13 Best Cloud Object Storage Providers

Amazon S3 doesn’t need an introduction, but still :). When a vendor calls itself S3-compatible, it means its API answers the same way S3 does, so S3 gets new features first and works with nearly every backup tool, SDK, and data platform.

It offers nine storage classes, from S3 Standard down to Glacier Deep Archive for data you may never read, and Intelligent-Tiering moves objects between tiers on its own.

Event notifications can start Lambda functions. S3 Tables stores data in Apache Iceberg format for Athena and other query engines, and S3 Vectors, generally available since December 2025, holds embeddings for AI search without a separate vector database.

Standard storage is $0.023 per GB in US East, requests are billed per thousand, and internet egress costs $0.09 per GB after the first 100 GB each month. New accounts no longer get a fixed amount of free S3 storage, only up to $200 in credits that cover S3 and other AWS services.

Our take: Pick S3 when the rest of your stack runs on AWS or you need event-driven processing, Iceberg tables, or deep archive tiers. For a bucket that mostly serves files to the internet, Cloudflare R2, Strg, or Backblaze B2 will usually cost less.

Standout features:

• Nine storage classes, including Intelligent-Tiering and Glacier Deep Archive
• Object Lock, versioning, and same-region or cross-region replication
• Event notifications that can trigger Lambda functions
• S3 Tables for Apache Iceberg and S3 Vectors for embeddings

R2 doesn’t charge for egress for a public bucket that serves images, downloads, or static files. The storage price is $0.015 per GB for Standard and $0.01 per GB for Infrequent Access.

The free tier renews every month with 10 GB of storage, 1 million Class A operations (writes and lists), and 10 million Class B operations (reads). Beyond that, operations are billed per million.

R2 fits best when you also use Cloudflare. Workers can read and write buckets through bindings, event notifications go to Cloudflare Queues, and a public bucket on a custom domain is served through Cloudflare’s network. R2 Data Catalog adds a managed Apache Iceberg catalog.

For migrations, Super Slurper copies a bucket in bulk, and Sippy copies objects from S3, Azure Blob Storage, or other S3-compatible sources the first time they’re requested.

Cloudflare’s own compatibility list marks object versioning, bucket replication, S3 website configuration, and S3-style Object Lock as unsupported, although R2 has its own bucket locks for retention. You also don’t pick a region, only a location hint or an EU, FedRAMP, or US jurisdiction.

Our take: The default choice for serving files to the public. Look elsewhere if your backup software needs versioning or S3 Object Lock.

Standout features:

• No egress fees on any storage class
• Workers bindings and event notifications to Queues
• Lifecycle rules, bucket locks, and presigned URLs
• Super Slurper and Sippy for migrating from other clouds

Strg charges $6.80 per TB per month, and that price covers all egress and standard S3 API requests. There are no retrieval fees or minimum storage periods, and the first 10 GB on each account is free.

Wasabi charges $7.99 per TB with a 90-day minimum, and Backblaze B2 charges $6.95 with free egress up to three times your stored data, so among the main picks here, Strg has the lowest per-TB rate.

Data lives in EU-Central in Amsterdam and US-East in Reston, Virginia. Requests enter through the nearest Strg edge and travel to the bucket’s region over an optimized route. Cross-region replication between the two is optional, and Object Lock works in both. Objects are encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit.

Strg also works with AI agents. Its MCP server connects Claude, Codex, Cursor, and other MCP clients through OAuth, and you choose which access key, buckets, and permissions an agent gets.

An AI agent can then create buckets, upload and organize objects, create scoped keys, manage lifecycle and retention rules, and generate temporary upload or download links.

You can take help from Strg assistant to migrate from Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2, or another S3-compatible source.

Strg signs requests with AWS Signature Version 4 only and doesn’t support SSE-KMS, IAM roles, or static website configuration.

Our take: A strong pick for backups, media libraries, and datasets that get downloaded often. It’s also the most agent-ready option here if you want Claude or Cursor to manage storage directly.

