Head to head · GPU compute · October 2026 research run
Baseten vs Cloud Run GPUs
Cloud Run GPUs scores 68.4 (B) on agent readiness against Baseten's 62.7 (B), and leads in 2 of 7 scored categories. Baseten leads on reliability, payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do gpu compute.
Best GPU and serverless compute for AI workloads · All 231 gpu compute comparisons
Which one, for what
Baseten B
Best for Teams that want one model behind a production endpoint with real autoscaling knobs, environments and scoped keys.
Ahead on
- Reliability, 90 against 70
- Payments & pricing, 40 against 20
- Maintenance & community, 90 against 80
Also in its favour
- Open source
Watch for
H100 at $6.50 and A100 at $4.00 an hour, and start-up and idle replica time are billed
Best for Serving small and mid-size open models, or batch jobs, from a container that should scale to zero.
Ahead on
- Agent ergonomics, 66 against 55
- Transparency & trust, 84 against 67
Also in its favour
- No incidents deducted, where Baseten loses 11 points for them
Watch for
One GPU per instance, L4 (24 GB) or RTX PRO 6000 (96 GB) only, so large models don't fit
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Reliability Baseten +20
Baseten 90
Atlassian Statuspage at status.baseten.co with incident history (20). Its history pages list 27 incidents from 3 August to 1 November 2026, 7 of them labelled major, plus three scheduled database upgrades. Every one is scoped to one Model API model, one cluster or region, or a subset of models, the longest labelled major being the Kimi K3 Model API for 54 minutes on 20 September, so all read as partial and minor (20). The management API rate-limits page gives per-endpoint numbers (20 a minute for activate and deactivate, 10 a minute for retry, 30 a second for logs) and the async limit stays at 12,000 a minute per the 1 October check (15). 429 returns retry_after with an instruction to back off on it, and 529 honours Retry-After (15). A public Service Level Agreement, part of the Terms and dated 15 September 2026 in its body (15 September 2025 in the page header), commits to 99.9 per cent monthly availability for Dedicated Inference and Model APIs on Baseten-managed infrastructure, with service credits up to 40 per cent on request within 24 hours; the 1 October check missed it (10). Dedicated deployments are GA (10). 20 + 20 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 = 90.
Cloud Run GPUs 70
Hosted reading. Google Cloud's status page with a JSON incident feed (20). In the 90 days from 8 August 2026 the feed names Cloud Run in three multi-product incidents, a service outage on 20 August (15:40 to 19:20 UTC, 27 products, global and us-west1), a network degradation in us-central1-b on 1 September and a europe-west2 disruption on 20 October. One major (10). Resource limits and GPU quota are published with numbers (3 GPUs a region by default), but no request rate for the Admin API was found on the quotas page (10). Google's client libraries retry with backoff and the Admin API takes etags, while no GPU-specific retry guidance was found (10). An SLA for GPU services, 99.95% with zonal redundancy and 99.5% without (10). GPU services generally available since 7 April 2025 (10). 20+10+10+10+10+10 = 70.
Payments & pricing Baseten +20
Baseten 40
No machine payment protocol (0). Per-minute GPU prices from $0.01052 (T4) to $0.16633 (B200) published without a login (20). New workspaces get credits and no payment method is needed until they run out, at which point models are deactivated (20). Signup is a browser flow (0).
Cloud Run GPUs 20
No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Per-second GPU, CPU and memory prices published without a login (20). The Cloud Run free tier covers CPU and memory, not GPUs, and the $300 trial credit needs a payment method (0). A person creates the project and billing account in a browser (0). 0+20+0+0 = 20.
Transparency & trust Cloud Run GPUs +17
Baseten 67
Hosted service is closed under clear California terms; Truss, the packaging tool, is MIT (20). The docs say inputs, outputs and weights aren't stored by default, async inputs are kept only while processing, and the privacy policy hands customer content to a published DPA; retention periods are given as 'as long as necessary' and audit-log retention is 'contact support' (22). Model API deprecations carry dates, and a published policy promises 30 days' notice, but recent notices fell short of it (8 July for 24 July, 16 days; 13 September for 25 September, 12 days). No deprecation policy for dedicated deployments found (8). Regions can be listed over the API and EU transfers use SCCs, but no subprocessor list found (8).
