Nebius vs Baseten
Nebius is an AI cloud that rents full GPU and CPU virtual machines, Kubernetes and Slurm clusters, and you build the rest yourself. Baseten is an inference cloud: you hand it a model or a Docker image and it runs replicas that scale with traffic, down to zero.
The companies and products
Nebius
Nebius is an AI cloud company, listed on Nasdaq and based in Amsterdam, that rents GPUs and the infrastructure around them.
You create a Compute VM from a preset (GPU or CPU only), add disks and an SSH key, and get a full Linux VM with root and an optional public IP. Around it Nebius sells Managed Kubernetes, Slurm clusters (Soperator), Serverless AI jobs and endpoints, object storage and networking. It is built for teams that train, fine-tune and serve AI models, not as a sandbox for agents.
Baseten
Baseten is an inference cloud: it runs AI models on GPUs for production apps, and sells hosted open models and training.
You package a model with Truss, its open-source format, or bring a Docker image, and Baseten runs it as replicas on Kubernetes that scale up with traffic and down to zero. It also sells Model APIs (open models priced per token) and training jobs on the same GPUs. Sandboxes, isolated environments where an agent runs commands and works with files, are in private preview; this page compares boat with both the CPU instances and the sandbox preview.
Which use cases each one fits
For each use case, Battleships prices every sandbox provider on the same workload and sorts them from the cheapest monthly bill up. “29th cheapest of 364” means 28 of the other 363 providers run that workload, with every feature it needs, for less. “With limits” means the provider runs it but misses something, so it is listed after every full match. Open a use case for its whole ranking and what each provider misses.
| Use case and its workload | Nebius: price rank | Baseten: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month A coding agent fits on a Nebius VM once you install the agent and Docker yourself, while Baseten containers run as non-root with no documented Docker inside. | 197th of 367, with limits $2,272 a month | 216th of 367, with limits $2,619 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB | 210th of 366, with limits $2,261 a month | 242nd of 366, with limits $3,258 a month | 5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month |
| Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month For short code bursts Nebius comes to $202 a month and Baseten to $1,856, because Baseten bills cold starts and, by default, 15 idle minutes per burst. | 111th of 345, with limits $202 a month | 319th of 345, with limits $1,856 a month | 186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month 300 user sandboxes are above both defaults, 12 VMs per region on Nebius and 10 preview sandboxes per organization on Baseten, so either needs a quota raise first. | 81st of 361, with limits $716 a month | 277th of 361, with limits $1,868 a month | Cheapest of 361 $209 a month |
| RL rollouts 1,000 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 1,000,000 sessions of 3 min a month RL rollouts cost $3,049 a month on Nebius and $31,140 on Baseten in our model, and $2,000 on boat. | 52nd of 360, with limits $3,049 a month | 322nd of 360, with limits $31,140 a month | 34th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Agent evals 250 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 15,000 sessions of 20 min a month | 29th cheapest of 364 $610 a month | 297th of 364, with limits $1,609 a month | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month A Nebius CPU VM works as a CI runner with root, while Baseten's non-root model containers do not fit; boat adds snapshots every minute and free stops between jobs. | 27th cheapest of 377 $297 a month | 320th of 377, with limits $1,119 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB A dev box needs a disk that stays: Nebius keeps disks on a stopped VM, Baseten replicas start fresh, and boat keeps the disk for free while stopped. | 68th cheapest of 368 $91 a month | 170th of 368, with limits $130 a month | 18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month |
| Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month Neither has a desktop or computer-use product, so you build one yourself; boat streams a 60fps desktop with Chromium from every sandbox. | 187th of 369, with limits $610 a month | 294th of 369, with limits $1,799 a month | 6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month |
| Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month | 223rd of 367, with limits $305 a month | 318th of 367, with limits $1,194 a month | 7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month |
| Scraping & bots (startup scale) 50 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 100,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 253rd of 346, with limits $302 a month | 220th of 346, with limits $183 a month | 6th cheapest of 346 $90 a month |
| Mass scraping & bots (undetectable) 1,000 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 3,000,000 sessions of 2 min a month | 174th of 338, with limits $6,049 a month | 126th of 338, with limits $3,654 a month | 71st of 338, with limits $1,800 a month |
| Parallel red teaming 200 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 5,000 sessions of 30 min a month | 176th of 360, with limits $156 a month | 254th of 360, with limits $381 a month | 2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month |
| GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month Both fit GPU eval jobs: Nebius ranks 18th at $1,127 a month and Baseten 24th at $1,625, and boat has no GPUs. | 18th cheapest of 98 $1,127 a month | 24th cheapest of 98 $1,625 a month | Can't run it |
| macOS agents 5 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 1,000 sessions of 20 min a month | Can't run it | Can't run it | Can't run it |
Key features
| Feature | Nebius | Baseten | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kind of product | AI cloud: GPU and CPU VMs, Kubernetes, Slurm clusters and serverless jobs | Inference cloud for serving and training models; agent sandboxes in private preview | Sandboxes for AI agents: VMs with agents, desktop and hosting ready |
| Isolation | Every Compute VM is a full VM behind a hypervisor | Kubernetes containers in a dedicated namespace per customer; sandbox isolation is not documented | Every sandbox is a full VM with its own kernel |
