Oracle Cloud vs OVHcloud
Oracle Cloud and OVHcloud both rent plain cloud VMs that you set up yourself. Oracle has more hardware (big GPUs, Arm, Mac servers) and regions worldwide, while OVHcloud, a French provider, sells dedicated-vCPU instances billed by the second.
The companies and products
Oracle Cloud
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is Oracle's general-purpose cloud: compute, storage, networking, databases and AI services in regions around the world.
OCI Compute rents virtual machines and bare metal servers on x86 (AMD, Intel) and Arm (Ampere), plus GPU machines and Mac servers. You pick a shape, an OS image, a network and a disk, and then install and run everything inside the VM yourself. It is not a sandbox product, so this page compares the part that overlaps: running agent code on a VM.
OVHcloud
OVHcloud is a French cloud provider; its Public Cloud rents OpenStack virtual machines, storage and networking by the second.
A Public Cloud instance is a Linux or Windows VM picked from families such as General Purpose (B3), Compute (C3), Memory (R3), GPU and the shared-resource Discovery range (D2). You run your own software on it, next to OVHcloud products like private networks, gateways, load balancers, Kubernetes and object storage, through a Control Panel, an API or OpenStack tools. It is general infrastructure, not an agent sandbox, so this page compares the two where they overlap: giving an agent its own Linux machine.
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. “Cheapest of 364” means no 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 | Oracle Cloud: price rank | OVHcloud: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month boat ranks 3rd for a software factory because Docker, coding agents, a desktop and snapshots come ready; on Oracle Cloud and OVHcloud you build that stack on a VM. | 58th of 367, with limits $413 a month | 90th of 367, with limits $814 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB | 100th of 366, with limits $376 a month | 136th of 366, with limits $934 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 Both clouds are cheaper than boat for short code runs, but each run waits for a full VM boot and the account's quotas. | 51st of 345, with limits $16 a month | 56th of 345, with limits $43 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 boat ranks 1st for sandboxes for your users, with an HTTPS URL per sandbox by API; on both clouds you build the sandbox layer and raise quotas first. | 31st of 361, with limits $115 a month | 43rd of 361, with limits $299 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 Oracle Cloud ranks 7th for RL rollouts on price, as long as its tenancy limits are raised to match the fleet. | 7th of 360, with limits $679 a month | 27th of 360, with limits $1,280 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 Oracle Cloud ranks 1st for agent evals in our table, well ahead of OVHcloud, and boat ranks 10th as a full fit with nothing to build. | Cheapest of 364 $136 a month | 99th of 364, with limits $231 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 All three run Docker builds on a full VM; boat ranks 4th and Oracle Cloud ranks 6th, and on either cloud you run the runner software and clean-up yourself. | 6th cheapest of 377 $102 a month | 29th cheapest of 377 $300 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB Oracle Cloud ranks 2nd for a 24/7 dev box, since its burstable VMs and Always Free Arm tier are cheap for one small machine; OVHcloud and boat both fit too. | 2nd cheapest of 368 $12 a month | 23rd cheapest of 368 $34 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 boat streams a 60fps desktop with Chromium and computer use; neither cloud has a desktop stream on its VMs, so you install and expose one yourself. | 75th of 369, with limits $97 a month | 108th of 369, with limits $231 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 | 154th of 367, with limits $49 a month | 174th of 367, with limits $128 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 | 150th of 346, with limits $32 a month | 159th of 346, with limits $65 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 | 35th of 338, with limits $642 a month | 47th of 338, with limits $1,290 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 | 102nd of 360, with limits $26 a month | 120th of 360, with limits $64 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 | Can't run it | Can't run it | 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 | Oracle Cloud | OVHcloud | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Every VM has its own kernel on a KVM hypervisor; bare metal servers also available | Every OpenStack instance is a fully isolated VM with its own kernel | Every sandbox is a full VM with its own kernel, made for agents and driven by API |
| CPU | Burstable shapes guarantee only part of each vCPU; full-speed shapes cost more; no comparable measurement | Dedicated vCPUs on B3, C3 and R3; shared resources on Discovery (D2); no comparable measurement | Dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) hosts; 26.69 runs/s at 4 vCPU / 8 GB |
| Docker and nested virtualization | Root on every VM, Docker is yours to install; nested KVM documented on E5 and Standard3 Flex VMs, not on Ampere Arm VMs | Root and Docker; the vmx flag is passed, but OVHcloud warns a live migration can make the guest kernel panic | Docker, root, systemd and /dev/kvm ready on every machine |
| Stopping | Stopping a standard VM pauses compute billing; the boot volume is billed until you delete it | Turned-off and paused instances bill at the same rate; shelving frees compute and bills only a disk snapshot | A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk |
| Snapshots | Backups run by hand or on a schedule | On-demand instance backups, or a schedule such as daily backups keeping the last 7 or 14 | Automatic snapshots every minute and on stop |