Cloud Run GPUs 84
Closed service under the Google Cloud terms, with Apache-2.0 client libraries (15). The Cloud Data Processing Addendum and the privacy notice cover customer data, per the Document AI listing's 1 November reading; no Cloud Run statement on GPU instance data after shutdown was found (22). The Cloud terms promise 12 months' notice before a backwards-incompatible API change, and driver versions are announced in the release notes (16). Regions per GPU type listed, with Google's subprocessor list and data-location terms (16). 15+22+16+16 = 69.
Agent ergonomics Cloud Run GPUs +11
Baseten 55
No field selection, limits or summaries found on list endpoints; responses are small resource objects (10). No pagination parameters on list endpoints such as /v1/models or /v1/secrets (5). The inference error page maps each code to a cause and says which to retry with exponential backoff (20). No idempotency keys; only per-deployment retry endpoints and async requests that can be polled (5). Sensible defaults (min_replica 0, max_replica 1) and official clients in Python (Truss, CLI 1.0.0) and JavaScript (performance client on npm) (15).
Cloud Run GPUs 66
Platform reading. One gcloud run deploy with --gpu and --gpu-type adds a GPU to a container, and responses carry the service object with fieldMask on updates (15). List calls page with pageSize and pageToken (15). Google's status codes and messages, with quota errors that name the limit (12). Revisions are immutable, traffic can be moved back, and etags guard updates, but no idempotency key on create (12). Client libraries in many languages and gcloud, though a GPU deploy needs instance-based billing, minimum CPU and memory and, past 3 GPUs, a quota request (12). 15+15+12+12+12 = 66.
Maintenance & community Baseten +10
Baseten 90
A changelog entry on 30 October 2026 (mixed-mode rolling promotions) and Truss v0.18.37 tagged on 29 October (30). In the 90 days from 3 August, 13 stable Truss tags (v0.18.25 on 3 August to v0.18.37) and 31 dated changelog entries from 14 August to 30 October (20). Truss had 9 open issues, the recent ones answered within days, but a 24 August request for a private security contact had one reply and two January 2026 deployment issues sat unanswered, per the 1 October check; GitHub's pages weren't readable on 1 November (18). Truss, the Baseten CLI (v1.4.1 on 22 October) and a JavaScript client are current (15). Release workflow runs in GitHub Actions and Truss supports Python 3.9 to 3.14, but an open issue reports the npm performance client shipping without its platform dependencies since 0.0.10, per the 1 October check (7). 30 + 20 + 18 + 15 + 7 = 90.
Cloud Run GPUs 80
Closed service with official SDKs. The newest GPU change is 30 October 2026, jobs with GPUs running up to 12 hours (30). Cloud Run release notes dated 4 November, 2 November, 30 October, 24 October and more in the 90 days (20). Release notes, Google Cloud support and public trackers for the client libraries, which were not read (10). Official client libraries in eight languages and gcloud (15). CI results not checked (5). 30+20+10+15+5 = 80.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Baseten | Cloud Run GPUs | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 90 | 70 | Baseten +20 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 84 | 81 | Baseten +3 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 55 | 66 | Cloud Run GPUs +11 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 82 | 78 | Baseten +4 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 40 | 20 | Baseten +20 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 90 | 80 | Baseten +10 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 67 | 84 | Cloud Run GPUs +17 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -11 | 0 | |
| Total | B 62.7/100 | B 68.4/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Baseten | Cloud Run GPUs |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | Platform |
| Vendor | Baseten | Google Cloud |
| Hosted endpoint | https://api.baseten.co | https://run.googleapis.com |
| Transports | HTTP | |
| Auth | API key | OAuth |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Pay per use |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT | Proprietary service under the Google Cloud Platform terms. Client libraries are Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-30 | 2026-10-30 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | 2026-09-02 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2026-09-28 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 1.2k stars, 74k PyPI/wk | none |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (2) | none |
How the scores have moved
Cloud Run GPUs
No score change since it was listed.
