ECS vs EKS Pricing in 2025: Which Container Service is Cheaper?

In the battle of container orchestrators, ECS (Elastic Container Service) describes itself as “Simple” and EKS (Kubernetes) as “Powerful.” But which one saves you money?

The answer isn’t just about the AWS bill—it’s about the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which includes your engineering salaries.

1. The Infrastructure Bill: Pure Spend

The Control Plane Tax

• EKS: $73.00 / month / cluster ($0.10/hour).
• ECS: $0.00.

Winner: ECS. For a small startup or a side project, ECS is instantly cheaper. You can have 10 isolated environments (Dev, Test, Staging) for free on ECS. On EKS, that’s $730/month just for empty clusters.

Compute Costs (Fargate)

• Prices for Fargate vCPU/GB are identical for both ECS and EKS.
• Nuance: ECS tasks tend to have lower overhead. EKS often requires sidecars (DaemonSets for logging, networking, monitoring) that consume 10-15% of your customized capacity. ECS has less “cluster plumbing” to pay for.

Compute Costs (EC2)

Both services allow you to use EC2 instances as workers.

• Savings: Both support Spot Instances and Savings Plans.
• Efficiency: EKS is generally better at “Bin Packing” (fitting small pods into gaps on a server) because the Kubernetes scheduler is more advanced than the ECS scheduler.

2. The Operational Bill: Human Cost

This is where the real money is lost.

Upgrades

• ECS: There are no “versions” to manage. AWS updates the control plane behind the scenes. You just update your Fargate platform version in your task definition (one line of code).
  • Cost: $0 engineering hours.
• EKS: Kubernetes releases a new version every 4 months. You must upgrade or pay an extended support penalty ($0.60/hour!).
  • Cost: Weeks of engineering time per year testing and performing upgrades.

Tooling & Hiring

• ECS: Requires general AWS knowledge. Any developer who knows Terraform/CloudFormation can manage it.
• EKS: Requires specialized Kubernetes knowledge (Helm, kubectl, RBAC, OPA Gatekeeper, ARP, Service Mesh).
  • Cost: Kubernetes experts generally command higher salaries.

3. The “Lock-In” Factor

• EKS: Is standard upstream Kubernetes. You can take your YAML manifests to GKE (Google), AKS (Azure), or on-prem.
• ECS: Is proprietary to AWS. You cannot run ECS anywhere else (except ECS Anywhere, which is still tied to the AWS control plane).

Conclusion: The Decision Matrix

Choose ECS if:

• You have < 50 microservices.
• You want “Zero Ops”—set it and forget it.
• You don’t want to pay the $73/month tax per cluster.
• Best for: Startups, Side Projects, Simple Web Apps.

Choose EKS if:

• You need the rich ecosystem of Helm charts (Airflow, Prometheus, Grafana, ArgoCD).
• You need “Multi-Cloud” portability.
• You have a dedicated DevOps team.
• Best for: Enterprises, Platform Teams, Complex Microservice architectures.

[!TIP] Moving from ECS to EKS? Estimate the new bill with our EKS Pricing Calculator before you migrate. You might be surprised by the added cost.