| Fork | Make a custom image of the boot disk; imaging a running VM shuts it down for several minutes | Take an instance backup, then create a new identical instance from it (disk, no memory) | Fork a running sandbox in one call while it keeps running |
| Reaching the machine | Public IPv4 per VM and any port you open in security rules; HTTPS through your own server or a load balancer | Public IPv4 on any port; HTTPS needs your own certificates or a load balancer | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected; raw TCP; dedicated IPv6 or IPv4 |
| Desktop and computer use | No desktop on Compute VMs; OCI Secure Desktops is a separate desktop-as-a-service product | None built in; you install a desktop and connect over SSH or RDP | 60fps desktop and Chromium, computer use and browser control, embeddable stream |
| Coding agents | None preinstalled; Oracle's AI agent service builds business agents, not coding agents in a VM | None; you install and drive agents yourself, for example over SSH | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and more preinstalled, driven from outside with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Keeping keys out of the machine | Secrets live in OCI Secret Management and the VM fetches them, so the key ends up inside | No credentials proxy; secrets live on the instance or are fetched from inside it | AI credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API you register; switch to another account when credits run out |
| Network rules | Security lists and network security groups by IP range, protocol and port; domain filtering through OCI Network Firewall | Security groups with inbound and outbound rules by IP range, port and protocol | Open internet on every plan; no provider-side allowlist |
| Running many at once | Default or trial service limits per tenancy; more needs a limit increase request, which may not be approved | Quotas raised in steps of 20, 50, 100 and 200 VMs by buying prepaid credit; more through support | 100 to 2,000 sandboxes at once by plan, self-serve |
| GPUs, Windows, macOS and Arm | Nvidia B200, H200, H100, A100 and AMD MI300X; Windows Server, Mac servers and Ampere Arm VMs | Nvidia GPU instances such as L4 and L40S; Windows Server images with the license included | Linux x86 only, no GPUs; Wine for Windows apps |
| Regions | Regions across the Americas, Europe, the UK, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Australia, plus government and sovereign clouds | Europe, Canada, the US, Singapore and Sydney, plus Local Zones | EU only: Germany, Finland, France, with EU data residency |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Oracle Cloud | OVHcloud | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Root | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | No | Yes |
| Browser | No | No | Yes |
| Computer-use API | No | No | Yes |
| SSH | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | No | Yes | Yes |
| Fork/clone | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Memory fork | No | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | No | No | No |
| Wake on request | No | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | No | No | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | Yes | Yes | 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 | Yes | No | No |
| GPU | Yes | Yes | No |
| Windows | Yes | Yes | No |
| Arm64 | Yes | No | No |
| Self-hosting | No | No | No |
| BYOC | No | No | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | No | 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 Oracle Cloud or OVHcloud: neither was part of StarSling's public sandbox benchmark run of 2026-09-29, where boat did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts. Speed on both clouds depends on the shape you pick: Oracle's burstable shapes guarantee only part of each vCPU, and OVHcloud's Discovery (D2) instances share their resources while B3 and C3 have dedicated ones.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Oracle Cloud and OVHcloud 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 | Oracle Cloud, a month | OVHcloud, 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 | $5 · Usage account · with limits | $8 · Usage account | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $15 · Usage account · with limits | $34 · Usage account | $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 | $203 · Usage account · with limits | $406 · Usage account | $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 | $49 · Usage account · with limits | $128 · Usage account · 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 | $97 · Usage account · with limits | $256 · Usage account · with limits | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Oracle Cloud: Oracle bills per OCPU hour (one x86 OCPU is two vCPUs) and per GB hour of memory while a VM runs, plus the boot disk until you delete it. The prices here use burstable E4 VMs billed at a 12.5% CPU baseline, so they sit far below a full-speed VM.
OVHcloud: OVHcloud bills every second an instance exists, after a 1-minute minimum, until you delete it; turned-off and paused instances bill at the same rate. The prices here use the shared Discovery d2 instances, and since October 2026 dedicated B3, C3 and R3 instances also bill local storage and a public IPv4 on top.
OVHcloud: 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
Oracle's prices come from burstable VMs that guarantee only 12.5% of each vCPU, so a busy agent gets throttled and every Oracle row is marked as not fitting; a new tenancy also needs an approved limit increase for 50 agents or 1,000 jobs at once. OVHcloud fits one agent and 50 agents, but 300 user sandboxes or 1,000 jobs at once go past its published quotas, so you ask support first, and its cheap Discovery instances share their CPU. On boat the 1,000-job burst needs more starts per day and per hour than the $2,000 plan allows, and starts above 90 a minute are queued.
| Scenario | Oracle Cloud | OVHcloud | 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 |
| Sandboxes for your users |
|
| None that bite |
| 1,000 short jobs at once |
|
|
|
Which one should you use?
