# Beam vs Nebius AI Cloud

> Nebius AI Cloud scores 67.2 (B) on agent readiness against Beam's 55.5 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Beam leads on payments & pricing. Both do compute gpu. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-nebius-ai-cloud
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.md (~2,500 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.min.md (~680 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-09

Nebius AI Cloud scores 67.2 (B) on agent readiness against Beam's 55.5 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Beam leads on payments & pricing. Both do compute gpu.

- Beam: grade C, 55.5/100, rank #588 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/beam.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/beam.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

### Beam (C)

Good for: Cost-sensitive Python teams running bursty GPU functions on consumer or PCIe cards, and anyone who wants the option to self-host the same runtime.

Ahead on:
- Payments & pricing, 40 against 20

Also in its favour:
- Open source

Watch for: No published request rate limits, 429 handling or SLA

### 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:
- Schema & documentation, 78 against 58
- Agent ergonomics, 77 against 58
- Security & auth, 81 against 50

Also in its favour:
- Runs on your own machine

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 | Beam | Nebius AI Cloud | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 55 | 57 | Nebius AI Cloud +2 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 58 | 78 | Nebius AI Cloud +20 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 58 | 77 | Nebius AI Cloud +19 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 50 | 81 | Nebius AI Cloud +31 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 20 | Beam +20 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 85 | 82 | Beam +3 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 74 | 77 | Nebius AI Cloud +3 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -2 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **55.5 · C** | **67.2 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Beam | Nebius AI Cloud |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model platform | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Beam | Nebius |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://app.beam.cloud/api/v1` | `https://api.nebius.cloud` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Price for compute gpu | not published | $1.35 per GPU-hour |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | 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 | 2026-10-01 | 2026-10-07 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-28 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-09-14 | 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 | not found in the text | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | yes |
| Popularity | 1.8k stars, 8.5k PyPI/wk | 4.1k npm/wk, 469k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (2) | none |

## Verdicts

**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.

**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

### 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

### 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, Beam or Nebius AI Cloud?

Nebius AI Cloud scores 67.2 (B) on agent readiness against Beam's 55.5 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Beam leads on payments & pricing.

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

Yes. Beam has a hosted endpoint at https://app.beam.cloud/api/v1 and Nebius AI Cloud at https://api.nebius.cloud.

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

Beam is open source (AGPL-3.0). No open-source release is listed for Nebius AI Cloud.


## For agents

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

## Other comparisons with Beam or Nebius AI Cloud

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- [Baseten vs Nebius AI Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.md)
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- [Beam vs Runpod](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-runpod.md)
- [Beam vs Thunder Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-thunder-compute.md)
- [Beam vs Vast.ai](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-vast-ai.md)
- [Beam vs Verda](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-verda.md)
- [Cerebrium vs Nebius AI Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cerebrium-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.md)
- [CoreWeave vs Nebius AI Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/coreweave-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.md)
- [Hugging Face Inference Endpoints vs Nebius AI Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/hugging-face-inference-endpoints-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.md)
- [Hyperbolic vs Nebius AI Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/hyperbolic-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.md)
- [Koyeb vs Nebius AI Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/koyeb-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.md)
- [Lambda Cloud vs Nebius AI Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lambda-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.md)
- [Modal vs Nebius AI Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/modal-vs-nebius-ai-cloud.md)
- [Nebius AI Cloud vs Northflank](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nebius-ai-cloud-vs-northflank.md)
- [Nebius AI Cloud vs Replicate Deployments](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nebius-ai-cloud-vs-replicate-deploy.md)
- [Nebius AI Cloud vs Runpod](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nebius-ai-cloud-vs-runpod.md)
- [Nebius AI Cloud vs Thunder Compute](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nebius-ai-cloud-vs-thunder-compute.md)
- [Nebius AI Cloud vs Vast.ai](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nebius-ai-cloud-vs-vast-ai.md)
- [Nebius AI Cloud vs Verda](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nebius-ai-cloud-vs-verda.md)