Amazon Web Services vs Google
Split decision: Amazon Web Services is cheaper in 1 of the 5 contested categories, Google in 4. Neither is the cheaper provider outright.
Category by category
Each provider's cheapest published option in each category, on the axis that category is billed on. A dash means they do not sell into it.
| Category | Amazon Web Services | Rate | Rate | Cheaper | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CDN & edge delivery | AWS CloudFront | $0.085 | Google Cloud CDN | $0.080 | Google1.1× cheaper |
| Cloud compute & VPS | AWS EC2 | $0.042 | Google Compute Engine | $0.048 | Amazon Web Services1.1× cheaper |
| GPU cloud | AWS EC2 P5 | $7.57 | Google Cloud A3 | $6.98 | Google1.1× cheaper |
| Object storage | AWS S3 | $0.023 | Google Cloud Storage | $0.020 | Google1.2× cheaper |
| Managed databases | AWS RDS for PostgreSQL | $12.40 | Google Cloud SQL | $9.37 | Google1.3× cheaper |
About each provider
Amazon Web Services
Headquartered in US · 7 priced services
The largest cloud provider by revenue, with the broadest service catalogue and the most complex pricing. Rates are rarely the cheapest on any single axis, and egress in particular is priced well above the market.
Headquartered in US · 6 priced services
Google Cloud for infrastructure and the Gemini API for models. Compute pricing is competitive with AWS, and sustained-use discounts apply automatically rather than requiring a commitment.
Questions
- Is Amazon Web Services or Google cheaper in 2026?
- Split decision: Amazon Web Services is cheaper in 1 of the 5 contested categories, Google in 4. Neither is the cheaper provider outright. Picking a provider on an aggregate "cheaper" verdict is usually a mistake — what matters is which of them is cheaper in the categories you actually buy.
- What does Amazon Web Services offer that Google does not?
- Nothing in this dataset — every category Amazon Web Services sells into, Google sells into as well.
- What does Google offer that Amazon Web Services does not?
- Nothing in this dataset — every category Google sells into, Amazon Web Services sells into as well.
- Should I use both?
- Often the cheapest answer, and the table above shows where the seams are. Splitting workloads across providers costs you cross-provider data transfer and a second bill to reason about, so it pays off when the per-category gap is large and the traffic between them is small.