# Baseten vs Nebius AI Cloud

> Nebius AI Cloud and Baseten score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 67.2 (B) and 66.5 (B). Baseten leads on reliability, schema & documentation, payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do compute gpu. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes…

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- Updated: 2026-10-09

Nebius AI Cloud and Baseten score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 67.2 (B) and 66.5 (B). Baseten leads on reliability, schema & documentation, payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do compute gpu.

- Baseten: grade B, 66.5/100, rank #264 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/baseten.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/baseten.json
- Nebius AI Cloud: grade B, 67.2/100, rank #240 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/nebius-ai-cloud.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/nebius-ai-cloud.json

## Which one, for what

### Baseten (B)

Good for: Teams that want one model behind a production endpoint with real autoscaling knobs, environments and scoped keys.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 80 against 57
- Schema & documentation, 84 against 78
- Payments & pricing, 40 against 20
- Maintenance & community, 90 against 82

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

### Nebius AI Cloud (B)

Good for: Teams that want whole GPU VMs or InfiniBand clusters in Europe, the UK, Israel or the US with IAM, Terraform and an SLA, and are content to manage endpoint lifecycles themselves.

Ahead on:
- Agent ergonomics, 77 against 55
- Transparency & trust, 77 against 65

Also in its favour:
- Runs on your own machine
- No incidents deducted, where Baseten loses 5 points for them

Watch for: Status page lists 14 incidents marked major between 14 July and 8 October 2026, including about 21 hours of partial degradation in us-central1 on 19 August


## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Baseten | Nebius AI Cloud | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 80 | 57 | Baseten +23 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 84 | 78 | Baseten +6 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 55 | 77 | Nebius AI Cloud +22 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 82 | 81 | Baseten +1 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 20 | Baseten +20 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 90 | 82 | Baseten +8 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 65 | 77 | Nebius AI Cloud +12 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -5 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **66.5 · B** | **67.2 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Baseten | Nebius AI Cloud |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Baseten | Nebius |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.baseten.co` | `https://api.nebius.cloud` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Pay per use |
| Price for compute gpu | not published | $1.35 per GPU-hour |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT | Proprietary service under the Nebius Services Agreement. The API definitions, the Go, Python and JavaScript SDKs and the MCP server on GitHub are MIT |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-09-28 | 2026-10-07 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | 2026-09-28 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2026-09-23 |
| 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 | yes |
| 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 | yes |
| Popularity | 1.2k stars, 74k PyPI/wk | 4.1k npm/wk, 469k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (2) | none |

## 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.

**Nebius AI Cloud.** One API definition generates the REST and gRPC interfaces, the CLI, Terraform provider and three SDKs, with a 602-operation OpenAPI document, `X-Idempotency-Key` and role-scoped service accounts. The status page lists 14 major incidents between 14 July and 8 October 2026, no request rate limits were found, and signup needs a browser and a card.

## 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

### Nebius AI Cloud

1. Use a service account with an authorised key, then exchange a five-minute RS256 JWT at `https://auth.eu.nebius.com/oauth2/token/exchange` for a 12-hour Bearer token
2. Send `X-Idempotency-Key` with a random UUID on every create, update and delete, since a 504 can follow a call that succeeded
3. Poll the returned operation (`/ai/v1/endpoints/operations/{id}`) until `status` is set; concurrent operations on one resource are not supported
4. Stop or delete endpoints when idle. A stopped endpoint bills nothing, a stopped Devlab or VM still bills for its disk
5. Check region support first. Serverless AI is absent from `eu-south1` and `us-north1`, and each GPU platform exists in one to four regions
6. Run the beta `nebius/mcp-server` with safe mode on (the default); `nebius_cli_execute` can run any CLI command when `SAFE_MODE=false`

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, Baseten or Nebius AI Cloud?

Nebius AI Cloud and Baseten score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 67.2 (B) and 66.5 (B). Baseten leads on reliability, schema & documentation, payments & pricing and maintenance & community.

### Do Baseten and Nebius AI Cloud need an API key?

Baseten needs an API key. Nebius AI Cloud takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

### Can an agent call Baseten and Nebius AI Cloud without installing anything?

Yes. Baseten has a hosted endpoint at https://api.baseten.co and Nebius AI Cloud at https://api.nebius.cloud.

### Are Baseten and Nebius AI Cloud open source?

Baseten is open source (MIT). No open-source release is listed for Nebius AI Cloud.


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "baseten", "b": "nebius-ai-cloud"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare baseten nebius-ai-cloud`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/baseten.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/nebius-ai-cloud.json

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