Microsoft Azure alternatives: 11 cloud computing platforms compared
Teams look beyond Azure when the invoice turns out to depend on where data leaves, which support plan is attached and whether a one-year or three-year commitment was signed. They move to European operators with bundled or capped pricing, to smaller global platforms, or to another hyperscaler.
Short answer: Looking for a replacement for Microsoft Azure? Hetzner, Scaleway and Exoscale come first in our cloud computing platform ranking. Places 1 to 3 go to challengers, vendors outside the best-known brands in a category, wherever the category has them; the established names follow from place 4 in their ranked order. Start with Hetzner if you run plain servers and want a bill with a ceiling. The 11 entries that follow are all ranked in Best Cloud Computing Platforms in 2026; each one explains what sets it apart from Microsoft Azure.
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Pricing: Pay-as-you-go with a free account credit; first 100 GB of egress each month not charged
Established in: United States
Built for: Buyers whose staff already work in Microsoft agreements and need many regions
Not for: Buyers who want one egress price independent of routing choice
01
Why buyers look past Microsoft Azure
01
Outbound traffic is priced by source continent and route
Azure's bandwidth page lists the first 100 GB a month as free, then $0.087 per GB for traffic starting in North America or Europe on the Premium network and $0.08 on the routing-preference route. Traffic starting in Asia (China excluded), Australia and the Middle East and Africa is $0.12 on the Premium network. Moving data between regions inside Europe costs $0.02 per GB. A design with several regions pays for every copy.
02
Help from an engineer is a monthly line item
Azure's support page shows Basic as included for all customers, then Developer at $29, Standard at $100 and Professional Direct at $1,000 per month. Developer is positioned for trial and non-production environments and Standard for production workloads. Coverage of Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 sits in a separate Unified tier.
03
The free account is short and the discounts need a term
A new Azure account receives $200 to spend within 30 days, and continuing beyond that point or after the credit runs out means moving to pay-as-you-go pricing. Azure's reservations page quotes savings of up to 72 percent on virtual machines, tied to a one-year or three-year commitment. Teams without a steady workload tend to find the saving out of reach.
Pay as you go; free plan with up to $200 credits over 6 months
124 Availability Zones in 39 regions, 100 GB free outbound
you want the same scale and catalogue from a different hyperscaler
#12
03
What each one does differently
1
Hetzner
Germany · Hourly rate with a monthly cap; Cost-Optimized from €5.99 a month excluding VAT
Hetzner bills each server hourly but never above a monthly cap, so a month's cost is known in advance, and only outgoing traffic is charged. Cost-Optimized servers start at €5.99 a month excluding VAT. Locations are Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki, Singapore and the USA. It offers servers, storage, load balancers and DNS, not Azure's wider service list.
Switch from Microsoft Azure if you run plain servers and want a bill with a ceiling.
France · Metered per product; Dedibox dedicated servers from €4.99 a month
Scaleway is a subsidiary of the iliad Group with four multi-AZ regions in France, Poland, Italy and the Netherlands, and it lists more than 100 cloud and AI products, among them managed Kubernetes (Kapsule). That is a much wider range than the other European operators here. Everything runs in Europe, so Azure's Asian and American regions have no counterpart.
Switch from Microsoft Azure if you want a broad managed catalogue but all of it hosted in Europe.
Switzerland · Per-second billing; support included, 50, 500 or 5% of usage (minimum 1,500)
Exoscale sits in the A1 Group and bills instances by the second. Inbound traffic is free, and so is traffic between its zones, which are in cities such as Frankfurt, Munich and Vienna. Outbound traffic has a free tier of 1.42 GiB per hour. Support is sold in tiers, from an included level up to 5 percent of usage.
Switch from Microsoft Azure if traffic between datacentres is a large part of your Azure invoice.
