Amazon Web Services vs Microsoft
Split decision: Amazon Web Services is cheaper in 2 of the 5 contested categories, Microsoft in 3. 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 | Microsoft | Rate | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CDN & edge delivery | AWS CloudFront | $0.085 | Azure Front Door | $0.081 | Microsoft1× cheaper |
| Cloud compute & VPS | AWS EC2 | $0.042 | Azure Virtual Machines | $0.052 | Amazon Web Services1.3× cheaper |
| GPU cloud | AWS EC2 P5 | $7.57 | Azure ND H100 v5 | $6.98 | Microsoft1.1× cheaper |
| Object storage | AWS S3 | $0.023 | Azure Blob Storage | $0.018 | Microsoft1.3× cheaper |
| Managed databases | AWS RDS for PostgreSQL | $12.40 | Azure Database for PostgreSQL | $12.41 | Amazon Web Services1× 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.
Microsoft
Headquartered in US · 6 priced services
Azure is the default cloud inside enterprises already licensed for Microsoft software, where existing agreements usually matter more to the final bill than list price does.
Questions
- Is Amazon Web Services or Microsoft cheaper in 2026?
- Split decision: Amazon Web Services is cheaper in 2 of the 5 contested categories, Microsoft in 3. 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 Microsoft does not?
- Nothing in this dataset — every category Amazon Web Services sells into, Microsoft sells into as well.
- What does Microsoft offer that Amazon Web Services does not?
- Nothing in this dataset — every category Microsoft 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.