Fortem vs Humanitec: ECS Ops vs General IDP

Originally published at https://fortem.dev/blog/fortem-vs-humanitec
Humanitec's Container Driver explicitly excludes ECS. If your problem is operating an ECS Fargate fleet, you're comparing the wrong category of tool. Here's the breakdown.

Versus

fortem-vs-humanitechumanitec-alternative-ecsecs-idp-comparison

Humanitec is the most-marketed IDP of 2025. If you run AWS ECS Fargate and searched “humanitec alternative,” you've likely seen it at the top of every comparison listicle. But the ECS team evaluating Humanitec is usually solving a different problem than the one Humanitec is built for. This article explains both tools precisely so you can figure out which problem you actually have.

TL;DR

• Humanitec is a platform orchestrator built for Kubernetes — the Container Driver (Jan 2025) explicitly states it "can only be used with managed clusters (EKS, AKS or GKE)" — ECS is not a supported workload target
• Humanitec Teams is $2,199/mo for 5 users, 2 projects, 5 environments per project — structurally incompatible with a fleet of 20+ ECS environments before you even reach Pro at $5,499/mo
• Fortem is purpose-built for ECS Fargate fleet operations: scheduling, cloning, fleet visibility, developer self-service — reads your existing AWS resources, no Terraform rewrite
• If your problem is 'operate my ECS fleet at scale' → Fortem. If your problem is 'build a company-wide IDP across AWS, GCP, and Azure' → Humanitec
• Humanitec requires substantial custom work to build the developer interface — right for a 5+ person platform team, not for a 1–2 person ops team on ECS

Ready to use — run this evaluation today

Before booking a demo with either vendor, answer these 5 questions. The answers tell you which category of tool fits — before any sales call.

1. 1.

   What runtimes does your production infrastructure actually run on?

   If the answer is 'ECS Fargate only' → operational layer. If 'ECS + EKS + Lambda + GCP' → platform orchestrator.

2. 2.

   How many ECS environments do you have, and are any of them running 24/7 without a workload?

   Count: aws ecs list-clusters | jq '.clusterArns | length'. If >10 environments with idle time → scheduling ROI is immediate.

3. 3.

   How many full-time engineers are dedicated to the internal platform (not to product features)?

   1–2 engineers → operational layer. 5+ dedicated platform engineers → full IDP may make sense.

4. 4.

   Are developers filing tickets to the platform team for environment restarts, clones, or access?

   If yes, that's an ops bottleneck — a self-service operations layer solves this faster than building an IDP.

5. 5.

   What is your current monthly Fargate compute spend on non-production environments?

   Run: aws ce get-cost-and-usage --time-period Start=2026-05-01,End=2026-06-01 --granularity MONTHLY --filter '{"Dimensions":{"Key":"SERVICE","Values":["Amazon Elastic Container Service"]}}' --metrics BlendedCost. If >$1,000/mo → scheduling saves more than Fortem Starter costs.

What Humanitec actually is

Humanitec is a graph-based platform orchestrator that enforces security, cost, and compliance policies on every deployment. It is Kubernetes-architected and cloud-agnostic.

The current homepage headline is “Let AI build. On your terms.” — Humanitec has repositioned from “developer self-service platform” to “AI agent governance layer.” The product lets platform teams define resource templates (databases, caches, queues) that AI agents and human developers can provision in a standardized, policy-compliant way across multiple cloud providers.

Compute targets claimed on the marketing site: EKS, GKE, AKS, VMs, Serverless. The reality for ECS teams is more nuanced. Humanitec's Container Driver — the mechanism that actually routes workloads to a compute target — was announced in January 2025 with an explicit restriction:

“As of today, the Container Driver can only be used with managed clusters (EKS, AKS or GKE.)”

— Humanitec blog: Introducing the Container Driver (Jan 2025)

AWS ECS and Fargate are not listed. The “serverless-ecs” runner type that appears in Humanitec docs refers to running Humanitec's own build agents on ECS compute — not routing your application workloads to ECS clusters. As of June 2026, humanitec.com/blog has zero posts about deploying to ECS.