Germany · Hourly or per-minute billing; 1-year and 3-year Savings Plans; 2 TB outbound free
IONOS Cloud bills compute by the hour, Cubes by the minute, and gives the first 2 TB of outgoing traffic each month at no charge before $0.036 per GB for the next 8 TB (US price page). A dedicated core costs $0.05 per hour on demand, $0.0370 on a one-year and $0.0261 on a three-year Savings Plan. Datacentres are in the EU and Newark.
Switch from Microsoft Azure if you can commit to one or three years and want the discount published per core and per GB of RAM.
France · Hourly billing, Savings Plans, US$200 trial credit
OVHcloud, a French company founded in 1999, includes outbound public traffic in the price of instances in every location except Singapore, Sydney and Mumbai, where 1 TB a month per project is included. A b3-8 instance (2 vCores, 8 GB) shows $0.0605 an hour or $37.54 a month on a 12-month plan. New projects get a $200 trial credit.
Switch from Microsoft Azure if you want a traffic allowance folded into the instance price instead of an egress table.
United States · Droplets from $4 a month; per-second billing; $0.01 per GiB overage
DigitalOcean sells Droplets from $4 a month, billed per second with a 60-second minimum or $0.01, whichever is higher. Internet egress above the quota costs $0.01 per GiB, against Azure's $0.087 on the first paid tier. Peering between datacentres is $0.01 per GiB and free inside one datacentre. Support plans start at $0, and the catalogue is smaller than Azure's.
Switch from Microsoft Azure if a small team wants one flat tariff for servers, databases and Kubernetes.
Not stated by the vendor · Hourly rates capped monthly on most services; no cap on G8 dedicated and GPU plans from 1 July 2026
Akamai Cloud, the Linode line, bills by the hour up to a monthly cap, with all inbound transfer free and outbound allowances pooled across your services. Since 1 July 2026 G8 dedicated plans, GPU plans and extra IPv4 addresses carry no cap and are billed for actual hours. Pooling does not apply in distributed compute regions.
Switch from Microsoft Azure if your services use uneven traffic and a shared transfer pool suits you better than per-service quotas.
United States · Pooled bandwidth: 2 TB per account plus hourly accrual per instance; price list not read
Vultr pools bandwidth in an unusual way: 2 TB of free transfer per account each month, plus a share that every running instance accrues each hour over a 672-hour month. Overage is billed on top. It offers cloud compute, GPUs, bare metal, Kubernetes and object storage. We could not read its price pages, so no amounts are quoted.
Switch from Microsoft Azure if you run many small instances and can use a shared allowance across them.
United States · Pay As You Go; $300 credit for 30 days; Always Free services
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure prints a single price list and gives the first 10 TB of outbound traffic a month at no charge from North America, Europe and the UK, a hundred times Azure's free 100 GB. New accounts get a $300 credit for 30 days, and Always Free services continue afterwards. Reading its compute prices takes some translation from OCPUs.
Switch from Microsoft Azure if your Azure bill is mostly outbound traffic from a few large workloads.
United States · Pay as you go; $300 credit for new customers; free tier on 20+ products
Google Cloud is the closest hyperscale counterpart, offering $300 in free credit to new customers and more than 20 products with a free tier, such as one e2-micro instance and 1 TB of BigQuery queries a month. Free limits do not expire but can change. A published programme grants free data transfer to customers moving all workloads away.
Switch from Microsoft Azure if you need a hyperscale catalogue but a second source of scale next to Azure.
United States · Pay as you go; free plan with up to $200 credits over 6 months
Amazon Web Services spans 124 Availability Zones in 39 regions, with fewer regions than the 80-plus Azure lists. The first 100 GB of outbound traffic each month is free, aggregated over all services and regions. The free plan gives up to $200 in credits over 6 months, after which the account closes unless upgraded.
Switch from Microsoft Azure if you want the same scale and catalogue from a different hyperscaler.
Azure is the right choice when licences are the driver: Azure Hybrid Benefit lets you reuse Windows Server licences with Software Assurance and Red Hat or SUSE subscriptions, so the operating system is not paid for twice. It also holds when you need the range Microsoft describes as more than 80 regions and 500 datacentres, or when one support contract should cover Azure, Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365. Leaving is not blocked by fees either, because Azure offers free egress to customers who move all their data away.
