RunPod vs Baseten
SEPT 2026 auditA comparison of RunPod and Baseten built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.
The short answer
Choose RunPod if…
Short experiments and bursty inference — per-second billing and a $0.27 entry card mean an idle hour costs nothing and a small job is genuinely small.
Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved
Choose Baseten if…
Teams that want per-token APIs and dedicated GPUs from one vendor with no plan fee — minute-granularity billing means a model that runs for ten minutes costs ten minutes.
Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved
Consider something else if…
- RunPod: The catalogue mixes community and secure capacity, so the cheapest quoted rate is not always the tier a production workload should sit on.
- Baseten: Its dedicated H100 works out at $6.50 an hour, roughly three times DeepInfra's, so steady GPU workloads pay a premium for the platform around them.
16 sourced criteria separate them — see where, with sources, below.
Pick the criteria you care about. The chart counts how many of them lean toward each provider — the same read as scanning the bars below, just totalled for the ones you chose.
RunPod 0
Baseten 0
At a glance.
| Criterion | RunPod | Baseten |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| Entry paid plan | No plan tiers: a new account can start with as little as $10 in prepaid credits, and deploying a Pod requires at least one hour of credits for the chosen configuration. | $0 per month on the Basic plan — pay as you go, with dedicated deployments, model APIs and training included rather than gated behind a fee. |
| Pricing model | Prepaid credit balance drawn down by usage: all compute and storage billed per second, with no data transfer fees and no monthly plan tiers. | No platform fee: per-token Model APIs for open models, and dedicated deployments billed per minute of compute with volume discounts. The Pro tier buys priority access to high-demand GPUs rather than a lower rate. |
| Infrastructure | ||
| Regions | 31 regions across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia for on-demand GPU instances. | Two Baseten regions selectable for regional deployments: us (United States) and eu (European Union); other regions by request to support. GPU model deployments only; Chains, training jobs and shared CPU types cannot select a region. |
| Uptime SLA | SLA-backed uptime is offered on reserved clusters, which are sold by contract. No percentage is published on the pricing page, and on-demand pods carry no stated commitment. | Custom SLAs on Enterprise. No percentage is published on the pricing page. |
| GPU | ||
| H100 SXM, per GPU-hour | $3.49 per hour for H100 SXM 80GB, single card. The PCIe variant is $2.89 and H100 NVL is $3.19. | $6.50 per hour for a dedicated H100 80GB. Baseten publishes $0.10833 per MINUTE — the hourly figure is that times 60, ours rather than Baseten's, and the page offers an hourly toggle. A100 80GB is $0.06667 a minute and B200 $0.16633. |
| Largest GPU offered | 288GB per GPU on B300; B200 at 180GB is $6.79 an hour and H200 at 141GB is $4.59. | 180GB per GPU on a B200, at $0.16633 per minute — $9.98 an hour. |
| Compliance | ||
| SOC 2 | SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 examinations completed; reports are listed in the Runpod Trust Center and some require approved access before download. | Maintains SOC 2 Type II certification for the inference platform; policies and certifications are held in the Baseten Trust Center. |
| ISO 27001 | ISMS certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 by Sensiba LLP; certificate RUN-ISMS-20260827 valid 27 August 2026 through 26 August 2029. Scope limited to the ISMS supporting Runpod's services and platform, not individual products. | ISO 27001:2022 listed as a compliance program; an ISO 27001 certificate for Baseten Labs, Inc. is published in the Trust Center for request. Certificate is request-access in the Trust Center, not a public download. |
| HIPAA | Maintains a HIPAA program; HIPAA sits among the Trust Center compliance resources, some of which require approved access before download. | Maintains HIPAA compliance alongside SOC 2 Type II for model inference on the Baseten platform. |
| GDPR / data residency | Stated fully GDPR compliant for data processed in European data center regions, with documented EU procedures for collection, storage, processing and deletion. | Baseten Cloud supports a GDPR compliance program; residency is set with regional environments or a region on a single deployment. |
| PCI DSS | Claimed for Secure Cloud's vetted infrastructure partners, who meet enterprise standards including SOC 2, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certifications. Stated of the data-centre partners behind Secure Cloud, not of Runpod Inc. itself. | PCI DSS - SAQ D listed as a compliance program; a PCI-DSS v4.0.1 AOC for SAQ D Service Provider is published in the Trust Center for request. SAQ D self-assessment AOC, not a QSA Report on Compliance. |
| Encryption at rest | Optional per-Pod volume encryption: the volume disk is encrypted at rest on the host machine, but container disk and network volumes cannot be encrypted. | Trust Center control: datastores housing sensitive customer data are encrypted at rest, and transmission over public networks is encrypted. |
| Customer-managed keys | Not supported: Runpod stores the volume encryption key, which cannot be retrieved, and the docs state bring your own key is not supported. | Runtime OIDC BYOK recipes: a model fetches customer-managed keys at runtime to decrypt encrypted weights and to decrypt requests and encrypt responses. Documented under runtime OIDC use cases, implemented in model code via the truss-examples envelope-encryption recipes. |
| Role-based access control | Four team roles — Basic, Billing, Dev and Admin — each with set permissions; Admin has unrestricted access to members, settings, billing and resources. | Role-based access control with three organization roles - Admin, Member and Viewer - in a single-team organization. |
| Private networking / VPC | Global networking gives each Pod a private IP reachable only by other Pods in the same account; NVIDIA GPU Pods only, in 17 data centers. | Single-tenant Enterprise environments expose endpoints via AWS PrivateLink or Google Cloud Private Service Connect, off the public internet. |
| Dedicated infrastructure | Reserved Clusters: dedicated GPU clusters with guaranteed availability, custom configurations and SLA-backed uptime for enterprises scaling to 10,000+ GPUs. | Single-tenant runs workloads in an isolated VPC in Baseten Cloud with compute restricted to your organization; Enterprise, custom pricing. |
Where they differ.
