Choosing a cloud provider is one of those decisions that feels bigger than it is. And yet it's one that many developers and founders agonize over before writing a single line of production code.
Here's the short answer: for most early-stage apps, it doesn't matter much. Pick one and ship.
But if you're past that point and want a real comparison, here's how they actually differ.
Market share and ecosystem
AWS is the default. More than half of the cloud market runs on it, which means more tutorials, more third-party integrations, more people you can ask for help. If you hire a backend engineer tomorrow, there's a good chance they've used AWS before.
GCP is a strong second for data-heavy workloads. Google's networking infrastructure is genuinely excellent, and services like BigQuery and Cloud Run are hard to beat in their categories. If your product lives around data pipelines, ML, or analytics, GCP deserves serious consideration.
Azure is the enterprise pick. If you're selling to large companies or working in a regulated industry, Azure's compliance certifications and Microsoft integrations matter a lot. For most early-stage startups, it's not the obvious first choice.
Pricing
Honestly, they're close. For a typical startup workload at early scale, you're not going to make or break your runway by choosing one over the other.
That said, there are real differences at the margins:
- Compute: GCP charges per second after the first minute. AWS charges per second for most instance types. Azure is similar. For bursty workloads, these rounding differences add up less than they used to.
- Bandwidth (egress): All three providers charge for data leaving their network. This is where surprises happen. AWS tends to be the most expensive for egress. GCP is somewhat cheaper. None of them make this easy to predict.
- Database: Managed databases (RDS, Cloud SQL, Azure Database) are priced similarly, but the devil is in the storage and I/O charges. A db.t3.micro on RDS is cheap. A production Postgres instance with high I/O is not.
- Free tiers: AWS and GCP offer always-free tiers for certain services. Azure's free tier is mostly time-limited (12 months). More on this below.
Use the Cloud Cost Estimator to compare costs for your specific workload across all three.
Developer experience
AWS has the most services, which is both a strength and a weakness. The console can feel overwhelming. The CLI (aws) is powerful but verbose. The docs are comprehensive, sometimes to a fault.
GCP has a cleaner console and better defaults for most managed services. Cloud Run in particular is one of the easiest ways to deploy a containerized app. The CLI (gcloud) is well-designed.
Azure's tooling has improved significantly in recent years, especially for developers already in the Microsoft ecosystem (VS Code, GitHub, .NET). If you're outside that ecosystem, the learning curve is steeper.
Free tiers
AWS has the most generous always-free tier: 750 hours of t2.micro compute per month (for 12 months), 25 GB of DynamoDB storage, 1 million Lambda invocations, and more. After 12 months, some services drop off and others stay free permanently.
GCP's always-free tier includes one f1-micro instance per month, 5 GB of Cloud Storage, and free usage of Cloud Run up to a generous limit. Less variety than AWS, but the limits on the compute and serverless side are genuinely useful.
Azure's free tier is 12 months of specific services at no charge, plus some always-free services. Similar to AWS in structure, but the always-free list is shorter.
Use the Free Tier Explorer to see exactly what each provider offers and what the limits are.
What to pick
Pick AWS if: you want the largest ecosystem, the most job candidates familiar with it, and the safest default choice.
Pick GCP if: your workload is data-heavy, you want to use Cloud Run or BigQuery, or you're applying for Google for Startups credits (up to $200K for eligible startups).
Pick Azure if: your customers are enterprises, you're building on Microsoft technologies, or your company already has an Azure agreement.
Pick a PaaS first if: you want to skip this decision entirely and focus on product. Railway, Render, and Fly.io abstract away most of the cloud provider complexity. You can always migrate later. Use the PaaS Comparison tool to see if this route makes more sense for your scale.
The real answer
The cloud provider matters less than people think at early stage. What matters is shipping fast, keeping your infrastructure simple, and not over-engineering before you have users.
Pick the one your team knows best, take the startup credits if you qualify, and revisit the decision when your bill actually becomes a meaningful line item in your budget.