Humanitec's workload descriptor is called Score — a YAML format that abstracts a service away from any specific runtime. To deploy through Humanitec, teams rewrite their Terraform task definitions or Kubernetes manifests in Score. This is the right tradeoff for organizations standardizing across heterogeneous platforms. For ECS-only teams, it adds an abstraction layer on top of resources that already exist and work.

Gartner Peer Insights reviewers describe the implementation honestly: Humanitec “requires you to build the developer interface and integrate existing tools. This means platform teams need to do substantial custom work to create the complete developer experience.” Humanitec is transparent about this — their MVP Program is a structured onboarding that guides a platform team through building that experience.

Known customers: Western Union, BambooHR, Cimpress — large, multi-cloud organizations with dedicated platform teams. The product is enterprise-sold; it does not have a self-serve signup.

KEY INSIGHT: Humanitec is genuinely good at what it does — the absence of ECS support is not a flaw, it's a design decision. The question is whether the ECS team evaluating it is solving the same problem Humanitec was built to solve.

What Fortem actually is

Fortem is a control plane for ECS Fargate fleet operations. It reads your existing AWS resources via tags and naming — Terraform stays your source of truth, nothing gets rewritten.

Fortem connects to your AWS account via a read-heavy IAM role, discovers every ECS cluster, service, and task definition through tags and naming conventions, and adds an operations layer on top. It does not replace Terraform, does not manage deployments, and does not require you to learn a new workload descriptor format.

What it adds: fleet-wide scheduling (stop all non-production environments at 7pm, restart at 9am, per-timezone), environment cloning (copy a staging environment with one API call), per-environment cost tracking, developer self-service with ECS-scoped RBAC so engineers can restart their own service without filing a ticket, and AI-assisted diagnostics that pull CloudWatch logs and task events when something is unhealthy.

The typical customer is a platform engineering team of 1–3 people running 10–80 ECS Fargate environments across 1–3 AWS accounts. Their IaC is Terraform. They did not set out to build an internal developer platform — they wanted to stop being the bottleneck for every environment restart, clone, and schedule change. See how ECS Fargate cost optimization compounds when scheduling, right-sizing, and Spot work together.

What Fortem does not do: Fortem does not manage Kubernetes, does not provide a service catalog, does not handle multi-cloud deployments, and does not give you a Backstage-style developer portal. If those are your requirements, Fortem is not the right tool.

Pricing — what you actually pay

Humanitec Teams at $2,199/mo limits you to 5 users and 5 environments per project. For a fleet of 20+ ECS environments, you're on Pro at $5,499/mo before you've saved anything.

Humanitec's pricing was verified June 2026 at humanitec.com/pricing. Both cloud-hosted tiers offer a free trial. An annual discount of 10% applies to both plans. Humanitec also lists a separate AWS Marketplace SKU at $999/mo for up to 15 users — the terms differ from the main site plans.

Humanitec Teams $2,199/mo - 5 users · 2 projects · 5 envs/project - Email su

Fortem Starter $790/mo - Up to 20 environments · 1 AWS account - Unlimited u

The ROI math for Fortem is straightforward. Scheduling 10 dev and staging environments (8 services each, 0.5 vCPU / 1 GB per task) to business hours saves $1,013/month in Fargate compute — using published AWS pricing at $0.04048/vCPU-hr. The Starter plan pays for itself before any other feature. For the full calculation, see the Fargate real cost breakdown — including the fixed overhead (ALB, NAT Gateway, CloudWatch) that scheduling doesn't eliminate.

Humanitec ROI comes from platform team leverage — fewer tickets, faster developer onboarding, consistent environments across teams. That is real value, but it requires a platform team large enough to build and maintain the developer experience layer Humanitec expects you to create. The Gartner review notes this plainly: “platform teams need to do substantial custom work to create the complete developer experience.”

ECS Fargate specifically

Humanitec has no ECS-specific features. Fortem was built exclusively for ECS Fargate — every feature maps to a real ECS operational problem.