Entry paid plan
- RunPod
- No plan tiers: a new account can start with as little as $10 in prepaid credits, and deploying a Pod requires at least one hour of credits for the chosen configuration.
- Baseten
- $0 per month on the Basic plan — pay as you go, with dedicated deployments, model APIs and training included rather than gated behind a fee.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Billing overview - Runpod Documentation ↗
“To deploy a new Pod, your account must have at least one hour’s worth of credits for your selected configuration. [...] If you’re new to Runpod and want to evaluate the platform, you can start with as little as $10.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
- Pricing — Baseten ↗
“Baseten $0 per month, pay as you go Get started [...] Included in Basic: Dedicated deployments Model APIs Training Fast cold starts SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliant”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
Pricing model
- RunPod
- Prepaid credit balance drawn down by usage: all compute and storage billed per second, with no data transfer fees and no monthly plan tiers.
- Baseten
- No platform fee: per-token Model APIs for open models, and dedicated deployments billed per minute of compute with volume discounts. The Pro tier buys priority access to high-demand GPUs rather than a lower rate.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Billing overview - Runpod Documentation ↗
“Runpod uses a credit-based billing system where you add funds to your account and charges are deducted as you use resources. All compute and storage charges are billed per second, with no fees for data transfer.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
- Pricing — Baseten ↗
“$0 per month, pay as you go [...] Only pay for the compute you use, down to the minute. Volume discounts available [...] Pro Unlimited autoscaling and priority compute access [...] Priority access to high-demand GPUs”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
Regions
31 regions across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia for on-demand GPU instances.
Two Baseten regions selectable for regional deployments: us (United States) and eu (European Union); other regions by request to support. GPU model deployments only; Chains, training jobs and shared CPU types cannot select a region.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Cloud GPU Instances for AI Workloads | Runpod ↗
“Rent GPU instances in 31 regions across the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official site
- Regional deployments - Baseten ↗
“The following regions are available for regional deployments. [...] us United States eu European Union”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
Uptime SLA
- RunPod
- SLA-backed uptime is offered on reserved clusters, which are sold by contract. No percentage is published on the pricing page, and on-demand pods carry no stated commitment.
- Baseten
- Custom SLAs on Enterprise. No percentage is published on the pricing page.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- RunPod Pricing ↗
“reserved clusters dedicated gpu clusters with guaranteed availability, custom configurations, sla-backed uptime, and discounted rates for enterprises scaling to 10,000+ gpus”
Read 2026-09-14 · official pricing
- Baseten Pricing ↗
“everything in pro plus: custom slas self-host deployments on-demand flex compute use existing cloud commitments”
Read 2026-09-14 · official pricing
H100 SXM, per GPU-hour
- RunPod
- $3.49 per hour for H100 SXM 80GB, single card. The PCIe variant is $2.89 and H100 NVL is $3.19.
- Baseten
- $6.50 per hour for a dedicated H100 80GB. Baseten publishes $0.10833 per MINUTE — the hourly figure is that times 60, ours rather than Baseten's, and the page offers an hourly toggle. A100 80GB is $0.06667 a minute and B200 $0.16633.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Pricing — RunPod ↗
“H100 SXM 80 GB VRAM 125 GB RAM 20 vCPUs $ 3.49 /hr [...] H100 PCIe 80 GB VRAM 188 GB RAM 16 vCPUs $ 2.89 /hr [...] H100 NVL 94 GB VRAM 94 GB RAM 16 vCPUs $ 3.19 /hr”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
- Pricing — Baseten ↗
“Dedicated Deployments Only pay for the compute you use, down to the minute. [...] Price per Minute Hour [...] A100 80 GiB VRAM $0.06667 [...] H100 80 GiB VRAM $0.10833 [...] B200 180 GiB VRAM $0.16633”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
Largest GPU offered
288GB per GPU on B300; B200 at 180GB is $6.79 an hour and H200 at 141GB is $4.59.
