How to choose between AWS, GCP, Azure, and Hetzner: decision guide 2026

Pick the wrong cloud provider and you either pay roughly three times more than you need to or end up fighting a platform that can't do what your product needs. Choosing between AWS, GCP, Azure, and Hetzner is an architectural decision with long-term cost and flexibility consequences. Here's a practical comparison with real figures, not marketing pages.

Quick decision table

AWS: the most complete, but expensive

Real advantages

• 200+ managed services (Lambda, RDS, SQS, EventBridge, Aurora, DynamoDB, etc.)
• 30+ regions, the only cloud with true global coverage
• Pre-existing compliance: SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP
• Huge documentation and community: for any problem, there is a Stack Overflow answer
• Bedrock for AI with Claude, enterprise managed models

Disadvantages

• Most expensive: for the same stable workload, the bill comes out roughly three times the Hetzner one
• Hidden costs: data egress ($0.09/GB), cross-AZ traffic, NAT gateway
• Complicated UI: billing alone requires a course
• Subtle vendor lock-in through managed services (Lambda, DynamoDB, etc.)

GCP: good at AI and data, weak at enterprise sales

Real advantages

• BigQuery: the best data warehouse with standard SQL
• Vertex AI: Google models (Gemini) accessible as managed services
• Best Kubernetes (GKE) experience, since Google invented K8s
• Per-second pricing, more favorable for variable workloads
• Automatic sustained-use discounts, without complicated reserved instances

Disadvantages

• Smaller community than AWS, so experts are harder to find
• Smaller geographic coverage (20+ regions, but concentrated)
• Abrupt product decision changes (Google is Google)
• Weaker business support than AWS or Azure

Azure: the mandatory choice for the Microsoft ecosystem

Real advantages

• Native integration with Active Directory, Office 365, Teams
• .NET workloads run best on Azure
• Largest corporate partner network and certifications
• Hybrid cloud (Azure Arc) connects on-premise with cloud

Disadvantages

• Most inconsistent UI of the big 3
• Fragmented documentation, variable quality
• More frequent outages than AWS in 2024–2025
• Inconsistent per-region pricing: the same instance type differs in UK vs Frankfurt

Hetzner: 65–75% lower bills for stable workloads

Real advantages

• Dedicated vCPU servers at roughly 55–62% of the price of comparable AWS instances, with traffic included (see the Hetzner vs AWS comparison)
• 20TB egress/month included, so no billing surprises
• EU datacenters (Falkenstein, Helsinki) with GDPR compliance
• Real hardware, predictable performance
• Simple, transparent UI, without 1,000 tabs

Disadvantages

• Self-managed: you install Postgres, Redis, monitoring yourself
• Only 4 regions (DE × 2, FI, US Ashburn)
• Slow email/ticket support (24h+)
• No managed services (no Lambda, RDS, SQS managed)
• Manual disaster recovery: you handle backup and failover

Hybrid strategy: the most efficient in 2026

Many successful SaaS products use a combination that delivers 80–90% of AWS's feature set at 20–30% of the cost:

• Compute & DB on Hetzner: maximum savings on stable workloads
• Cloudflare for CDN, DDoS, WAF, Workers (zero egress fees)
• Object storage: Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2 (free egress)
• AWS / GCP on demand: only for AI/ML, sporadic Lambda, managed queues

Common pitfalls

1. Lock-in through managed services: DynamoDB, Lambda, Aurora. Changing cloud = partial rewrite
2. Seductive free tiers: Vercel free tier works until 100GB bandwidth, then costs explode
3. Data egress costs: the biggest hidden cost. Move data in-cloud when you can
4. “Choose AWS because everyone does”: bad argument. Calculate your real needs.

Concrete figures for a 10k MAU B2B SaaS

The difference: roughly €600–€700 a month, or €7,500–€8,500 a year. The AWS and Hetzner figures come from our Hetzner vs AWS cost comparison, at list prices from September 2026.