FluidStack vs AWS EC2
A detailed comparison to help you choose between FluidStack and AWS EC2.
Quick Verdict
3.6/5
FluidStack
0 reviews
3.9/5
AWS EC2
0 reviews
AWS EC2 is rated higher (3.9 vs 3.6). FluidStack aggregates GPU capacity from multiple providers to offer H100, A100, and consumer GPU instances. Pay-as-you-go and reserved capacity. EU and US datacenters with competitive pricing. 124 Availability Zones in 39 geographic regions
FluidStack Enterprise GPU cloud at competitive pricing |  AWS EC2 The original cloud — 750+ instance types | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.6 (0 reviews) | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | usage-based | usage-based (per-second On-Demand, Spot, Savings Plans; free tier credits for new accounts) |
| Starting price | From $1.3/mo | From $0.0042/mo✓ |
| Best for | AI labs and platform teams committing to 8-10k+ GPUs for training or heavy inference who want managed Slurm/Kubernetes, per-GPU-hour transparency, and a hands-on infrastructure partner | Teams with AWS expertise needing the broadest instance selection, global regions, GPU/bare metal options, and commitment-based discounts for steady production workloads |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | — | — |
| RAM | — | 0.5 GB |
| Storage | — | — |
| Bandwidth | — | — |
| SLA uptime | — | 99.99% |
| Data-center count | — | — |
| €/GB RAM/mo | — | €0.01 |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ✓ | |
| DDoS protection | ✓ | |
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ✓ | |
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | Canada, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden | 39 AWS regions / 124 AZs plus Local Zones and Wavelength |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | hourly billinggpu availableeu datacenterus datacenter | free tierhourly billingipv6ddos protectionbackups includedmanaged optionbare metalgpu availables3 compatibleeu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi accessterraform providerkubernetes support |
| Visit FluidStack → | Visit AWS EC2 → | |
FluidStack
Pros
- + Published per-GPU-hour rate card with no egress or ingress fees
- + Fully managed Slurm and Kubernetes on bare metal with 24/7 engineering support
- + Scales from 8 GPUs on-demand to 10k+ reserved — cluster sizes most clouds cannot match quickly
- + EU capacity in the Netherlands and Nordics for data-residency-sensitive training
- + Engineering response times measured in hours by SemiAnalysis during ClusterMAX testing
Cons
- - Aggregated third-party capacity means hardware and day-one polish vary by deployment
- - Contract-first commercial model — 8-GPU on-demand floor, 256-GPU reserved floor, no free tier
- - No public uptime SLA, datacenter list, or documentation library
- - Reactive software supply chain security — unpatched NVIDIA container toolkit found at cluster handover in evaluation
- - Track record is short relative to the scale of its recent customer commitments
AWS EC2
Pros
- + Widest hardware catalog in the market — 1,000+ instance types including Arm, bare metal and GPU families
- + Per-second billing with real cost levers: Spot up to 90% off, Savings Plans up to 72% off
- + 99.99% region-level SLA across 124 AZs in 39 regions with explicit service credits
- + Mature ecosystem: AMIs, Marketplace, Terraform, Systems Manager, and deep service integration
Cons
- - Total cost is a system of meters — EBS, snapshots, elastic IPv4, data transfer and add-ons dwarf the instance price
- - Requires real AWS expertise: VPC design, security groups, IAM and patching are all self-managed
- - Single-instance SLA is only 99.5%; the 99.99% commitment requires multi-AZ architecture
- - Data transfer out is expensive enough to shape architecture decisions
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