| Root, Docker and nested virtualization | Root on your own VM and container VMs from Docker images; nested virtualization is not documented | Containers run as the non-root app user; Docker inside and /dev/kvm are not documented | Docker, root, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine |
| GPUs | Nvidia L40S, RTX PRO 6000, H100, H200, B200 and B300, on-demand or preemptible | Nvidia T4 up to B200, 1 to 8 per instance, multi-node over InfiniBand | None |
| Biggest CPU machine | CPU VMs up to 256 vCPU / 1,024 GB | CPU instances up to 16 vCPU / 64 GiB | 16 vCPU / 32 GB on the $100 plan and up |
| Files after a stop | Disks stay; they keep billing on their full provisioned size while the VM is stopped | Model replicas start fresh from the image; preview sandboxes are deleted with their data after 7 days by default | Snapshots every minute and on stop; a stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk |
| Snapshots and fork | Manual disk snapshots; to fork, make a disk from the snapshot, then a VM from the disk | No snapshots, fork or clone; new replicas cold-start from the image | Snapshots every minute and on stop; fork a running sandbox in one call |
| Scale to zero and wake on request | No wake on request; a VM runs until you stop it | Deployments scale to zero and start on the next request; standby sandboxes resume on the next request | No wake on request; you start a stopped sandbox through the API |
| Billing | Per second for vCPU and RAM, no plan fee; disks billed separately | Per minute, rounded up, including image builds and cold starts; no plan fee on Basic | Plan from $20 a month turns into credit spent per second; a stopped sandbox costs nothing |
| Desktop and computer use | No desktop or browser product; a text serial console | No desktop or computer-use API; sandboxes run commands and file operations | 60fps desktop and Chromium, computer use and browser control, embeddable stream |
| Coding agents | None built in; you install and run agents yourself over SSH | Baseten Switch points Claude Code or Codex on your laptop at its Model APIs; nothing runs inside a Baseten machine | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and more preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Reaching the machine | Optional public IPv4 per VM, SSH and Nebius Tunnels; you set up TLS yourself | HTTPS API endpoint per deployment; sandbox ports through a /port/ route; SSH once enabled for your organization | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected; raw TCP; dedicated IPv6 or IPv4 |
| Outbound network rules | VPC security groups allow or deny egress by IP range, port and protocol | TCP 443 and 80 by default; IP and domain allowlists once enabled for your organization | Open internet on every plan; no provider-side allowlist |
| Keeping keys out of the machine | SecretStash stores secrets that a VM fetches with its service account | Secrets are passed into the model as arguments or files under /secrets | AI credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API you register |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Nebius | Baseten | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | No | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | Not published | No | Yes |
| Root | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Systemd | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | No | Yes |
| Browser | No | No | Yes |
| Computer-use API | No | No | Yes |
| SSH | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | No | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | No | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | No | No | Yes |
| Fork/clone | Yes | No | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Memory fork | No | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | No | Yes | No |
| Wake on request | No | Yes | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | Yes | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | Yes | Yes | No |
| Secret proxy | No | No | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | No | No | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | No | No | Yes |
| Agent harness API | No | No | Yes |
| MCP server | No | Yes | No |
| GPU | Yes | Yes | No |
| Windows | No | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | No | No |
| Self-hosting | No | Yes | No |
| BYOC | No | Yes | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | No | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Audit logs | Not published | Not published | No |
| SSO | Yes | Yes | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | Yes | Yes | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for either: Nebius and Baseten were not part of the public StarSling benchmark run. boat did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB in that run, on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts. Nebius CPU VMs run on AMD EPYC Genoa or Intel Ice Lake, and Baseten publishes no CPU benchmark.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Nebius and Baseten have no published run in this suite yet, so there is no like-for-like number to compare.
Pricing in five scenarios
Each bill is priced from the providers' public price lists by the open Battleships engine, with the cheapest plan that runs the scenario.
| Scenario | Nebius, a month | Baseten, a month | boat, a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, 8 hours a day, 22 days a month, files kept between days | $25 · Pay as you go | $34 · Basic · with limits | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $91 · Pay as you go | $136 · Basic · with limits | $26 · $20/mo |
| 50 agents in parallel 50 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GB at once, 8-hour sessions, 1,100 sessions a month, Docker inside | $1,127 · Pay as you go | $1,701 · Basic · with limits | $317 · $20/mo × 3 seats |
| Sandboxes for your users 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 30,000 sessions of 10 minutes a month, up to 300 at once | $305 · Pay as you go | $1,246 · Basic · with limits | $200 · $100/mo × 2 seats |
| 1,000 short jobs at once 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 1,000 at once, 3 minutes each, 200,000 jobs a month | $610 · Pay as you go | $6,228 · Basic · with limits | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Nebius: Nebius bills running VMs per second for vCPU and RAM with no plan fee, and bills disks by provisioned size even while the VM is stopped. From 1 October 2026, AMD Genoa costs $0.015 per vCPU-hour plus $0.0045 per GiB-hour.
