Microsoft Azure vs Google Cloud

Microsoft Azure is strongest for enterprises. Google Cloud is strongest for enterprises. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Microsoft Azure	Google Cloud
Starting price	$0.01/mo	$0.01/mo
Best for	Enterprises Windows/.NET workloads Hybrid cloud Regulated industries	Enterprises Data & AI/ML workloads Kubernetes-native teams BigQuery/analytics-heavy stacks
Stated uptime SLA	99.99%	99.99%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	60	40
Managed Kubernetes	Yes	Yes
Support channels	Ticket, Phone (paid plans), Docs, Community forum	Ticket, Docs, Community, Phone (paid support tiers)
Compliance	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR, PCI DSS	SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA (BAA available), GDPR, FedRAMP (select services)
Hidden costs to watch for	Windows Server VMs carry a license surcharge on top of the Linux compute rate Outbound bandwidth billed above 100 GB/month pooled free tier, tiered by volume Premium SSD/Ultra Disk IOPS and throughput billed separately from disk capacity Blob Storage Cool/Cold/Archive tiers bill a minimum 128 KiB per object and impose early-deletion penalties (90/180 day minimums) Archive tier retrieval fees are notably high ($6.50/10,000 read ops) AKS Standard tier control plane fee ($0.10/hr per cluster) on top of node VM costs	Network egress to internet billed per-GB and rises past free tier (200 GiB/month egress to certain destinations) Sustained-use and committed-use discounts are separate mechanisms and easy to miss when comparing to flat-rate competitors Custom machine types carry a 5% premium over predefined machine type pricing GKE charges a $0.10/hour cluster management fee per cluster (Standard and Autopilot alike) Cloud SQL high-availability configuration doubles vCPU, memory, and persistent disk costs Nearline/Coldline/Archive storage classes carry early-deletion minimum storage durations (30/90/365 days) and per-GB retrieval fees
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18