180GB per GPU on a B200, at $0.16633 per minute — $9.98 an hour.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Pricing — RunPod ↗
“B300 288 GB HBM3e 251 GB RAM 32 vCPUs [...] B200 180 GB VRAM 283 GB RAM 28 vCPUs $ 6.79 /hr [...] H200 141 GB VRAM 276 GB RAM 24 vCPUs $ 4.59 /hr”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
- Pricing — Baseten ↗
“B200 180 GiB VRAM $0.16633 Deploy”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
SOC 2
- RunPod
- SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 examinations completed; reports are listed in the Runpod Trust Center and some require approved access before download.
- Baseten
- Maintains SOC 2 Type II certification for the inference platform; policies and certifications are held in the Baseten Trust Center.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- AI Infrastructure Security & Compliance | Runpod ↗
“Runpod has also completed SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 examinations, and maintains HIPAA and GDPR programs. [...] The Runpod Trust Center lists current compliance resources, including the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate, SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, HIPAA, GDPR, and the SOC 2 Bridge Letter 2026. Some documents require approved access before download.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official site
- Secure model inference - Baseten ↗
“Baseten maintains SOC 2 Type II certification and HIPAA compliance.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
ISO 27001
- RunPod
- ISMS certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 by Sensiba LLP; certificate RUN-ISMS-20260827 valid 27 August 2026 through 26 August 2029. Scope limited to the ISMS supporting Runpod's services and platform, not individual products.
- Baseten
- ISO 27001:2022 listed as a compliance program; an ISO 27001 certificate for Baseten Labs, Inc. is published in the Trust Center for request. Certificate is request-access in the Trust Center, not a public download.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- AI Infrastructure Security & Compliance | Runpod ↗
“Runpod Inc. operates an Information Security Management System certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 by Sensiba LLP, an ANAB-accredited certification body. Certificate RUN-ISMS-20260827 is valid from August 27, 2026 through August 26, 2029.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official site
- Baseten Trust Center ↗
“Compliance SOC 2 ISO 27001:2022 HIPAA [...] Baseten Labs, Inc. ISO 27001 Certificate.pdf”
Read 2026-09-13 · official site
HIPAA
- RunPod
- Maintains a HIPAA program; HIPAA sits among the Trust Center compliance resources, some of which require approved access before download.
- Baseten
- Maintains HIPAA compliance alongside SOC 2 Type II for model inference on the Baseten platform.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- AI Infrastructure Security & Compliance | Runpod ↗
“Runpod has also completed SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 examinations, and maintains HIPAA and GDPR programs. [...] Some documents require approved access before download.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official site
- Secure model inference - Baseten ↗
“Baseten maintains SOC 2 Type II certification and HIPAA compliance.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
GDPR / data residency
- RunPod
- Stated fully GDPR compliant for data processed in European data center regions, with documented EU procedures for collection, storage, processing and deletion.
- Baseten
- Baseten Cloud supports a GDPR compliance program; residency is set with regional environments or a region on a single deployment.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Data security and legal compliance - Runpod Documentation ↗
“Runpod is fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for data processed in European data center regions. [...] For servers hosted in GDPR-compliant regions like the European Union, Runpod maintains clear procedures for the collection, storage, processing, and deletion of personal data.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
- Baseten Cloud - Baseten ↗
“Baseten Cloud supports SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance programs. [...] to constrain workloads and inference traffic to specific regions”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
PCI DSS
- RunPod
- Claimed for Secure Cloud's vetted infrastructure partners, who meet enterprise standards including SOC 2, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certifications. Stated of the data-centre partners behind Secure Cloud, not of Runpod Inc. itself.
- Baseten
- PCI DSS - SAQ D listed as a compliance program; a PCI-DSS v4.0.1 AOC for SAQ D Service Provider is published in the Trust Center for request. SAQ D self-assessment AOC, not a QSA Report on Compliance.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Data security and legal compliance - Runpod Documentation ↗
“For workloads requiring the highest level of security, Secure Cloud provides vetted infrastructure partners who meet enterprise security standards including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS certifications.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
- Baseten Trust Center ↗
“GDPR PCI DSS - SAQ D [...] PCI-DSS-v4-0-1-AOC-for-SAQ-D-Service-Provider-r1.pdf”
Read 2026-09-13 · official site
Encryption at rest
- RunPod
- Optional per-Pod volume encryption: the volume disk is encrypted at rest on the host machine, but container disk and network volumes cannot be encrypted.