Humanitec on ECS

• ✗No ECS workload deployment — Container Driver supports EKS, AKS, GKE only
• ✗No environment scheduling for ECS clusters or services
• ✗No ECS fleet visibility — no per-environment cost or status dashboard
• ✗No environment cloning for ECS task definitions
• ✗No ECS-specific diagnostics — no CloudWatch log integration
• ✗Zero ECS-specific blog posts or documentation as of June 2026

Fortem on ECS

• ✓Reads ECS services, task definitions, and CloudWatch metrics natively via AWS API
• ✓Fleet-wide scheduling: stop/start all environments by timezone on a cron schedule
• ✓Per-environment cost tracking using ECS service CPU/memory allocations
• ✓Environment cloning: copy a full ECS environment with one API call
• ✓Developer self-service: scoped IAM lets engineers restart their own services
• ✓AI diagnostics: surfaces unhealthy tasks with CloudWatch context automatically

KEY INSIGHT: The Humanitec “serverless-ecs” runner type that appears in their docs is not what it sounds like. It refers to running Humanitec's own CI build agents on ECS compute — not routing your application services to ECS clusters. If you found that in a Google search, it is not ECS workload support.

When Humanitec is the right choice

Humanitec is right when you need a company-wide platform across multiple clouds and platforms — not when your problem is operating an ECS fleet.

The strongest signal that Humanitec fits: your engineering org runs workloads on at least two of EKS, GKE, AKS, Lambda, or VMs, and you want a single interface for developers to provision infrastructure regardless of which runtime it lands on. Score (Humanitec's workload descriptor) earns its abstraction cost when the same service needs to deploy to different runtimes depending on environment or team.

Humanitec fits when

• —You need a formal IDP for 50+ engineers across AWS, GCP, and Azure
• —You're building a dedicated platform team with a charter to standardize all of engineering
• —You already use Backstage or Port and want an orchestration layer on top
• —You're willing to invest 2–6 months in implementation and have 5+ dedicated platform engineers
• —You need AI agent governance — controlled AI provisioning across heterogeneous platforms
• —Your compliance requirements need multi-cloud deployment standardization

Humanitec's MVP Program offers structured onboarding with a platform architect. Their documentation targets a first working example environment in the initial session — not a production IDP. The actual implementation timeline for a working internal developer platform, with real services, resource drivers, and a developer-facing interface, is measured in months.

When Fortem is the right choice

Fortem is right when your infrastructure is primarily AWS ECS Fargate and your problem is operational — managing environments, controlling costs, and enabling self-service without a full IDP build.

Fortem fits when

• —Your stack is primarily or entirely AWS ECS Fargate — no multi-cloud requirement
• —You have 10–80 environments and growing compute spend on idle dev and staging
• —Your platform team is 1–3 people — not 5+ engineers dedicated to IDP work
• —You use Terraform and don't want to learn Score or rewrite task definitions
• —You need results in days, not months — no multi-month implementation project
• —Developers are filing tickets for environment restarts, clones, or schedule changes

Fortem onboarding runs 7 business days: a Fortem engineer audits your AWS setup, tags environments, configures per-timezone schedules, and hands you the dashboard. No Score migration, no new abstraction layer. You keep your Terraform as the source of truth.

Side-by-side at a glance

The table below shows the practical differences. If a row is missing from one column, that tool doesn't have that capability.

| | Humanitec | Fortem |
| --- | --- |
| Pricing | $2,199/mo (Teams) · $5,499/mo (Pro) | $790/mo (Starter) · $2,490/mo (Scale) |
| Users included | 5 (Teams) · 50 (Pro) | Unlimited on all plans |
| Environments | 5/project (Teams) · Unlimited (Pro) | 20 (Starter) · 80 (Scale) |
| ECS Fargate support | Not a workload target | Purpose-built |
| Kubernetes support | EKS, AKS, GKE via Container Driver | Not supported |
| Terraform required | Score replaces task definitions | Reads existing state, no rewrite |
| Self-service for devs | Build it (custom developer portal) | Included — ECS-scoped RBAC |
| Environment scheduling | Not available | Fleet-wide, per-timezone |
| Environment cloning | Not available | Single API call |
| Onboarding time | Months (IDP build required) | 7 business days |
| Right for | Multi-cloud, 50+ engineers, Kubernetes | ECS Fargate, 1–3 platform engineers |

Humanitec pricing: humanitec.com/pricing, verified June 2026. Fortem pricing: fortem.dev/pricing, verified June 2026.

