Microsoft Azure vs Render

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

Feature	Microsoft Azure	Render
Starting price	$0.01/mo	$0.25/mo
Best for	Enterprises Windows/.NET workloads Hybrid cloud Regulated industries	Developers Startups Full-stack web apps APIs Small teams replacing Heroku
Stated uptime SLA	99.99%	99.95%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	60	4
Managed Kubernetes	Yes	No
Support channels	Ticket, Phone (paid plans), Docs, Community forum	Ticket, Docs, Community forum, Priority support on Pro/Scale/Enterprise
Compliance	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR, PCI DSS	SOC 2
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	Persistent disk storage billed separately at $0.25/GB/month Bandwidth overage billed per-GB beyond workspace plan allowance (best-available figure ~$0.15/GB, exact current rate not printed on fetched docs page) Additional custom domains beyond plan allowance billed at $0.25/month each Postgres storage overage billed at roughly $0.30/GB/month beyond included storage Instances billed by the second while running, so scale-to-zero / suspended services still show partial-month charges for the time they were up
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18