Modal vs Shakti Cloud: Complete Comparison (2026)

Why choose Modal

• Has a free plan (Shakti Cloud does not)
• Higher Ease of Use score (8/10 vs 5/10)
• Higher Analytics score (6/10 vs 4/10)
• Better fit for developers (9/10 vs 6/10)
• Better fit for startups (9/10 vs 6/10)

Why choose Shakti Cloud

• Better fit for enterprise (9/10 vs 7/10)
• Includes Dedicated Servers, which Modal lacks

Modal

Pros

• GPUs from the T4 up to the B300 are available without quota requests or reservations, and workloads can burst to thousands of containers.
• Per-second billing and scale-to-zero mean idle bursty inference workloads cost nothing.
• Python developers define infrastructure in code and deploy with a single CLI command, with no Kubernetes or Dockerfiles needed.
• The free Starter plan includes $30 a month of compute, and startup and academic credit programs are available.
• Sandboxes support large numbers of concurrent isolated environments for AI agents and untrusted code.

Cons

• Always-on or steady workloads can cost more than reserved GPU rentals from providers such as RunPod or Lambda.
• Containers stay billable for 60 seconds after the last request by default, and keep-warm settings are a common source of bill surprises.
• Region pinning raises prices by 1.15 to 1.75 times, and non-preemptible execution by 3 times.
• SSO, audit logs, and HIPAA support are limited to the custom-priced Enterprise plan.
• Credits from AWS, GCP, or Azure cannot be applied to Modal usage.

Shakti Cloud

Pros

• It publishes INR prices for VMs, bare metal and clusters, so Indian buyers avoid exchange-rate risk and can estimate costs without a sales call.
• Data centres in Navi Mumbai and Greater Noida keep data in India for DPDP Act compliance.
• It covers the full range from hourly single-GPU VMs to 256-plus-GPU H100 clusters over InfiniBand, as one of NVIDIA's Cloud Partners.
• Unlimited ingress and egress are included on VMs, and data transfer is included on bare metal and clusters.
• It bundles NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NIM, plus OpenAI-compatible serverless endpoints for hosted open models.

Cons

• The on-demand H100 VM, at 356 rupees per hour, costs more than Cyfuture AI (329) and JarvisLabs (about 330), according to a comparison article.
• It is limited to GPU and AI workloads. It has no general web hosting, managed databases, object storage pricing or CDN.
• InfiniBand and the Kubernetes control plane cost extra, and term discounts are not published.
• Independent user reviews are scarce, and sources disagree on whether access is self-serve or quote-based.