Baseten: Baseten bills CPU instances per minute, rounded up, from image build and cold start until the replica stops; 4 vCPU / 16 GiB is $0.00346 a minute. Basic has no plan fee, and preview sandbox pricing is not published.
Baseten: You pick a monthly plan from $20, and all of it becomes usage credit spent per second on running sandboxes. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Limits in those scenarios
Nebius starts each region at 12 VMs and, in most regions, 200 vCPU across CPU-only VMs, so 50 agents in parallel, 300 user sandboxes and 1,000 short jobs at once all need a quota raise first. Baseten's CPU instances have no persistent disk, so the table marks them as not fitting any scenario, and its preview sandboxes run at most 10 per organization by default. A Baseten monthly budget only sends alerts for dedicated deployments; it never stops them. On boat the 1,000-job burst is queued and needs more starts per day than the $2,000 plan allows.
| Scenario | Nebius | Baseten | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays | None that bite |
| None that bite |
| One agent that never stops | None that bite |
| None that bite |
| 50 agents in parallel | None that bite |
| None that bite |
| Sandboxes for your users | None that bite |
| None that bite |
| 1,000 short jobs at once | None that bite |
|
|
Which one should you use?
Use Nebius when
you want full GPU or CPU VMs with root, large machines, Slurm or Kubernetes clusters, egress rules, or a region in the UK, Israel or the US.
- Full VMs with root and a disk that stays. Useful when you need a real Linux machine: Nebius gives root on a full VM whose disks survive a stop, unlike Baseten replicas.
- Very large machines and GPU clusters. Useful for big training or batch jobs: CPU VMs reach 256 vCPU, and Nebius runs Slurm and Kubernetes clusters on its GPUs.
- Network rules and more regions. Useful if you need egress rules by IP range or a region in Spain, the UK, Israel or the US.
Use Baseten when
you serve or train models and want deployments that scale to zero and wake on request, hosted open models per token, or your own cloud account.
- Scale to zero, wake on request. Useful for spiky model traffic: Baseten deployments scale to zero when idle and start again on the next request.
- Model serving done for you. Useful if you ship a model, not a server: package it with Truss or a Docker image, or call hosted open models per token.
- Your own cloud account. Useful on Enterprise when the workload must run in your own AWS, GCP or OCI account.
Where boat fits
Nebius and Baseten are GPU clouds, and neither is built as a sandbox for agents. If what you are really running is agents that write code, use a browser or run for days, boat gives each one a full VM with the agent, desktop and kept disk ready. Keep GPU training and model serving on Nebius or Baseten and let the agents work on boat.
Coding agents built in, driven from outside
On Nebius you install every agent over SSH, and Baseten only points an agent on your laptop at its models. boat ships Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode inside each VM, with a prompt, steer and events API.
A disk that stays, snapshots every minute, fork in one call
Baseten replicas lose their files when they stop, and Nebius snapshots are manual and stopped VMs still pay for disks. boat snapshots every minute, forks a running sandbox in one call, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing.
A desktop and keys kept off the machine
Neither has a desktop, so a computer-use agent means installing a desktop, VNC and a browser yourself. Both also put the real secret on the machine. boat streams a 60fps desktop and its credentials proxy keeps AI keys outside.
Use boat when you run agents: full VMs with root and Docker, coding agents and a 60fps desktop built in, snapshots every minute, forks of a running sandbox, and free stops. Compare it one to one: boat vs Nebius and boat vs Baseten.
Questions people ask
Is Nebius cheaper than Baseten?
In every scenario we priced with CPU machines, yes. One agent running all month is $91 on Nebius and $136 on Baseten, and 50 agents in parallel are $1,127 against $1,701. For GPU eval jobs Nebius comes to $1,127 a month and Baseten to $1,625.
Which is faster, Nebius or Baseten?
There is no comparable CPU measurement for either, because neither was in the public StarSling benchmark run. boat did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB in that run.
Can Nebius or Baseten run Docker?
On Nebius you get root on a full VM and can run container VMs from Docker images. Baseten runs your Docker image as a model server, but its containers run as the non-root app user and Docker inside is not documented. Every boat sandbox has root and Docker.
Does Baseten keep files like a Nebius VM?
No. Baseten model replicas start fresh from the image, and its preview sandboxes are deleted with their files after 7 days by default. Nebius disks stay but keep billing while the VM is stopped, and a stopped boat sandbox keeps its disk for free.
Does boat have GPUs like Nebius and Baseten?
No. boat runs Linux VMs on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts and has no GPUs. Train or serve models on Nebius or Baseten and let your agents work on boat.
Is boat SOC 2 compliant?
SOC 2 is in progress. We're open about where we stand: live status at status.ascii.dev and our data retention policy at docs.boat.dev/data-retention.
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