Head to head · Storage object · October 2026 research run

Amazon S3 vs Backblaze B2

Amazon S3 has a score of 79.3 (A) against Backblaze B2's 75.4 (BB). Both do storage object. The largest gap is reliability, 35 points.

Which one, for what

Pick Amazon S3 for

  • reliability (+35)
  • transparency & trust (+6)

Pick Backblaze B2 for

  • payments & pricing (+20)
  • maintenance & community (+7)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAmazon S3Backblaze B2Edge
Reliability16%209560Amazon S3 +35
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.29289Amazon S3 +3
Agent ergonomics13%16.28385Backblaze B2 +2
Security & auth14%17.58690Backblaze B2 +4
Payments & pricing10%12.52040Backblaze B2 +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88390Backblaze B2 +7
Transparency & trust7%8.88074Amazon S3 +6
Negative events≤1500
Total79.3 · A75.4 · BB

Facts side by side

FactAmazon S3Backblaze B2
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorAmazon Web ServicesBackblaze
Hosted endpointhttps://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.comhttps://s3.us-west-004.backblazeb2.com
TransportsHTTPHTTP, stdio, Streamable HTTP
AuthAPI keyAPI key
PricingPay per usePay per use
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Tools exposednone40
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtnono
MCP registrynot listedio.github.backblaze-labs/b2-mcp
Last release2026-09-302026-09-29
Popularity3.7k stars, 44.8M npm/wk, 578.4M PyPI/wk1 stars, 150 npm/wk, 112k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3.4/5 (8)3.8/5 (8)

Verdicts

Amazon S3

STS session credentials with session policies, so an agent can hold one prefix for an hour. Egress to the internet is billed per GB after 100 GB a month.

Backblaze B2

$6.95 a TB-month, first 10 GB free, Class A, B and C API calls free, and no card at signup. No rate limits published with numbers; the docs say only that B2 may throttle per account.

Before you call either

Amazon S3

  1. Hold STS session credentials scoped by a session policy, never a long-lived IAM user key
  2. Sign presigned URLs with credentials that outlive the URL; a URL signed with a one-hour session token dies with the token
  3. Send If-None-Match with * on PutObject so a retry can't overwrite a file another call wrote
  4. Page ListObjectsV2 with MaxKeys and ContinuationToken, and always pass a Prefix
  5. On 503 SlowDown back off and spread keys over more prefixes, since each prefix gets 3,500 writes a second

Backblaze B2

  1. Take the region from the key's S3 endpoint (the second label of s3.<region>.backblazeb2.com) and pass it as the SDK region
  2. Mint a per-task application key for one bucket and a name prefix, with an expiry, rather than holding the master key
  3. Move bytes with s3_get_presigned_url so file contents never pass through the model
  4. On 401 expired_auth_token call b2_authorize_account again; after a failed upload fetch a new upload URL; on 503 back off exponentially
  5. Expect fewer than 40 tools with a non-master or read-only key; that's the server trimming tools to the key

Other comparisons with Amazon S3 or Backblaze B2

Machine-readable

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