Azure vs AWS Pricing: Which Is Cheaper in 2025?

• Azure bills VMs per minute, rounding up to the next full minute.
• AWS, on the other hand, charges you per second, with a 60-second minimum for most Linux and Windows EC2 instances.

Hence, one might argue it gives AWS a slight edge for workloads that spin up and down quickly or run in short bursts.

Azure

Azure offers long-term savings (1-3 years) with Reservations and flexible Savings Plans. Storage costs are based on usage, and discounts are also available through the Azure Hybrid Benefit program or with Azure Spot VMs. Additionally, Azure gives you full visibility into your usage and costs at no extra charge through the portal or API.

AWS

Just like Azure, AWS also offers flexible costs, various computing instances, and storage pricing based on the amount of data stored and accessed. You can take advantage of discounts available with upfront payments, and AWS also offers long-term savings through Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances and AWS Savings Plans, as well as other ways to save, such as spot instances.

While AWS offers detailed cost reports through Cost Explorer, you’ll need to enable resource-level granularity to view individual VM costs, which incurs an additional fee.

Azure vs AWS: Which one is cheaper? 

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question “Which one is cheaper, Azure or AWS?” simply because it depends entirely on how you use it.  

Nonetheless, but cloud providers offer calculator tools which you can use to check the price of certain services before use.

Let’s give you an example: 

Taking a very common virtual machine, the Linux VM with 2 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 32 GiB of disk space, the pricing for AWS and Azure is as follows: 

In Azure, it will cost you no more than $75.64 a month. For AWS, however, the closest matching instance is the AWS m6a.large instance, which results in the following prices: 

The plain virtual machine, or as called in AWS the EC2 instance will cost you only 72.93$ per month.  

Adding the disk size of 32 GB, it results in a total cost of 75.90 US dollars. 

Azure is only about 0.34% cheaper than AWS in this case, which is practically the same price.

As you can see, in reality, comparing AWS and Azure pricing is often more of an apples-to-apples comparison.

This example is just one VM configuration, but to truly answer the question, we must delve deeper and compare pricing across core services, as well as consider the discount models each provider offers.

Azure vs AWS Pricing Comparison of Core Services 

Compute Costs 

Virtual machines, container services, and serverless computing form the backbone of cloud infrastructure. They’re what you rely on to deploy apps, run workloads, and scale on demand. Below is a direct comparison of virtual machine offerings from Azure and AWS. 

*Prices based on UK South (Azure) and London (AWS) region selections. 

If you want to learn more about the pricing of virtual machines, check out Azure virtual machines pricing and the AWS EC2 instances pricing page. 

For consistent, steady and predictable workloads, you can commit to reservations in Azure as well as opt for EC2 Reserved Instances. 

*Prices are in US dollars.
*Prices based on UK South (Azure) and London (AWS) region selections.

With Linux as OS, Azure and AWS offer nearly identical discounts; 37% off for 1–year reservations and 57% for 3-year commitments.

AWS has a slightly lower monthly price and provides more flexibility in how you pay for the reserved instances. You can choose between upfront, partial upfront, or monthly payments with tiered discounts. The same is not true, however, for Microsoft Azure. 

Unlike AWS, Azure offers a way to bring your existing Windows Server or SQL Server licences and get a significant discount with Azure Hybrid Benefit.  

Let’s give you an example to explain it: Let’s take 8 CPUs and 64 GB of RAM, choosing the r6a.2xlarge instance on AWS and the counterpart on Azure, the E8s_v5. 

If you bring your own Windows Server licence to Azure, you skip the $0.368/hour licence cost.

These savings might seem minimal on one machine, but across many, running over multiple years, the difference adds up. 

Storage Costs 

Storage costs is often the second thing to come up to mind when it comes to cloud costs, whether in AWS or Azure. We've included sample storage costs in the table below. 

*Prices based on UK South (Azure) and London (AWS) region selections. 

The point is that all of these can shift your final bill beyond just the per-GB rates. 

For full, up-to-date pricing details, refer to our article on Azure storage pricing and AWS S3 pricing. 

Database Costs 

Running databases on physical hardware was extremely expensive, but cloud services make it possible to spin up a fully managed SQL database without upfront capital costs.  

Here’s a quick look at SQL database pricing from Azure and AWS:

*Prices based on UK South (Azure) and London (AWS) region selections. 

Additional Costs 

Networking Costs 

Networking costs can also inflate your cloud bill, especially when it comes to outbound data (egress), public IPs, or inter-region transfers.

Both Azure and AWS charge for data that leaves their network.

To add, you’ll also pay extra for load balancers, which, if you’re running apps at scale, can add up quickly. 

Here’s a quick overview of the bandwidth pricing for these two cloud providers: 

Refer to the Microsoft Azure Bandwidth pricing page and the AWS data transfer page for more information. 

Management and Support Fees 

When you’re running important workloads in the cloud, you might need support. Both Microsoft and Amazon offer support beyond basic documentation. Here’s what they charge you: 

Ensure you review Azure support pricing and AWS support pricing.

Can you get Azure and AWS for free? 

Either Azure and AWS offer free tiers, allowing you to try different cloud services.

We all love free stuff, but how much can you actually do without spending a cent? Let’s compare it. 

Azure 

When you sign up for an Azure account, you get $200 in credits valid for 30 days. You can spend that on just about anything, ranging from compute to AI services. After that, you have two types of “free”: 

• 12 months free: This includes access to services such as databases, AI, containers, and networking services, as well as 750 hours/month of B1S (burstable) VMs for Linux or Windows. After the trial period ends, you’ll need to pay to continue using these services. 
• Always-free services: Microsoft Azure also offers over 65 “forever” free services across compute, databases, AI and more. While some services have no limits, many popular ones do. Examples of services with limits include Azure Functions (with a limit of 1 million requests/month). It’s a great way to explore Azure for development and testing environments, as well as proof-of-concept work. 

AWS 

AWS splits its free offerings into three categories, or what they would call: “buckets”: 

• Free trials: With AWS free trials, you get short-term access (hours/days/usage-based) for new services. Once it ends, you get automatically charged for on-demand pricing. 
• 12-month free tier: The 12-month free tier allows you to run various services until you reach a certain limit, like EC2 instances of 750 hours/month, S3 to 5 GB and RDS of 750 hours, etc. It resets after one year. 
• Always free: Services like Lambda (1M requests/month) and SNS (1M publishes/month) are permanently free within limits. 

Closing thoughts 

Ultimately, the costs of using these cloud service providers depend on your workloads, use cases, and your specific needs. 

Also, ask yourself: If one cloud handles a specific service better, do you find it worth paying slightly more for the performance?  

Both offer public cloud calculators that can help you estimate the costs and check the prices for your workloads: the Azure Pricing Calculator and the AWS Pricing Calculator.

These calculators are a good way to get a sense of the costs of running your workloads in these cloud platforms. Yet, in practice, they aren’t perfect and can be challenging.