Microsoft vs Oracle
Split decision: Microsoft is cheaper in 1 of the 2 contested categories, Oracle in 1. 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 | Microsoft | Rate | Oracle | Rate | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CDN & edge delivery | Azure Front Door | $0.081 | — | — | only one competes |
| Cloud compute & VPS | Azure Virtual Machines | $0.052 | Oracle Cloud Compute | $0.010 | Oracle5.2× cheaper |
| GPU cloud | Azure ND H100 v5 | $6.98 | — | — | only one competes |
| Object storage | Azure Blob Storage | $0.018 | Oracle Object Storage | $0.025 | Microsoft1.4× cheaper |
| Managed databases | Azure Database for PostgreSQL | $12.41 | — | — | only one competes |
About each provider
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.
Oracle
Headquartered in US · 2 priced services
Oracle Cloud's headline is an Always Free tier that is genuinely generous by industry standards, plus egress rates well below AWS and Azure.
Questions
- Is Microsoft or Oracle cheaper in 2026?
- Split decision: Microsoft is cheaper in 1 of the 2 contested categories, Oracle in 1. 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 Microsoft offer that Oracle does not?
- In this dataset: CDN & edge delivery, GPU cloud, Managed databases. Oracle has no priced equivalent in those categories.
- What does Oracle offer that Microsoft does not?
- Nothing in this dataset — every category Oracle sells into, Microsoft 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.