# AWS Backup vs SimpleBackups

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-backup-vs-simplebackups/

Every value below is read from AWS Backup's and SimpleBackups's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | AWS Backup | SimpleBackups |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| What the free plan includes | Backup storage free tiers exist for EBS, DocumentDB and Neptune. The pricing page names them only in passing, to say they do not apply inside a logically air-gapped vault, and never states how large they are — so the allowance is confirmed to exist here and its size is not sourced from here. | The Basic plan at $0: one backup job and 1 GB of included storage, with your own storage connectable without limit. |
| Entry paid plan | None. There is no minimum fee and no setup charge, so the smallest possible bill is the cost of whatever is actually stored — the only member of this category without a floor to clear. | $49 a month for Lite, which includes 5 backup jobs, 50 GB of storage and a floor of 12 hours between runs. |
| Pricing model | Pure consumption, with no plan and no floor: backup storage held, cross-region transfer, data restored, and backup evaluations. Nothing is bought in advance, which is the opposite end of the category from the job-count and resource-count plans. | Per backup job, in plan-sized blocks of 1, 5, 20 and 100, with storage included at each step and unlimited bring-your-own storage alongside it. The tier also sets how often a job may run — 12 hours, 1 hour, then 5 minutes — so the plan buys recovery point objective as much as it buys capacity. |

## Where they differ

### What the free plan includes

- AWS Backup: Backup storage free tiers exist for EBS, DocumentDB and Neptune. The pricing page names them only in passing, to say they do not apply inside a logically air-gapped vault, and never states how large they are — so the allowance is confirmed to exist here and its size is not sourced from here. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/))
- SimpleBackups: The Basic plan at $0: one backup job and 1 GB of included storage, with your own storage connectable without limit. ([source](https://simplebackups.com/pricing))

### Entry paid plan

- AWS Backup: None. There is no minimum fee and no setup charge, so the smallest possible bill is the cost of whatever is actually stored — the only member of this category without a floor to clear. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/))
- SimpleBackups: $49 a month for Lite, which includes 5 backup jobs, 50 GB of storage and a floor of 12 hours between runs. ([source](https://simplebackups.com/pricing))

### Pricing model

- AWS Backup: Pure consumption, with no plan and no floor: backup storage held, cross-region transfer, data restored, and backup evaluations. Nothing is bought in advance, which is the opposite end of the category from the job-count and resource-count plans. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/backup/pricing/))
- SimpleBackups: Per backup job, in plan-sized blocks of 1, 5, 20 and 100, with storage included at each step and unlimited bring-your-own storage alongside it. The tier also sets how often a job may run — 12 hours, 1 hour, then 5 minutes — so the plan buys recovery point objective as much as it buys capacity. ([source](https://simplebackups.com/pricing))

## Which should you choose?

Pick AWS Backup if Backing up AWS services from one console with nothing bought in advance. There is no minimum fee and no setup charge, and the rate is per GB-month per service, so a small estate genuinely pays a small bill.

Pick SimpleBackups if Backing up many different things on a schedule you choose and being told when one stops working: 5 jobs at $49 a month rising to 100 at $299, with unlimited storage of your own alongside whatever the plan includes.

Consider something else: AWS Backup — Your estate is not all AWS, or disaster recovery means a copy in another region. Cross-region transfer is billed as its own line where rsync.net and BorgBase charge nothing to move data at all, and anything moved to cold storage is committed for 90 days whether you keep it or not.

Consider something else: SimpleBackups — You protect one or two things. The free plan allows a single job with 1 GB, and the next step is $49 — Snapshooter covers three resources for $14 and five times that for $39.

## Documented by only one

- Egress over allowance: AWS Backup: Charged. Backup data transferred between AWS Regions is billed as its own line, so cross-region copies — the thing that makes a backup a disaster recovery plan — are not free the way they are at rsync.net and BorgBase.
- Backup retention: SimpleBackups: Customer-defined on every paid tier, described only as flexible retention and schedule rather than as a fixed number of days.
- Storage price: AWS Backup: $0.05 per GB-month warm and $0.01 per GB-month cold, for EFS in us-east-1. The rate is per protected service rather than universal — EBS, RDS, Aurora and DynamoDB each carry their own — so this is one row of a table, not a headline price.
- Minimum storage duration: AWS Backup: 90 days for anything moved to cold storage. Deleting earlier still bills the remaining days, so cold storage is a commitment rather than a cheaper shelf.
- SOC 2: SimpleBackups: Listed as a feature of the $299 Max plan rather than as a property of the company, which is an unusual way to present an attestation and is recorded as the page frames it.
- HIPAA: AWS Backup: Yes. AWS Backup is named on the HIPAA Eligible Services Reference, the list of services that may handle protected health information under the AWS Business Associate Addendum. Eligibility is per-service rather than account-wide, so the list is the thing to check.
- Encryption at rest: AWS Backup: Yes, and independently of the source: a backup can carry a different encryption method from the resource it was taken from, so an unencrypted volume can still produce an encrypted recovery point. Only resource types supporting full AWS Backup management get this; others inherit the source resource encryption.
- Customer-managed keys: AWS Backup: Yes, through KMS. The key is configured on the backup vault rather than per backup, so the vault is the unit of key control — which also means moving a backup between vaults changes which key protects it.

## Questions this comparison answers

**Entry paid plan: AWS Backup or SimpleBackups?**

AWS Backup: None. There is no minimum fee and no setup charge, so the smallest possible bill is the cost of whatever is actually stored — the only member of this category without a floor to clear.
SimpleBackups: $49 a month for Lite, which includes 5 backup jobs, 50 GB of storage and a floor of 12 hours between runs.

**Should I choose AWS Backup or SimpleBackups?**

Pick AWS Backup if Backing up AWS services from one console with nothing bought in advance. There is no minimum fee and no setup charge, and the rate is per GB-month per service, so a small estate genuinely pays a small bill.
Pick SimpleBackups if Backing up many different things on a schedule you choose and being told when one stops working: 5 jobs at $49 a month rising to 100 at $299, with unlimited storage of your own alongside whatever the plan includes.