Amazon Lightsail and Amazon EC2 instances differ from each other in terms of pricing, suitability, templates and API integration.
Refer to the following table of differences for a detailed comparison between Amazon Lightsail and Amazon EC2 on the above mentioned grounds.
Amazon Lightsail
Amazon EC2
Pricing
Lightsail is much less costlier than EC2 instances. Various outbound costs are included in lightsail instances, such as, each lightsail instance includes 5 TB of internet data transfer allowance.
Outbound costs are not included in EC2 instances. An enterprise using EC2 instances may have to pay $90 per TB of outbound data transfer.
Suitability
Lightsail might not be ideal for applications that need highly configurable environment or high CPU performances. Lighsail would be perfect for small developers.
For applications that require high CPU performances or highly configurable environment, Amazon EC2 would be the most appropriate choice. EC2 is meant for meant for huge organizations
API integration
There is no particular web service interface for Lightsail. Amazon Lightsail instances are not accessible directly from the AWS management console.
Amazon EC2 instances are virtual machines with Amazon's web service interface.