Use Oracle Cloud when
you need big GPUs, Arm or macOS machines, regions in Asia, the Middle East, Africa or government clouds, or a free Arm box for one small project.
- More kinds of hardware. Useful if your agents need big GPUs, Arm or macOS: Oracle rents B200 and H100 GPUs, Ampere Arm VMs and Mac servers.
- Stopped VMs stop compute billing. Useful for machines that sit idle: stopping a standard Oracle VM pauses compute billing, and only the boot disk keeps billing.
- A free always-on box. Useful for one small personal box: Oracle's Always Free tier covers a modest Arm VM every month.
Use OVHcloud when
you want a European provider with dedicated-vCPU instances, per-second billing, Windows or L4 and L40S GPUs, and quota raises you can buy yourself.
- Dedicated vCPUs. Useful for builds that run hot all day: OVHcloud's B3, C3 and R3 instances give each vCPU dedicated resources.
- Quota raises you can buy. Useful when you need more machines soon: OVHcloud raises quotas in steps up to 200 VMs when you buy prepaid credit.
- Billed by the second. Useful for short jobs: OVHcloud bills every second after a 1-minute minimum, with no plan fee.
Where boat fits
Oracle Cloud and OVHcloud are general clouds, so an agent gets an empty VM and your team builds the rest. If what you are really running is agents, boat gives each one a full VM with Docker, /dev/kvm, coding agents, a desktop and minute-by-minute snapshots already in place. Pick one of the two clouds when you need GPUs, Windows or regions outside the EU.
A disk saved every minute, and free stops
On Oracle, backups run by hand or on a schedule and the boot disk bills while stopped. On OVHcloud a turned-off instance bills at full rate, and daily backups can lose a day of an agent's work.
Fork a running machine
To try two paths at once on Oracle you image the VM, which shuts it down for several minutes. On OVHcloud you take a backup and build a new instance from it. boat forks a running sandbox in one call.
Agents, desktop and key proxy built in
Both clouds start from an empty OS image: you install each agent, set up a desktop stream and put the API key on the machine, where code the agent runs can read it. boat's credentials proxy keeps real keys outside.
Use boat when the machines are for agents: full VMs with Docker, /dev/kvm, coding agents, a 60fps desktop, HTTPS ports, snapshots every minute, fork while running and stops that cost nothing, without building that layer on raw cloud VMs. Compare it one to one: boat vs Oracle Cloud and boat vs OVHcloud.
Questions people ask
Is Oracle Cloud cheaper than OVHcloud?
On list price in our table, yes: one agent that never stops comes to $15 a month on Oracle against $34 on OVHcloud, and 50 agents in parallel to $203 against $406. But those Oracle prices use burstable VMs throttled above 12.5% of each vCPU, so they do not fit a busy agent; boat comes to $26 and $317 for the same two cases.
Which is faster, Oracle Cloud or OVHcloud?
There is no comparable measurement for either one. Speed depends on the shape: Oracle's burstable VMs guarantee only part of each vCPU, while OVHcloud's B3 and C3 instances have dedicated vCPUs. boat did 26.69 runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB in StarSling's public benchmark.
Can Oracle Cloud and OVHcloud run Docker and nested VMs?
Both give you root on a full VM, so Docker works once you install it. Oracle documents nested KVM on E5 and Standard3 Flex VMs but not on Ampere Arm VMs, and OVHcloud warns that a live migration can make a nested guest kernel panic. On boat, Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm are ready on every machine.
Do I pay for a stopped VM?
On Oracle, stopping a standard VM pauses compute billing, but the boot volume bills until you delete it. On OVHcloud, turned-off and paused instances bill at the same rate, and only shelving frees the compute. On boat a stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Which has more regions?
Oracle Cloud, with public regions across the Americas, Europe, the UK, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Australia, plus government and sovereign clouds. OVHcloud runs in Europe, Canada, the US, Singapore and Sydney, plus Local Zones. boat runs only in the EU (Germany, Finland and France).
Can I run AI coding agents on Oracle Cloud or OVHcloud?
Yes, on a VM you set up yourself: you install the agent, Docker and any desktop, open ports, and handle backups and keys. Neither cloud has a sandbox API, built-in coding agents or a desktop stream on its VMs. boat ships all of that in every sandbox.
Try boat
Install the CLI, then run boat new.
7-day free trial
More comparisons
- boat vs Oracle Cloud
- boat vs OVHcloud
- AWS EC2 vs Oracle Cloud
- Google Compute Engine vs Oracle Cloud
- Azure Virtual Machines vs Oracle Cloud
- Oracle Cloud vs DigitalOcean
- Oracle Cloud vs Hetzner Cloud
- Oracle Cloud vs Vultr
- Oracle Cloud vs Linode
- Oracle Cloud vs Scaleway
- Oracle Cloud vs IONOS Cloud
- Oracle Cloud vs Contabo