05
What moving off Microsoft Azure involves
01
Apply for the leaving credit before copying data
Azure's pricing FAQ says customers who take their data out over the internet to switch provider can claim a credit for egress above the free 100 GB a month. Follow the steps on that page and get the request accepted first, then start the transfer, so that the copy is not billed as ordinary egress.
02
Add up your regional and cross-zone traffic
The $0.02 per GB between European regions is easy to overlook in an Azure bill. Pull the last three invoices, list what you pay for inter-region and outbound traffic, and price the same pattern on the target provider. Some bundle outbound traffic in the instance price, and some charge nothing between their own zones.
03
Move a stateless service first and replace licences second
Start with a service that holds no data and has no managed dependencies. Check which Windows Server or SQL licences were covered by Hybrid Benefit, because the new provider may charge for them separately, then move databases and identity last.
06
Questions about replacing Microsoft Azure
6 answers
What is the best alternative to Microsoft Azure as a cloud computing platform?
Hetzner ranks first in our list of Azure alternatives. Its servers have a monthly price cap, with Cost-Optimized plans from €5.99 a month excluding VAT, and only outgoing traffic is billed.
Scaleway, Exoscale and IONOS Cloud follow, the last with 2 TB of outbound traffic free each month and published Savings Plan rates.
Which Azure alternative has the lowest egress charges?
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure gives the first 10 TB of outbound traffic a month free from North America, Europe and the UK, against Azure's 100 GB.
OVHcloud includes outbound traffic in instance prices outside Singapore, Sydney and Mumbai. DigitalOcean charges $0.01 per GiB of overage, where Azure's first paid Premium tier is $0.087 per GB.
Is there a European alternative to Azure with regions in Germany and Austria?
Exoscale lists zones in Frankfurt, Munich and Vienna, among other cities, and charges nothing for traffic between its zones. Hetzner runs Nuremberg, Falkenstein and Helsinki.
Scaleway has four regions in France, Poland, Italy and the Netherlands, and IONOS Cloud has datacentres in the European Union and Newark.
Which Azure alternative gives the biggest trial credit?
Google Cloud and Oracle both state $300 for new customers, Oracle's valid for 30 days with Always Free services afterwards.
OVHcloud offers US$200 of trial credit, the same as Azure's $200 within 30 days. AWS gives up to $200 over 6 months. Hetzner and Scaleway do not advertise a general credit on the pages we read.
Can I leave Azure without paying for the data I move?
Azure states it offers free egress to customers leaving the platform to another cloud provider or an on-premises datacentre, via a credit claimed through its pricing FAQ steps.
Google Cloud has a similar exit request form for customers migrating all workloads. Claim first, copy second, and ask the new provider about transfer fees on its own side.
Does an Azure alternative cover Microsoft licensing?
Not in the same way. Azure Hybrid Benefit is a benefit of running on Azure, so Windows Server licences moved elsewhere fall under that provider's terms.
Exoscale's price page lists a separate Windows licence line for instances up to 7 vCPUs. Check each licence you hold before the move.
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Sources
Checked 5 November 2026
Azure bandwidth pricing: Egress tiers by source continent, 100 GB free, $0.02 per GB between European regions, free egress for customers leaving Azure.
Azure account options: $200 credit within 30 days, move to pay-as-you-go to continue, free monthly amounts of 20+ services for 12 months.
Azure support plans: Basic included, Developer $29, Standard $100, Professional Direct $1,000 per month, Unified coverage.
Azure reservations: Reservations save up to 72 percent on virtual machines with set terms, Hybrid Benefit mention.
Founder of The Knowledge Engineers and of 2 Steps Ahead, an AI search visibility agency. Editorially responsible for every page on this site; research and drafting are AI-assisted.
Sebastiaan Smits wrote and checked this page, most recently on 5 November 2026. See how we review.
