Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) claims to be dramatically cheaper than AWS. Is it true? In this comparison, we look at real prices across every major service category and explain when the savings are genuine — and when AWS's premium is justified.
Compute Pricing: OCI Wins by a Huge Margin
OCI's pricing model is fundamentally different from AWS. Instead of hundreds of fixed instance sizes, OCI offers Flex instances where you specify exact OCPU and GB of RAM needed. Pricing: $0.0080/OCPU/hr (1 OCPU = 2 vCPU) and $0.0015/GB RAM/hr.
Real comparison — 8 vCPU, 32GB RAM, Singapore region:
- OCI E5.Flex (4 OCPU, 32GB): $0.08/hr = $58/month on-demand
- AWS m7i.2xlarge: $0.403/hr = $295/month on-demand
- AWS m7i.2xlarge 1yr RI: $0.258/hr = $188/month
Verdict: OCI is 80% cheaper on-demand and 69% cheaper than AWS 1yr reserved for equivalent compute. This is not marketing — it's the actual price list.
Egress Fees: OCI Wins 10× Over
This is where OCI's advantage becomes transformative for data-heavy workloads:
- OCI: $0.0085/GB (10TB free monthly for paid accounts)
- AWS: $0.09/GB
At 100TB/month: OCI costs $850, AWS costs $9,000. Annual difference: $97,800 on egress alone.
Object Storage: Similar Pricing, OCI Wins on Egress
OCI Object Storage: $0.0255/GB/month vs AWS S3 Standard: $0.0207/GB. AWS is slightly cheaper for storage, but OCI's egress advantage dominates for any workload serving significant data.
Managed Databases: AWS Still Leads
This is where AWS genuinely justifies its premium. AWS RDS has more engine options, better multi-region replication, and more mature operational tooling. OCI MySQL HeatWave is impressive for MySQL workloads, but PostgreSQL support on OCI is less mature.
For Oracle Database workloads, OCI is the obvious choice — BYOL advantages and Exadata infrastructure are unavailable on other clouds.
When AWS Is Worth the Premium
- You need specific AWS managed services (Kinesis, DynamoDB, SageMaker) with no OCI equivalent
- Your team has deep AWS expertise and migration cost is high
- Compliance certifications you need are only on AWS in your region
- You're already in AWS ecosystem with significant Marketplace commitments
When OCI Clearly Wins
- Running Oracle Database (BYOL + Exadata)
- High egress workloads — media, large file serving, high-volume APIs
- Cost-sensitive Linux compute without hard service dependencies
- SAP HANA workloads (OCI certified, cheaper compute)
- Evaluating AI/LLM at scale (OCI Gen AI is 3× cheaper than Bedrock for Llama)
The Bottom Line
For pure infrastructure cost, OCI is genuinely 60-80% cheaper than AWS. The savings are real. The question is whether your workload can run on OCI without AWS-specific services — and whether the migration cost is justified by the savings.
Use the TCOIQ TCO Calculator to model your specific workload and see the 5-year total cost on both platforms.