If you read this, you might also want to know

What does an actual platform engineering stack look like for an ECS team?+

Most ECS teams run Terraform for IaC, GitHub Actions or CircleCI for CI/CD, Datadog or CloudWatch for observability, and a Slack-connected ops runbook for manual operations. Fortem slots in as the fleet operations layer — the piece that handles scheduling, self-service, and cost tracking that none of those tools cover.

Can I start with Fortem and add a developer portal like Backstage later?+

Yes. Fortem operates at the ECS fleet operations layer — it doesn't own your service catalog, developer portal, or deployment pipeline. Backstage (or Port, or Cortex) can sit alongside Fortem, each covering different surfaces. Many teams start with Fortem for immediate cost and ops wins, then add a portal when the team grows large enough to need a service catalog.

What does Humanitec's Score language actually require me to rewrite?+

Score replaces the deployment configuration for each service — your ECS task definitions, environment variables, resource dependencies (databases, caches, queues). You'd define each service in a score.yaml and map its resources to Humanitec resource types. For a team with 40 ECS services, this is a significant migration. The payoff is portability across Kubernetes clusters and other runtimes.

Frequently asked questions

Does Fortem replace Humanitec?

No — they solve different problems. Humanitec is a general-purpose platform orchestrator for standardizing deployments across multiple clouds and Kubernetes clusters. Fortem is a control plane specifically for AWS ECS Fargate fleet operations. If your stack is ECS Fargate, Fortem addresses the actual operational problems (scheduling, fleet visibility, self-service) without requiring you to build an IDP.

Does Humanitec support ECS Fargate workload deployment natively?

Not through its primary deployment mechanism. Humanitec's Container Driver — the tool used to route workloads to compute targets — explicitly states: 'the Container Driver can only be used with managed clusters (EKS, AKS or GKE).' ECS and Fargate are not supported workload targets. The 'serverless-ecs' runner type in Humanitec docs refers to running Humanitec's own build agents on ECS infrastructure, not deploying user applications to ECS.

Can I use Fortem and Humanitec together?

In theory, yes — they operate at different layers. If you're running both ECS Fargate and Kubernetes workloads in a hybrid architecture, Humanitec could handle Kubernetes orchestration while Fortem handles ECS fleet operations. In practice, most ECS-first teams don't need both — Humanitec's value proposition (standardized developer experience across multi-cloud, multi-platform infrastructure) is a different problem than what ECS teams typically face.

What is Humanitec's Score language and do I have to learn it?

Score is Humanitec's workload descriptor — a YAML format that abstracts your service definition away from any specific infrastructure target. To use Humanitec fully, you describe your services in Score rather than in Terraform task definitions or Kubernetes manifests. For teams that need to deploy the same service across EKS, GKE, and Lambda, Score makes sense. For ECS-only teams who already have Terraform task definitions, Score is an additional abstraction layer with no payoff.

How long does Fortem onboarding take compared to Humanitec?

Fortem onboarding runs 7 business days: a Fortem engineer audits your AWS setup, imports your environments, configures schedules per timezone, and hands you the keys. Humanitec's MVP Program (their structured onboarding) targets a working MVP after the first session but typically involves multiple months of platform team work to build the developer interface, configure resource drivers, and integrate existing tooling.

Running 10+ ECS environments?

We'll show you what fleet operations looks like without building an IDP — scheduling, cloning, cost tracking, and dev self-service, live in your AWS account in 7 days.

Run Fleet Audit →Book a 20-min call →

Response within 4 hours, weekdays.

Worth reading

ComparisonECS vs EKS: Which AWS Container Service?Humanitec's Container Driver explicitly excludes ECS. If you're on Fargate, the comparison starts here.Guide · How to Cut AWS ECS Fargate Costs by 65%Scheduling, right-sizing, Spot, and orphaned environments — the four methods that take a 12-environment fleet from $1,730 to $380/month.

All ECS platform comparisons: fortem.dev/versus