# Baseten vs Beam

> Baseten has a score of 66.7 (B) against Beam's 55.5 (C). Both do compute gpu. The largest gap is security & auth, 32 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-05

Baseten has a score of 66.7 (B) against Beam's 55.5 (C). Both do compute gpu. The largest gap is security & auth, 32 points.

- Baseten: grade B, 66.7/100, rank #157 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/baseten.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/baseten.json
- Beam: grade C, 55.5/100, rank #313 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/beam.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/beam.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Baseten for reliability (+25), schema & documentation (+26), security & auth (+32), maintenance & community (+5).

Pick Beam for transparency & trust (+7).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Baseten | Beam | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 80 | 55 | Baseten +25 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 84 | 58 | Baseten +26 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 55 | 58 | Beam +3 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 82 | 50 | Baseten +32 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 40 | even |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 90 | 85 | Baseten +5 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 67 | 74 | Beam +7 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -5 | -2 | |
| **Total** | | **66.7 · B** | **55.5 · C** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Baseten | Beam |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | Model platform |
| Vendor | Baseten | Beam |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.baseten.co` | `https://app.beam.cloud/api/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Tools exposed | none | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-28 | 2026-10-01 |
| Popularity | 1.2k stars, 74k PyPI/wk | 1.8k stars, 8.5k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (2) | 3/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**Baseten.** Team API keys scoped to inference-only, metrics-only or a single environment or model, plus a Viewer role since 1 September 2026. H100 at $6.50 and A100 at $4.00 an hour, and start-up and idle replica time are billed.

**Beam.** Per-millisecond billing with cold starts and image pulls free, H100 PCIe at $3.50 and RTX 4090 at $0.69 an hour. No published request rate limits, 429 handling or SLA.

## Before you call either

### Baseten

1. Create a team key with inference-only permission for calling models and keep full-access keys out of the agent
2. Sleep for `retry_after` seconds on a 429 from api.baseten.co; the activate and deactivate endpoints allow 20 calls a minute
3. Retry 429, 503 and 529 with backoff, but treat 500 as a bug in your model code
4. Set `scale_down_delay` below the 900-second default or every burst bills 15 idle minutes
5. Send payloads over 256 KiB to `/predict`, not `/async_predict`, unless support has raised the async limit

### Beam

1. Check the response body for `ok: false` on gateway calls; a failure can arrive as HTTP 200
2. Don't pipe `beam deploy --format json` output into CI logs, since it contains the workspace token
3. Route anything over 180 seconds to a task queue and poll the task instead of holding the endpoint request
4. Set `keep_warm_seconds` deliberately; the 180-second endpoint default bills three minutes of GPU after every call
5. Pass `gpu=["RTX4090", "A10G"]` so a job still schedules when one type is out

## Other comparisons with Baseten or Beam

- [Baseten vs Koyeb](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-koyeb.md)
- [Baseten vs Lambda Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-lambda.md)
- [Baseten vs Modal](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-modal.md)
- [Baseten vs Northflank](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-northflank.md)
- [Baseten vs Replicate Deployments](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-replicate-deploy.md)
- [Baseten vs Runpod](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-runpod.md)
- [Beam vs Koyeb](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-koyeb.md)
- [Beam vs Lambda Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-lambda.md)
- [Beam vs Modal](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-modal.md)
- [Beam vs Northflank](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-northflank.md)
- [Beam vs Replicate Deployments](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-replicate-deploy.md)
- [Beam vs Runpod](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-runpod.md)