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 AWS App Runner if you need containers on aws without touching ecs/eks. For anything latency-sensitive at the edge, cold start row is the tiebreaker.
| AWS Lambda | AWS App Runner | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Function-as-a-Service | Container PaaS |
| Free tier | 1M requests/month (always free) | None |
| Paid pricing (indicative) | ~$0.20 per million requests + GB-seconds compute | vCPU + memory per second, scale to zero |
| Egress | ~$0.09/GB (billed) | Metered |
| Cold start | ~100ms-1s (varies by runtime/VPC) | Seconds from zero |
| Regions | ~30+ regions | AWS regions |
| Best for | Event-driven pipelines inside the AWS ecosystem | Containers on AWS without touching ECS/EKS |
Try AWS Lambda Try AWS App Runner
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