Runpod vs Scaleway: Complete Comparison (2026)

Why choose Runpod

• Higher Customization score (8/10 vs 7/10)
• Higher Scalability score (8/10 vs 7/10)

Why choose Scaleway

• Has a free plan (Runpod does not)

Runpod

Pros

• Per-second billing with no ingress or egress fees keeps short experiments cheap.
• Community Cloud GPUs cost far less than hyperscalers, for example an RTX 4090 at $0.34 per hour.
• Serverless endpoints scale to zero, so spiky inference traffic costs nothing when idle.
• A wide catalogue of more than 30 GPU models, including B200 and B300, across 31 regions.
• Secure Cloud is backed by SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance.

Cons

• Community Cloud machines can drop out mid-job, and some users report pods that crash while billing continues.
• GPU availability fluctuates, and listed GPUs can disappear before you launch.
• Standard accounts have no published support response times or uptime SLA, and the SLA is limited to enterprise contracts.
• Stopped pods pay double for volume disk, and deposited credits are non-refundable.
• Serverless assumes Docker knowledge, and network volumes are tied to a single region.

Scaleway

Pros

• All data centers are in the EU, which helps with GDPR and data sovereignty requirements
• Low entry prices with hourly billing, and Instance list prices include egress
• The shared Kubernetes control plane is free
• A full API, CLI and Terraform provider allow infrastructure-as-code workflows
• A wide compute range covering bare metal, Apple silicon and current GPUs

Cons

• No regions outside Europe
• Trustpilot reviews frequently cite unexpected billing and account verification lockouts
• Support is slow on the free tier, and stronger support costs extra
• Block storage and public IPv4 are billed separately, which pushes costs above headline instance prices
• Development instances carry little or no availability SLO