Head-to-head, indicative as of Oct 2026. Prices change — always confirm on the vendor page.
Quick read: pick AWS Lambda if your workload is event-driven pipelines inside the aws ecosystem and its pricing model fits your traffic shape; pick Alibaba Cloud if you need reaching apac users at apac prices. For anything latency-sensitive at the edge, cold start row is the tiebreaker.
| AWS Lambda | Alibaba Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Function-as-a-Service | Full cloud (ECS) |
| Free tier | 1M requests/month (always free) | Trial credits |
| Paid pricing (indicative) | ~$0.20 per million requests + GB-seconds compute | ECS from ~$2.50/mo promo |
| Egress | ~$0.09/GB (billed) | Metered by region |
| Cold start | ~100ms-1s (varies by runtime/VPC) | N/A |
| Regions | ~30+ regions | Strong APAC + global |
| Best for | Event-driven pipelines inside the AWS ecosystem | Reaching APAC users at APAC prices |
Try AWS Lambda Try Alibaba Cloud
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