Which ECS Platform Should You Choose: Fortem or Flightcontrol?
Originally published at https://fortem.dev/blog/fortem-vs-flightcontrol
Flightcontrol is the right tool for 1–3 apps on AWS. Here's exactly where it stops making sense — and where the pricing math breaks.
Versus
Flightcontrol and Fortem solve different problems. One of them is the wrong tool for you — and figuring out which one depends on how many environments you run, not which features look better in a comparison table. This article explains what each product actually does, where the pricing math breaks, and how to tell which side of the line you're on.
TL;DR
- Flightcontrol is a PaaS for deploying apps to your AWS account — excellent for 1–3 services.
- Per-service pricing ($30/service on Business) breaks at 10+ environments.
- Flightcontrol has no environment scheduling, no fleet visibility, no developer self-service.
- Fortem is not a deployment tool — it's a fleet operations layer for teams already on ECS.
- At 20 environments × 8 services, Flightcontrol Business costs $4,897/mo vs Fortem plan at $2,499/mo flat.
What Flightcontrol actually is (and what it's not)
Flightcontrol is a managed PaaS that deploys your applications to your own AWS account. ECS, Lambda, static sites, RDS — they handle the infrastructure so your team doesn't have to. The value proposition is simplicity: connect your GitHub repo, define your services, and Flightcontrol manages the AWS complexity.
It works well for exactly what it was designed for. A startup with 2–3 applications and a small engineering team that doesn't want a dedicated platform engineer gets a lot of value from Flightcontrol. Fast setup, good support, and AWS without the AWS complexity.
What it doesn't market itself as, and isn't designed for: managing a fleet of 20+ environments across multiple teams, scheduling dev environments to stop at night, giving developers self-service access to restart their own environment without Slack messages, or showing you fleet-wide cost and activity data in one screen.
The pricing math at scale
Flightcontrol charges per service, not per environment. This is the right model for small deployments — you pay for what you use. It becomes the wrong model at fleet scale.
Flightcontrol pricing (verified May 2026):
Starter: $97/mo, 5 services included + $20/service overage
Business: $397/mo, 10 services included + $30/service overage
The math at 20 environments × 8 services = 160 billable services:
Starter: $97 + 155 × $20 = $3,197/mo
Business: $397 + 150 × $30 = $4,897/mo
Fortem plan: $2,499/mo flat for up to 80 environments
Monthly cost — Flightcontrol Business vs Fortem
$547
$2,499
5 envs
$2,197
$2,499
10 envs
$4,897
$2,499
20 envs
$11,297
$2,499
50 envs
Flightcontrol Business
Fortem plan ($2,499 flat)
Crossover: ~7 environments
KEY INSIGHT: At 7 environments × 8 services = 56 services, Flightcontrol Business ($397 + 46 × $30 = $1,777/mo) and Fortem plan ($2,499/mo) are roughly equivalent. Above that breakpoint, Fortem is cheaper. Below it, Flightcontrol is.
For more on managing the ECS cost side of this equation, see How to Cut AWS ECS Fargate Costs by 65%.
What Flightcontrol doesn't do (and says so)
Flightcontrol's product is honest about its scope. The gaps below aren't criticisms — they're category differences.
No environment scheduling. Environments run 24/7. There's no built-in way to stop all services in a dev environment at 7pm and restart them at 9am. If you want this, you'd build it yourself with EventBridge.
No fleet-wide visibility. If you have 15 environments across 3 teams, there's no single screen showing you all of them — their status, last deploy, activity, cost attribution, who owns them.
No developer self-service. When a developer's environment gets stuck, there's no “restart my environment” button. They file a ticket or message the platform team.
No environment cloning. Spinning up a new dev or QA environment from a known-good template requires manual work, not a UI action.
When Flightcontrol is the right choice
- ≤3 applications, ≤5 services each — you're well within the pricing model where it works in your favor.
- Moving off Heroku or Railway to AWS — Flightcontrol is the path of least resistance. You get AWS's infrastructure without AWS's complexity overhead.
- Team without a dedicated platform engineer — the managed deployment model saves real time and eliminates a category of infrastructure decisions.
- You need deployment management more than fleet management — your primary problem is getting code to AWS, not operating environments once they're running.
If this is you, use Flightcontrol. Their product is well-designed for this use case, their support is responsive, and the setup time is genuinely low.
When Fortem is the right choice
- 10+ environments across your fleet — dev, staging, QA, demo, per-team, per-feature. At this scale, per-service pricing breaks and fleet visibility becomes operationally necessary.
