# Baseten vs Runpod

> Baseten has a score of 66.7 (B) against Runpod's 53.7 (D). Both do compute gpu. The largest gap is reliability, 45 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 Runpod's 53.7 (D). Both do compute gpu. The largest gap is reliability, 45 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
- Runpod: grade D, 53.7/100, rank #329 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/runpod.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/runpod.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Baseten for reliability (+45), agent ergonomics (+8), security & auth (+22), payments & pricing (+20), maintenance & community (+8).

Pick Runpod for nothing in particular (no category where it leads by five points or more).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Baseten | Runpod | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 80 | 35 | Baseten +45 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 84 | 81 | Baseten +3 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 55 | 47 | Baseten +8 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 82 | 60 | Baseten +22 |
| 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) | 67 | 65 | Baseten +2 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -5 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **66.7 · B** | **53.7 · D** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Baseten | Runpod |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Baseten | Runpod |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.baseten.co` | `https://api.runpod.ai/v2` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Pay per use |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT | MIT |
| 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 | 2026-09-15 |
| Popularity | 1.2k stars, 74k PyPI/wk | 314 stars, 22k npm/wk, 147k 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.

**Runpod.** Per-second billing across more than a dozen serverless GPU classes, H100 at $4.79 and A100 80 GB at $2.72 an hour. Data-centre outages of 6 to 24 hours in each of July, August and September 2026.

## 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

### Runpod

1. Create a Restricted or Read Only key per endpoint for the agent, not an All key
2. Use REST v2 at api.runpod.io/v2 with a Bearer header; avoid GraphQL, which puts the key in the URL
3. Fetch `/run` results within 30 minutes and `/runsync` results within 1 minute, or they're gone
4. Call `/retry` on a failed job ID rather than submitting a duplicate job
5. Check `/health` before relying on an endpoint idle for a week, since max workers drop to 0

## Other comparisons with Baseten or Runpod

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