# Crusoe Cloud vs Modal

> Modal and Crusoe Cloud score within a point of each other for gpu compute, 63.6 and 63.4 out of 100. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crusoe-cloud-vs-modal
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crusoe-cloud-vs-modal.md (~2,650 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crusoe-cloud-vs-modal.min.md (~780 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crusoe-cloud-vs-modal.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

Modal and Crusoe Cloud score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 63.6 (B) and 63.4 (B). Crusoe Cloud leads on schema & documentation, security & auth and transparency & trust. Both do gpu compute.

- Crusoe Cloud: grade B, 63.4/100, rank #396 of 950. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/crusoe-cloud.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/crusoe-cloud.json
- Modal: grade B, 63.6/100, rank #382 of 950. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/modal.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/modal.json
- Best GPU and serverless compute for AI workloads: https://www.anchorterminal.com/best/gpu-compute/index.md
- All 167 gpu compute comparisons: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/gpu-compute/index.md

## Which one, for what

### Crusoe Cloud (B)

Good for: Teams that want whole GPU machines or clusters with managed Kubernetes or Slurm in the US, Iceland or Norway, under an SLA, and are content to manage lifecycles themselves.

Ahead on:
- Schema & documentation, 79 against 70
- Security & auth, 74 against 68
- Transparency & trust, 77 against 67

Also in its favour:
- A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
- Runs on your own machine

Watch for: No idempotency key or safe-retry guidance was found for create and delete calls, which return asynchronous operations to poll.

### Modal (B)

Good for: Python teams that want GPU functions, batch jobs and HTTP endpoints from one decorator with scale to zero.

Ahead on:
- Agent ergonomics, 57 against 45
- Maintenance & community, 85 against 76

Also in its favour:
- Free to start without a card

Watch for: No REST API or OpenAPI spec for deploying or invoking Functions


## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Crusoe Cloud | Modal | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 66 | 70 | Modal +4 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 79 | 70 | Crusoe Cloud +9 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 45 | 57 | Modal +12 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 74 | 68 | Crusoe Cloud +6 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 30 | 30 | even |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 76 | 85 | Modal +9 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 77 | 67 | Crusoe Cloud +10 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **63.4 · B** | **63.6 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Crusoe Cloud | Modal |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | Model platform |
| Vendor | Crusoe | Modal |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.cloud.crusoe.ai/v1` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio |  |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary service under the Crusoe Cloud Platform Terms of Service. The Go client and the MCP server package are MIT. The CLI ships as binaries, and no licence file was found in the Terraform provider repository | Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | 41 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-08 | 2026-09-28 |
| Terms last updated | couldn't be read | 2026-05-01 |
| Privacy policy last updated | couldn't be read | 2023-05-17 |
| Customer content may train models | couldn't be read | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | couldn't be read | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | couldn't be read | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | couldn't be read | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | couldn't be read | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 7 npm/wk | 514 stars, 941k npm/wk, 10.1M PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 4/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**Crusoe Cloud.** The v1 REST API has a published OpenAPI description, Markdown docs, HMAC-signed keys, reader roles and a 90-day audit log, with on-demand GPU prices public. No idempotency keys or control-plane rate limits were found, spot and B200 prices go through sales, and a storage outage in eu-norway1 lasted about four hours on 29 September 2026.

**Modal.** Scale to zero by default, per-second billing and about one-second container boots. No REST API or OpenAPI spec for deploying or invoking Functions.

## Before you call either

### Crusoe Cloud

1. Sign every request. Build the payload from path, sorted query string, verb and `X-Crusoe-Timestamp`, HMAC-SHA256 it with the base64url-decoded secret, and send `Authorization: Bearer 1.0:<access_key_id>:<signature>`.
2. Use `https://api.cloud.crusoe.ai/v1`. Some docs pages and the MCP server still name `api.crusoecloud.com` and `/v1alpha5`.
3. Creates, updates and deletes return an operation. Poll the matching operations endpoint for `state`, and list existing resources by name before retrying a create, because no idempotency key was found.
4. Managed AI uses separate Intelligence API keys and hosts, `api.inference.crusoecloud.com` for OpenAI-compatible calls and `api.intelligence.crusoecloud.com` for files and fine-tuning jobs.
5. Delete a VM and its disks to stop charges. A stopped on-demand VM is not billed for compute, but its 128 GB OS disk still bills at $0.08 a GiB-month.

### Modal

1. Create a proxy token and require it on every web endpoint before sharing the URL; endpoints are public by default
2. Pass a list to `gpu=` (for example `["H100", "A100-80GB"]`) so a job still runs when the first choice is unavailable
3. Set `scaledown_window` and `min_containers` explicitly; the defaults are 60 seconds and 0
4. Use `.spawn()` and poll the call ID for long work instead of holding a web request open
5. Keep web endpoint traffic under 200 requests a second or ask Modal to raise the limit

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, Crusoe Cloud or Modal?

Modal and Crusoe Cloud score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 63.6 (B) and 63.4 (B). Crusoe Cloud leads on schema & documentation, security & auth and transparency & trust.

### Can an agent call Crusoe Cloud and Modal without installing anything?

Crusoe Cloud has a hosted endpoint at https://api.cloud.crusoe.ai/v1. No hosted endpoint is listed for Modal.


## For agents

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

## Other comparisons with Crusoe Cloud or Modal

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