- Dev/staging environments running 24/7 with no after-hours demand — see the cost breakdown on what that actually costs before you decide it's too small to fix.
- Developers filing tickets to restart their own environment — that friction compounds. Every restart request is 15–30 minutes of a platform engineer's time that should be self-service.
- You're already running your own Terraform and don't want a tool that manages your infrastructure — Fortem connects to your existing ECS clusters without taking over provisioning.
- You need fleet visibility: all environments, their status, cost, owners, and last deploys in one view — something you currently piece together from CloudWatch, Cost Explorer, and Slack threads.
KEY INSIGHT: Fortem is not a deployment tool. It sits on top of your existing ECS infrastructure — your Terraform, your CI/CD pipelines, your task definitions. If you're evaluating whether to replace deployments, that's a different question.
Migration path from Flightcontrol to Fortem
Two paths depending on what you want to change.
Path 1 — Run both in parallel
Flightcontrol continues handling deployments. Fortem connects to the same ECS clusters and handles fleet operations — scheduling, visibility, self-service restarts. No migration of deployment pipelines needed. This is the lower-risk path for teams that are happy with Flightcontrol's deployment experience but need fleet management on top of it.
Path 2 — Full migration
Move deployment pipelines from Flightcontrol to GitHub Actions or your existing CI/CD. Fortem handles fleet operations.
Week 1: Connect Fortem to your clusters via IAM
Weeks 2–4: Migrate deployment pipelines from Flightcontrol
Weeks 4–6: Parallel operation before fully deprecating Flightcontrol
Fortem onboarding doesn't require changes to task definitions, ECS cluster config, or Terraform. It reads your existing infrastructure.
Common questions
Does Fortem replace Flightcontrol's deployment pipelines?
No. Fortem is a fleet operations layer — it manages running environments (scheduling, visibility, self-service, cost tracking) but does not deploy code or manage build pipelines. Many teams run Flightcontrol for deployments and Fortem for fleet ops simultaneously. If you eventually want to replace Flightcontrol's deployment pipelines, that's a separate decision typically involving GitHub Actions or AWS CodePipeline.
Can I connect Fortem to environments that Flightcontrol currently manages?
Yes. Fortem connects to your ECS clusters directly via your AWS account. It doesn't care how those clusters were provisioned — Flightcontrol, Terraform, manual console setup. As long as the ECS cluster exists, Fortem can read and manage it.
What's the pricing break-even between Flightcontrol Business and Fortem?
At 8 services per environment, the break-even is around 7 environments. Below that, Flightcontrol Business ($397/mo base) is cheaper. Above it, Fortem plan ($2,499/mo flat for up to 80 environments) is cheaper. At 20 environments, Flightcontrol Business comes to $4,897/mo versus Fortem's $2,499/mo.
Does Fortem handle deployments — pushing new container images to ECS?
No. Fortem manages environment state — starting, stopping, scheduling, fleet visibility — but image builds and deployments happen in your CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, AWS CodePipeline). Fortem sees the results of deployments (service status, running task count, last deploy time) but doesn't initiate them.
Do I need to rewrite any infrastructure to add Fortem?
No. Fortem reads your existing ECS cluster configuration and connects via your AWS account credentials. No changes to task definitions, Terraform, or CloudFormation. The typical onboarding is: grant IAM access, point Fortem at your clusters, set your schedules.
If you read this, you might also want to know
What if I have both 1-app side projects AND a 30-env production fleet?
You might use both. Flightcontrol for the 1–3 app side projects where simplicity wins, Fortem for the main fleet where per-service pricing breaks. They don't compete — they address different scales. The cost question is whether the ops overhead of two tools is worth the savings.
Can I run Fortem alongside my existing Terraform CI/CD?
Yes. Fortem reads AWS resources after Terraform provisions them — no HCL parsing, no repo access, no state modifications. Your terraform apply still provisions infrastructure. Fortem adds the operations layer on top without touching your pipeline.
How do I calculate whether per-environment or per-service pricing is cheaper for my fleet?
Count your services, multiply by the overage rate, and compare to the flat rate. Example: 30 envs × 8 services = 240 services. On Flightcontrol Business: $397 + (240–10) × $30 = $7,297/mo. On the Fortem plan: $2,499/mo flat. The crossover is at roughly 7 services per environment.
### Running 10+ ECS environments? Talk to a Fortem engineer. We'll go through yo
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