AWS Cloud Certifications -Complete 2026 Guide
AWS certifications are organized into four levels: Foundational, Associate, Professional, and Specialty. This comparison table helps you choose the right certification for your career path based on experience level, role, and budget.
Foundational Level
Compare AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and AI Practitioner
| Certification | Level | Cost | Duration | Best For | Enroll |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner | Foundational | $100 USD | 90 minutes | Beginners, non-technical stakeholders (sales, finance, PMs), or engineers entirely new to cloud | View Course → |
| AWS Certified AI Practitioner | Foundational | $100 USD | 90 minutes | PMs, analysts, and engineers learning Bedrock and GenAI fundamentals | View Course → |
Associate Level
Compare AWS Certified Associate Level Certifications
| Certification | Level | Cost | Duration | Best For | Enroll |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate | Associate | $150 | 130 minutes | The default first AWS cert for most engineers. Covers compute, storage, networking, security, and cost optimization | View Course → |
| AWS Certified Developer – Associate | Associate | $150 USD | 130 minutes | Developers writing Lambda functions, integrating SDKs, and shipping to ECS or API Gateway | View Course → |
| AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate | Associate | $150 | 130 minutes | Platform/SRE engineers running production AWS workloads day to day | View Course → |
| AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate | Associate | $150 | 130 minutes | Building pipelines on Glue, Athena, Redshift, Kinesis, EMR, and MSK | View Course → |
| AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate | Associate | $150 | 130 minutes | Engineers shipping SageMaker and Bedrock models to production. Replacing the older ML Specialty as the default ML cert | View Course → |
Professional Level
Compare AWS Certified Professional Level Certifications
| Certification | Level | Cost | Duration | Best For | Enroll |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional | Professional | $300 | 180 minutes | Architects designing multi-account, multi-region systems. The hardest of the role-based exams | View Course → |
| AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional | Professional | $300 USD | 180 minutes | Senior platform engineers owning CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and observability across many services | View Course → |
Specialty Level
Compare AWS Certified Specialty Level Certifications
| Certification | Level | Cost | Duration | Best For | Enroll |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Certified Security – Specialty | Specialty | $300 | 170 minutes | Security engineers, GRC professionals, and architects responsible for AWS security posture | View Course → |
| AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty | Specialty | $300 USD | 170 minutes | VPC topology, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, hybrid networking, and Network Firewall | View Course → |
