Joined SAP-C02 club today
I have 5+ years of experience with AWS. Not with 100% of the services, of course, but with most of the core ones: compute, storage, databases, data science/ML, serverless, containers, hybrid networking, etc.
As preparation, I went through courses by Stephane Maarek and Neal Davis, along with their practice exams and TD tests. I took the exam after passing SAA-C03.
To be honest, SAP-C02 actually felt easier to me. Maybe because SAA-C03 has more questions about newer services. As far as I understand, the professional certification was updated less recently.
That said, the professional exam probably has trickier and more in-depth questions. But, as I mentioned, most of them are still focused on the core AWS services, and if you have hands-on experience with those, answering them shouldn’t be too difficult.