AWS Bedrock vs Azure OpenAI: pricing, speed, and use cases (2026)

Updated May 04, 2026·By VerticalAPI Team

Most enterprise teams compare AWS Bedrock and Azure OpenAI for the same reasons: data residency, compliance, and consolidated cloud billing. The trade-off is model variety vs single-vendor consistency. This page compares them on the criteria architecture teams use during procurement.

Side-by-side

AWS Bedrock vs Azure OpenAI — at a glance

Dimension	AWS Bedrock	Azure OpenAI
Flagship model	Claude Sonnet 4.5 on Bedrock	GPT-4o on Azure
Context window	200K	128K
Input price (per 1M tok)	Anthropic Bedrock pricing (~$3 / $15)	Azure OpenAI pricing (~$2.50 / $10)
Output price (per 1M tok)	(matches Anthropic)	(matches OpenAI)
Latency (typical)	~500-700ms TTFT	~400-600ms TTFT
Free tier	AWS Free Tier	Azure Free Tier
Best for	Multi-model catalog (Claude, Llama, Mistral, Titan), AWS-native compliance	OpenAI on enterprise infra, MS Defender + Purview, VNet integration

When to choose which

Pick AWS Bedrock or Azure OpenAI?

When to choose AWS Bedrock

Choose AWS Bedrock when your team is already on AWS and you want a multi-vendor model marketplace under one IAM perimeter. Bedrock fronts Anthropic Claude, Meta Llama, Mistral, Cohere, AI21, Stability and Amazon's own Titan/Nova models — all billed through your AWS account, eligible for committed-use discounts, and integrated with KMS, VPC endpoints, CloudWatch, and PrivateLink. For regulated workloads (HIPAA, GovCloud, IL5) Bedrock has the broadest BAA coverage.

Anthropic Claude, Llama, Mistral, Cohere, Titan all in one place
AWS billing, IAM, KMS, VPC endpoints, PrivateLink
HIPAA / GovCloud / IL5 eligibility (broadest of any cloud)
Knowledge Bases (managed RAG) and Agents built-in
Pricing = provider rate + ~10-15% AWS infrastructure margin

When to choose Azure OpenAI

Choose Azure OpenAI when your stack is Microsoft-first and you want the canonical OpenAI models (GPT-4o, GPT-4 Turbo, o1) with enterprise-grade SLAs, content filters, and regional data residency. Azure OpenAI is the only path to OpenAI models with SOC2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA / FedRAMP High under a single Microsoft contract. Pricing matches OpenAI list ($2.50 / $10 for GPT-4o) but Provisioned Throughput Units (PTUs) make latency and throughput deterministic.

GPT-4o, o1, GPT-4 Turbo with Microsoft SLAs
Provisioned Throughput Units (PTUs) for deterministic latency
FedRAMP High, HIPAA, ISO 27001, SOC2 included
Regional data residency (US, EU, UK, JP, etc.)
Tight integration with Entra ID, Sentinel, Defender

Why not both?

Run AWS Bedrock and Azure OpenAI side-by-side

VerticalAPI fronts both AWS Bedrock and Azure OpenAI through the same OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Drop in your AWS keys or Azure deployment URL, route per-request, keep your enterprise compliance perimeter intact — and add cost / latency dashboards across both clouds. Zero markup on tokens; you pay AWS and Azure directly.

from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.verticalapi.com/v1", api_key="vapi_...")

# AWS Bedrock
resp_x = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="bedrock/anthropic.claude-sonnet-4-5",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}],
    extra_headers={"X-Provider-Key": "sk-..."},
)

# Azure OpenAI — same SDK, same client, different model + key
resp_y = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="azure/gpt-4o",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}],
    extra_headers={"X-Provider-Key": "..."},
)

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VerticalAPI verdict

Use AWS Bedrock when you want one cloud-native endpoint that fans out to Claude, Llama, Mistral, Titan and Cohere — and your data stack is already on AWS. Use Azure OpenAI when you need GPT-4o specifically on enterprise infrastructure with Microsoft's compliance posture (Defender, Purview, VNet, AAD). VerticalAPI can BYOK to both — IAM credentials for Bedrock, resource keys + endpoint for Azure — and route on a per-request basis.

Get started — BYOK both providers →

FAQ

Common questions about AWS Bedrock vs Azure OpenAI

Can I use Claude on Azure?

Not directly via Azure OpenAI (which is OpenAI-only). For Claude on Azure, you'd run a self-hosted gateway. For Claude on hyperscaler infra, AWS Bedrock or GCP Vertex are the supported routes.

Which has better data residency?

Both pin inference to a specific region (us-east-1, eu-west-1, etc.). Choose based on your existing data residency posture — if your data lake is in AWS, Bedrock's same-region inference is simpler; if in Azure, Azure OpenAI is simpler.

Are prompts logged by either?

Both have opt-in / opt-out logging policies; verify with your enterprise contract. VerticalAPI's gateway only logs metadata (latency, token counts) and never persists prompts/completions unless you enable replay logs explicitly.