Amazon S3 vs SkyPilot (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict
Amazon S3 is our pick, scoring 7.8/10 against 7.3/10 for SkyPilot on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria. Its biggest advantage: higher Security score (9/10 vs 7/10). Only SkyPilot has a free plan.
Last updated: November 2026
A
Amazon S3
7.8/10
Amazon S3 is AWS's pay-as-you-go object storage service. Businesses use it to store files, backups, data lakes and static website assets at almost any scale.
SkyPilot
7.3/10
Open-source and enterprise system for running, scheduling and scaling AI training, inference and batch jobs across Kubernetes, Slurm, on-prem and 20+ clouds.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | A Amazon S3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 7.8/10 | 7.3/10 |
| Integration | 10/10 | 9/10 |
| Support | 6/10 | 5/10 |
| Cost | 5/10 | 8/10 |
| Customization | 8/10 | 8/10 |
| Security | 9/10 | 7/10 |
| Reliability | 9/10 | 7/10 |
| Ease of Use | 5/10 | 7/10 |
| Analytics | 8/10 | 6/10 |
| Scalability | 10/10 | 9/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Cheapest paid plan | Contact for pricing | Contact for pricing |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Contact for pricing | Free Open Source |
| Features | ||
| API and CLI | ||
| Multiple Regions | ||
| Automatic Backups | Not listed | |
| Cloud Compute | Not listed | |
| Managed WordPress | Not listed | |
| Object Storage | Not listed | |
| Shared Hosting | Not listed | |
| Uptime SLA | Not listed | |
Amazon S3 vs SkyPilot cost by team size
| Team size | Amazon S3 | SkyPilot |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | Contact for pricing | FreeOpen Source |
| 5 users | Contact for pricing | FreeOpen Source |
| 10 users | Contact for pricing | FreeOpen Source |
| 25 users | Contact for pricing | FreeOpen Source |
| 50 users | Contact for pricing | FreeOpen Source |
The plan that fits each team size, billed monthly, before add-ons and usage charges. Each cost opens that tool's pricing calculator for the team size.
Who Amazon S3 and SkyPilot suit
Amazon S3 fits enterprise better than SkyPilot.
| Audience | Amazon S3 | SkyPilot |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | 9/10It offers Object Lock, replication, audit logging and organisation-wide analytics through Storage Lens. | 7/10The paid platform adds SSO, RBAC, airgapped deployment and SOC 2 Type II, but it has only recently become commercially available. |
| Startups | 7/10There are no upfront costs, and new AWS accounts get Free Tier credits. | 8/10The open-source edition is free, and users report using it to burn through startup cloud credits from several providers. |
| Developers | 9/10S3 is managed through a widely adopted API and SDKs, and that API has become the standard interface for object storage. | 9/10ML engineers define jobs in YAML through a CLI, with SSH and IDE access to the machines. |
| IT Teams | Not rated | 7/10Infrastructure teams get one control plane with quotas, priority queueing and GPU health checks. |
| SaaS Companies | 8/10It scales without limit for application data, and transfers to other AWS services in the same Region are free. | Not rated |
| Small Business | 5/10The storage rates are cheap, but reviewers say the console and the pricing model are complex. | Not rated |
Which One Should You Choose?
AWhy choose Amazon S3
- Higher Security score (9/10 vs 7/10)
- Higher Reliability score (9/10 vs 7/10)
- Better fit for enterprise (9/10 vs 7/10)
Why choose SkyPilot
- Has a free plan (Amazon S3 does not)
- Higher Cost score (8/10 vs 5/10)
- Higher Ease of Use score (7/10 vs 5/10)
Pros & Cons
AAmazon S3
Pros
- Very high scale: about 500 trillion objects stored and around 200 million requests per second, according to Wikipedia.
- The S3 API is the industry standard, so a wide range of tools and competing storage providers support it.
- Strong data protection: versioning, MFA Delete, Object Lock in compliance mode, and cross-Region replication with a time-bound SLA.
- Many storage classes, from Express One Zone to Glacier Deep Archive at about $0.001 per GB-month, let teams match cost to how often data is accessed.
- Reviews are consistently positive: about 4.7 out of 5 from more than 1,100 Capterra reviews.
Cons
- Internet egress costs about $0.09 per GB after the first free 100 GB a month, and competitors widely criticise these fees.
- Request, retrieval and lifecycle-transition fees make monthly bills hard to predict.
- Reviewers on Capterra and TrustRadius call the console navigation and user interface complex.
- The SLA pays only service credits toward future bills, never refunds, and infrequent-access classes have a lower 99% uptime threshold.
SkyPilot
Pros
- One YAML job definition runs on AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Slurm and neoclouds such as CoreWeave, Lambda and RunPod.
- When GPU capacity is unavailable, it automatically fails over to other regions or clouds and favours cheaper matching instances.
- Managed jobs recover from spot preemptions and crashes, which cuts down on manual babysitting.
- The core is free and open source under Apache 2.0 and runs inside your own cloud accounts.
- The enterprise edition adds SSO, RBAC, quotas and SOC 2 Type II for teams with governance needs.
Cons
- Checkpointing must be built into your training code, or a preempted job starts over from the beginning.
- It is not designed to manage long-running Kubernetes Deployments or StatefulSets.
- Moving data between clouds can erase the savings from choosing cheaper GPUs.
- The open-source edition requires you to run and maintain your own API server.
- The vendor publishes no pricing for the commercial platform.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon S3 scores higher on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria: 7.8/10 against 7.3/10 for SkyPilot. The largest gap is in Cost: 5/10 for Amazon S3 and 8/10 for SkyPilot.
SkyPilot has a free plan; Amazon S3 does not list one.
Amazon S3 is the better fit for enterprise: we rate it 9/10 for them, against 7/10 for SkyPilot.
