# Modal vs Runpod

> Modal has a score of 63.8 (B) against Runpod's 53.7 (D). Both do compute gpu. The largest gap is reliability, 35 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-05

Modal has a score of 63.8 (B) against Runpod's 53.7 (D). Both do compute gpu. The largest gap is reliability, 35 points.

- Modal: grade B, 63.8/100, rank #195 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/modal.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/modal.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 Modal for reliability (+35), agent ergonomics (+10), security & auth (+8), payments & pricing (+10).

Pick Runpod for schema & documentation (+11).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Modal | Runpod | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 70 | 35 | Modal +35 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 70 | 81 | Runpod +11 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 57 | 47 | Modal +10 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 68 | 60 | Modal +8 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 30 | 20 | Modal +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 85 | 82 | Modal +3 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 69 | 65 | Modal +4 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **63.8 · B** | **53.7 · D** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Modal | Runpod |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model platform | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Modal | Runpod |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://api.runpod.ai/v2` |
| Transports |  | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | 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 | 514 stars, 941k npm/wk, 10.1M PyPI/wk | 314 stars, 22k npm/wk, 147k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 4/5 (2) | 3/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**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.

**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

### 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

### 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

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