Vultr Bare Metal vs Equinix Metal
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Vultr Bare Metal and Equinix Metal.
Quick Verdict
3.7/5
Vultr Bare Metal
0 reviews
1.5/5
Equinix Metal
0 reviews
Vultr Bare Metal is rated higher (3.7 vs 1.5). Vultr's bare metal offering provides dedicated physical servers without virtualization overhead. Ideal for compute-intensive workloads, databases, and applications requiring predictable performance and full hardware control. Equinix Metal (formerly Packet) offered on-demand bare metal servers across Equinix metros with ARM and x86 hardware, hourly billing and private interconnects to cloud providers. Equinix stopped commercial sales and sunset the service on 30 June 2026 — it can no longer be purchased or used.
Vultr Bare Metal High-performance bare metal servers with hourly billing and global deployment | Equinix Metal Discontinued: on-demand bare metal (formerly Packet), sunset 30 June 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.7 (0 reviews)✓ | 1.5 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | paid | paid |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Teams wanting dedicated hardware with cloud automation - HPC, database clusters, game backends, compliance workloads, and especially on-demand GPU training/inference clusters | Nobody — the service was sunset on 30 June 2026. Former Metal workloads belong on a modern bare metal provider from our /category/bare-metal-cloud shortlist, or on Equinix colocation if interconnection was the real dependency. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ✓ | |
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | hourly billingnvme storageipv6ddos protectioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter | hourly billingipv6ddos protectioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi accessprivate networking |
| Visit Vultr Bare Metal → | Visit Equinix Metal → | |
Vultr Bare Metal
Pros
- + Dedicated physical servers with cloud ergonomics: on-demand, hourly, console/API/Terraform provisioning in minutes, no sales cycle
- + Vultr Clusters offers self-service multi-node and GPU bare-metal groups (e.g. 8x L40S nodes) without reservations
- + Full Vultr platform inheritance: S3-compatible object storage, storage gateways, load balancers, DNS, CDN, BGP bring-your-own-IP, L3/L4 DDoS mitigation
- + Single-tenant isolation for HPC, databases, compliance-sensitive and AI/ML workloads, under one account and invoice with the VM fleet
Cons
- - CPU bare-metal pricing is not public - on-demand rates appear only in the console/API and contract rates go through sales
- - Bare-metal availability is a subset of the 34-region platform and the stocked classes per region are not published
- - No refunds per the terms of service; backups are a 20%-of-price add-on and snapshots are not part of the bare-metal flow
- - No published hardware-replacement SLA; ticket-only support and metered egress at high spend levels
Equinix Metal
Pros
- + Historically one of the strongest developer surfaces in bare metal: API, CLI, Terraform, Kubernetes integrations
- + Hourly on-demand billing (minimum one-hour block) with 5-50% reservation discounts by term
- + Single-tenant hardware with real interconnection: Equinix Fabric links and cloud on-ramps
- + ARM and x86 options, NVMe storage, up to 64-core EPYC-class machines
- + Shutdown was handled professionally: dated timeline, migration support, security and stability maintained to the end
Cons
- - Discontinued: sales stopped and the service was sunset on 30 June 2026 — unpicked workloads were deleted
- - Premium pricing (~$535/mo entry per third-party trackers) in a market with far cheaper bare metal automation
- - Classic vendor-concentration risk: a side product inside a colocation giant, killed by portfolio arithmetic
- - Residual resources (IPs, VLANs, VRFs, Fabric connections, dedicated ports) kept billing unless explicitly deleted
- - No free tier, no published SLA; enterprise sales-led motions for credits and reservations
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