Verdicts
Baseten
Team API keys can be scoped to inference-only, metrics-only or one environment or model, and a public SLA commits to 99.9 per cent. Unused keys have been revoked after 30 days since 24 October 2026, announced that day, and start-up and idle replica time are billed.
Cloud Run GPUs
Serverless GPUs on Cloud Run, an L4 or RTX PRO 6000 per instance, billed per second, scaling to zero and starting in about 5 seconds before the model loads, with a published SLA and IAM. One GPU per instance, 3 GPUs of default quota a region and instance-based billing limit it to small and mid-size models.
Before you call either
Baseten
- Create a team key with inference-only permission for calling models and keep full-access keys out of the agent
- Sleep for
retry_afterseconds on a 429 from api.baseten.co; the activate and deactivate endpoints allow 20 calls a minute - Treat 401 as bad or expired credentials and 403 as missing permission (since 28 October 2026)
- Make a call with each key at least every 30 days, or create a new key before an infrequent job; revoked keys can't be restored
- Set
scale_down_delaybelow the 900-second default or every burst bills 15 idle minutes
Cloud Run GPUs
- Pass
--gpu 1 --gpu-type nvidia-l4(or nvidia-rtx-pro-6000) with at least 4 vCPU and 16 GiB, and--no-cpu-throttlingfor instance-based billing - Load model weights from Cloud Storage at startup in parallel; bake them into the image only below about 10 GB
- Turn zonal redundancy off for cheaper, more readily granted quota when failover isn't required
- Set minimum instances to 0 unless cold starts matter, since minimum instances bill at the full rate
- Send OAuth tokens in the
Authorizationheader, never asaccess_tokenin the URL
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Baseten or Cloud Run GPUs?
Cloud Run GPUs scores 68.4 (B) on agent readiness against Baseten's 62.7 (B), and leads in 2 of 7 scored categories. Baseten leads on reliability, payments & pricing and maintenance & community.
Can an agent call Baseten and Cloud Run GPUs without installing anything?
Yes. Baseten has a hosted endpoint at https://api.baseten.co and Cloud Run GPUs at https://run.googleapis.com.
Are Baseten and Cloud Run GPUs open source?
Baseten is open source (MIT). No open-source release is listed for Cloud Run GPUs.
Other comparisons with Baseten or Cloud Run GPUs
- Baseten vs Beam
- Baseten vs Cerebrium
- Baseten vs CoreWeave
- Baseten vs Crusoe Cloud
- Baseten vs GPUsMarket
- Baseten vs Hugging Face Inference Endpoints
- Baseten vs Hyperbolic
- Baseten vs Koyeb
- Baseten vs Lambda Cloud
- Baseten vs Massed Compute
- Baseten vs Modal
- Baseten vs Nebius AI Cloud
- Baseten vs Northflank
- Baseten vs Replicate Deployments
- Baseten vs Runpod
- Baseten vs Thunder Compute
- Baseten vs Together GPU Clusters
- Baseten vs Vast.ai
- Baseten vs Verda
- Beam vs Cloud Run GPUs
- Cerebrium vs Cloud Run GPUs
- Cloud Run GPUs vs CoreWeave
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Crusoe Cloud
- Cloud Run GPUs vs GPUsMarket
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Hugging Face Inference Endpoints
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Hyperbolic
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Lambda Cloud
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Massed Compute
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Nebius AI Cloud
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Northflank
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Thunder Compute
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Together GPU Clusters
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Koyeb
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Modal
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Replicate Deployments
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Runpod
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Vast.ai
- Cloud Run GPUs vs Verda
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/baseten-vs-cloud-run-gpus.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/baseten.json·/api/v1/tools/cloud-run-gpus.json - From a terminal
anchor compare baseten cloud-run-gpus(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "baseten", "b": "cloud-run-gpus"}at/mcp, no key