastic Beanstalk pricing is entirely dependent on what AWS resources are used in the environment.  For example, using more storage buckets will increase AWS Elastic Beanstalk pricing.

AWS Lambda is priced depending on the amount of memory used and the amount of requests made.  Businesses can expect AWS Lambda pricing to start at $0.20 per million requests.

Features
AWS Elastic BeanstalkAWS Lambda
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
9.5
28 Ratings
15% above category average
AWS Lambda
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces10.018 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability9.928 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead9.727 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability9.522 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control9.227 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration9.727 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation9.427 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication9.428 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification9.027 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery9.425 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes9.326 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AWS Elastic BeanstalkAWS Lambda
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.8 out of 10
IBM Cloud Functions
IBM Cloud Functions
Score 8.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AWS Elastic BeanstalkAWS Lambda
Likelihood to Recommend
9.8
(28 ratings)
8.8
(45 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.9
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(9 ratings)
9.0
(13 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(12 ratings)
8.7
(20 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AWS Elastic BeanstalkAWS Lambda
Likelihood to Recommend
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
Amazon AWS
[AWS Lambda] is very well suited for the projects that doesn't have any infra but needs it where short running processes are required. But if your application need to run continuously than this might not be the very apt tool for you.
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Pros
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.
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Amazon AWS
  • Lambda provides multiple methods for triggering functions, this includes AWS resources and services and external triggers like APIs and CLI calls.
  • The compute provided my Lambda is largely hands off for operations teams. Once the function is deployed, the management overhead is minimal since there are no servers to maintain.
  • Lambda's pricing can be very cost effective given that users are only charged for the time the function runs and associated costs like network or storage if those are used. A function that executes quickly and is not called often can cost next to nothing.
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Cons
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.
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Amazon AWS
  • Putting a significant portion of your codebase into AWS Lambda and taking advantage of the high level of integration with other AWS services comes with the risk of vendor lock-in.
  • While the AWS Lambda environment is "not your problem," it's also not at your disposal to extend or modify, nor does it preserve state between function executions.
  • AWS Lambda functions are subject to strict time limitations, and will be aborted if they exceed five minutes of execution time. This can be a problem for some longer-running tasks that are otherwise well-suited to serverless delivery.
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Likelihood to Renew
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.
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Usability
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
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
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.
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Amazon AWS
I have not needed support for AWS Lambda, since it is already using Python, which has resources all over the internet. AWS blog posts have information about how to install some libraries, which is necessary for some more complex operations, but this is available online and didn't require specific customer support for.
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Implementation Rating
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.
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
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Amazon AWS
Azure Functions is another product that provides lambda functionality, but the documentation for some of Azure's products is quite hard to read. Additionally, AWS Lambda was one of the first cloud computing products on a large cloud service that implemented lambda functions, so they have had the most time to develop the product, increase the quality of service, and extend functionality to more languages. Amazon, by far, has the best service for Lambda that I know.
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Return on Investment
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
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Amazon AWS
  • I was able to perform a lot of processing on data delivered from my website and little or no cost. This was a big plus to me.
  • Programming AWS Lambda is quite easy once you understand the time limits to the functions.
  • AWS Lambda has really good integration with the AWS S3 storage system. This a very good method of delivering data to be processed and a good place to pick it up after processing.
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