Baseten vs Cloud CDN (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict

Why choose Baseten

• Higher Ease of Use score (6/10 vs 4/10)
• Higher Support score (6/10 vs 5/10)

C

Why choose Cloud CDN

• Higher Integration score (8/10 vs 6/10)
• Better fit for small business (4/10 vs 2/10)

Baseten

Pros

• Broad compliance coverage: SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, HIPAA with a BAA, GDPR and PCI DSS, plus BYOK encryption for model weights and payloads.
• Flexible deployment: the same stack runs on Baseten's multi-cloud pool, on single-tenant clusters, or in a self-hosted data plane inside your own VPC.
• Per-minute GPU billing and scale to zero (min replicas defaults to 0) mean idle dev deployments cost nothing.
• Wide range of GPUs, from T4 at about $0.63 an hour to B200 at about $9.98 an hour, with failover across 20+ cloud providers.
• Built-in logs, metrics and traces for every dedicated deployment, exportable to Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana and New Relic.

Cons

• Covers inference, training and sandboxes only, so databases, object storage and general app hosting need another provider.
• Dedicated replicas bill per minute while they run, including cold-start time and the default 15-minute scale-down delay, which can make bills hard to predict.
• Built for ML engineers. Reviewers say non-technical teams will struggle, and performance tuning still needs ML expertise.
• Very few independent reviews: G2 lists too few reviews to give buying insight.
• SLAs, reserved capacity and volume discounts are only available through negotiated contracts with sales.

C

Cloud CDN

Pros

• Connects directly to Google Cloud origins such as Cloud Storage buckets, GKE (including GKE Gateway since April 2026), Cloud Run, and Compute Engine, and it also accepts external origins.
• Cache egress falls to 0.02 USD per GiB above 1,000 TiB in North America and Europe, which makes it competitive at very large volumes.
• Cloud Armor edge security policies inspect all traffic before the cache lookup, so attack filtering and WAF rules sit in front of cached content.
• Invalidation has no per-request fee and supports cache tags, and each invalidation takes effect in about 10 seconds.
• You can automate everything through the REST API, gcloud CLI, and Terraform, and logs export to BigQuery or Cloud Storage.

Cons

• It is not a standalone CDN. You must configure the external Application Load Balancer's URL maps, backend services, and forwarding rules, and reviewers say this is hard for people new to CDNs.
• Billing has several layers (egress, cache fill, per-request lookups on every GET and HEAD, plus load balancer charges), so monthly costs are hard to forecast.
• The cache only fills when requests arrive, and there is no native way to pre-warm content across locations, which users have flagged.
• Reviewers say analytics are complex, and simple downloadable raw access logs are not offered the way some specialist CDNs provide them.
• Large-scale video and download delivery is steered to the separate Media CDN product, and Cloud CDN does not deliver RTMP or WebRTC.