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Cloud Cost Comparison
Oracle Cloud vs AWS: Is OCI Really 70% Cheaper? Complete Comparison
Oracle's marketing claim of up to 70% savings versus AWS is bold. Is it accurate? The short answer: yes, OCI is genuinely significantly cheaper — but the real figure varies by workload.
Compute: Is 70% Real?
General Purpose (8 vCPU / 32 GB)
| Provider | Instance | $/Hour | $/Month | vs AWS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS | m5.2xlarge | $0.384 | $280 | — |
| Azure | D8s v5 | $0.384 | $280 | Similar |
| GCP | n2-standard-8 | $0.388 | $283 | Similar |
| OCI | E4.Flex 4 OCPU | $0.128 | $93 | 67% cheaper |
Close to the 70% claim — and this is with the correct OCPU conversion applied.
Where OCI Saves Even More: Egress
| Provider | Egress/GB | Annual (50TB/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| AWS | $0.09 | $54,000 |
| Azure | $0.087 | $52,200 |
| GCP | $0.08 | $48,000 |
| OCI | $0.0085 | $5,100 |
OCI also provides 10 TB free outbound data transfer per month — the most generous free tier of any major cloud.
Where OCI is NOT Cheaper
- Object storage: OCI charges $0.0255/GB vs AWS S3 at $0.023/GB
- Ecosystem: OCI has fewer managed services and third-party integrations
- Community: Smaller community, fewer Stack Overflow answers and tutorials
Oracle Database Advantage
For organisations running Oracle Database, OCI provides additional advantages:
- Most favourable Oracle licence mobility terms
- Licence Included pricing only available on OCI
- For organisations spending $500,000+/year on Oracle licences, OCI savings can dwarf the compute pricing difference
OCI Always Free Tier
OCI offers the most generous Always Free tier of any major cloud:
- Ampere A1 instances: 4 OCPUs (= 8 vCPU) and 24 GB RAM permanently free
- 200 GB block storage
- 10 GB object storage
- 10 TB outbound data transfer per month
- 2 Autonomous Databases
Verdict: When Should You Choose OCI?
- ✅ Cost is your primary driver
- ✅ Linux-based workloads without cloud-native service dependencies
- ✅ Oracle Database workloads
- ✅ Data-intensive workloads with high egress
- ❌ Deep dependency on AWS/Azure-specific managed services
- ❌ Team has deep AWS/Azure expertise that would be expensive to retrain
Use TCOIQ to model your specific workload and get an accurate OCI vs AWS comparison — with OCPU conversion handled automatically.
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