Azure App Service vs Azure Virtual Machines: What are the differences?

Developers describe Azure App Service as "Build, deploy, and scale web apps on a fully managed platform". Quickly build, deploy, and scale web apps created with popular frameworks .NET, .NET Core, Node.js, Java, PHP, Ruby, or Python, in containers or running on any operating system. Meet rigorous, enterprise-grade performance, security, and compliance requirements by using the fully managed platform for your operational and monitoring tasks. On the other hand, Azure Virtual Machines is detailed as "*It provides on-demand, high-scale, secure, virtualized infrastructure *". You can create Linux and Windows virtual machines. It gives you the flexibility of virtualization for a wide range of computing solutions—development and testing, running applications, and extending your datacenter. It’s the freedom of open-source software configured the way you need it.

Azure App Service belongs to "Platform as a Service" category of the tech stack, while Azure Virtual Machines can be primarily classified under "Virtual Machine".

According to the StackShare community, Azure App Service has a broader approval, being mentioned in 15 company stacks & 10 developers stacks; compared to Azure Virtual Machines, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.