- Baseten
- Trust Center control: datastores housing sensitive customer data are encrypted at rest, and transmission over public networks is encrypted.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Storage options - Runpod Documentation ↗
“When encryption is enabled, the volume is encrypted at rest on the host machine, and only your Pod can access the data. [...] Encryption applies only to volume disk. Container disk and network volumes cannot be encrypted.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
- Baseten Trust Center - Controls ↗
“The company's datastores housing sensitive customer data are encrypted at rest. [...] The company uses secure data transmission protocols to encrypt confidential and sensitive data when transmitted over public networks.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official site
Customer-managed keys
- RunPod
- Not supported: Runpod stores the volume encryption key, which cannot be retrieved, and the docs state bring your own key is not supported.
- Baseten
- Runtime OIDC BYOK recipes: a model fetches customer-managed keys at runtime to decrypt encrypted weights and to decrypt requests and encrypt responses. Documented under runtime OIDC use cases, implemented in model code via the truss-examples envelope-encryption recipes.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Storage options - Runpod Documentation ↗
“Your encryption key cannot be retrieved, and bring your own key is not supported. Runpod securely stores your key and passes it only to your container image at runtime.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
- OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication - Baseten ↗
“Keep model weights encrypted in object storage and use runtime OIDC to retrieve the key material needed to decrypt them when the model starts. [...] Use runtime OIDC to retrieve customer-managed keys, then decrypt requests and encrypt responses during inference.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
Role-based access control
- RunPod
- Four team roles — Basic, Billing, Dev and Admin — each with set permissions; Admin has unrestricted access to members, settings, billing and resources.
- Baseten
- Role-based access control with three organization roles - Admin, Member and Viewer - in a single-team organization.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Manage accounts - Runpod Documentation ↗
“Runpod provides four distinct roles to control access within team accounts. Each role includes specific permissions designed for different responsibilities. [...] Administrators have unrestricted access to manage team members, configure account settings, handle billing, and control all team computing resources.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
- Access control - Baseten ↗
“Baseten uses role-based access control (RBAC) to manage organization access. [...] In organizations that use a single team, every organization member has one of three roles.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
Private networking / VPC
- RunPod
- Global networking gives each Pod a private IP reachable only by other Pods in the same account; NVIDIA GPU Pods only, in 17 data centers.
- Baseten
- Single-tenant Enterprise environments expose endpoints via AWS PrivateLink or Google Cloud Private Service Connect, off the public internet.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Global networking - Runpod Documentation ↗
“Global networking provides each Pod with a private IP address accessible only to other Pods in your account. [...] Global networking is currently only available for NVIDIA GPU Pods. [...] Global networking is available in these 17 data centers worldwide:”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
- Single-tenant - Baseten ↗
“Inference requests route directly from your application to your dedicated environment and can remain off the public internet. [...] such as AWS PrivateLink or Google Cloud Private Service Connect”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
Dedicated infrastructure
- RunPod
- Reserved Clusters: dedicated GPU clusters with guaranteed availability, custom configurations and SLA-backed uptime for enterprises scaling to 10,000+ GPUs.
- Baseten
- Single-tenant runs workloads in an isolated VPC in Baseten Cloud with compute restricted to your organization; Enterprise, custom pricing.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- GPU Cloud Pricing | Per-Second H100, A100, RTX | Runpod ↗
“Reserved Clusters Dedicated GPU clusters with guaranteed availability, custom configurations, SLA-backed uptime, and discounted rates for enterprises scaling to 10,000+ GPUs.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing
- Single-tenant - Baseten ↗
“Single-tenant runs your inference workloads in an isolated VPC in Baseten Cloud. [...] Compute and scheduling are restricted to your organization. [...] Single-tenant is available with custom pricing on the Enterprise plan.”
Read 2026-09-13 · official docs
When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.
Documented by only one.
These criteria are published by one provider and not the other. An absence here means we have not found a source, not that the feature is missing.
Questions this comparison answers.
Entry paid plan: RunPod or Baseten?
RunPod: No plan tiers: a new account can start with as little as $10 in prepaid credits, and deploying a Pod requires at least one hour of credits for the chosen configuration.
Baseten: $0 per month on the Basic plan — pay as you go, with dedicated deployments, model APIs and training included rather than gated behind a fee.
Should I choose RunPod or Baseten?
Pick RunPod if Short experiments and bursty inference — per-second billing and a $0.27 entry card mean an idle hour costs nothing and a small job is genuinely small.
Pick Baseten if Teams that want per-token APIs and dedicated GPUs from one vendor with no plan fee — minute-granularity billing means a model that runs for ten minutes costs ten minutes.