Standout features:

• Egress and standard API requests included in the storage price
• MCP server for Claude, Codex, Cursor, and other MCP clients
• Object Lock, versioning, lifecycle rules, and cross-region replication
• Assisted migration from S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and Cloudflare R2

Backblaze B2 costs $6.95 per TB per month, and the first 10 GB is free. Most API calls cost nothing, since Class A, B, and C transactions are free on pay-as-you-go.

Egress is free up to three times your average monthly storage, then $0.01 per GB. Traffic through Backblaze’s partners doesn’t count toward that limit, and the list includes Fastly, Cloudflare, bunny.net, CacheFly, CoreWeave, Vultr, and phoenixNAP.

B2 speaks the S3 API and its own B2 Native API. Files keep earlier versions by default, lifecycle rules clean them up, and Object Lock makes backups immutable. Cloud Replication copies data between regions with no replication or egress fees. Event notifications send webhooks, but you need to ask Backblaze support to turn them on.

It supports multiple backup like Veeam, Synology, Commvault, rclone, and LucidLink, and Snowflake. For AI and HPC workloads, B2 Overdrive offers very high throughput and unlimited free egress from $15 per TB.

Our take: A cheap object storage for backups and media archives, with one of the few free tiers that doesn’t need a card. Teams that need data in Asia or Australia should look at Wasabi or a hyperscaler, since B2 has four regions in the US, Canada, and Europe.

Standout features:

• S3-compatible API plus the B2 Native API
• Object Lock, lifecycle rules, and fee-free Cloud Replication
• Free egress through CDN and compute partners
• Integrations with Veeam, Synology, Commvault, and rclone

Wasabi sells a single hot storage class at $7.99 per TB per month. Egress and API requests doesn’t cost extra. The free egress has a fair-use limit, though, and monthly downloads should stay around the amount of data you store.

Pay-as-you-go storage has a 90-day minimum, so a file deleted after 10 days is billed for the other 80. The smallest monthly bill equals 1 TB of storage, and every object is billed as at least 4 KB. That works well for backups that sit for months, but it can be expensive for short-lived files.

Wasabi is compatible with the S3 and IAM APIs. You get Object Lock with a separate Compliance mode, versioning, lifecycle policies, replication between regions on the same continent, and event notifications. Covert Copy keeps a hidden copy of a bucket, and Multi-User Authorization requires a second person to approve sensitive actions, both aimed at ransomware.

Its 16 regions span North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

Our take: One of the easiest picks for backup data, with ready support in Veeam, Commvault, Cohesity, Veritas, MSP360, and Acronis. Skip it for small or short-lived data.

Standout features:

• No egress or API request fees within fair use
• Object Lock, Compliance mode, and Covert Copy for ransomware protection
• Replication between regions on the same continent
• 16 storage regions across three continents

Google Cloud Storage has a small forever free tier. Each month you get 5 GB of Standard storage, 5,000 Class A and 50,000 Class B operations, and 100 GB of egress from North America, as long as the bucket sits in us-west1, us-central1, or us-east1. New customers also get $300 in credit for 90 days but you need to add your card.

Standard storage is about $0.020 per GB a month in Iowa, with Nearline, Coldline, and Archive below it at 30, 90, and 365-day minimums. Autoclass moves objects between those classes as access patterns change.

For AI training, Rapid Bucket became available in March 2026 as a zonal class built for speed, and Rapid Cache adds an SSD read cache close to your compute.

Google’s own JSON and gRPC APIs are the primary interface. The XML API works with some S3 tools using HMAC keys, but GCS isn’t a drop-in S3 replacement, so test your tools before moving.

Our take: The perfect choice when the data feeds BigQuery, Spark, or Google’s AI services, and a Cloud Storage MCP server became generally available in April 2026 for agent access.

Standout features:

• Standard, Nearline, Coldline, and Archive classes with Autoclass
• Rapid Bucket and Rapid Cache for AI and analytics workloads
• Object versioning, retention lock, and Pub/Sub notifications
• Static website hosting and signed URLs

Azure Blob Storage is the only major service in this list without an S3 API. It uses Microsoft’s own Blob REST API, and it can also act as Data Lake Storage with an HDFS-compatible interface, or accept files over NFS 3.0 and SFTP. Tools written for S3 will need a change or need a gateway.

Inside Azure, the tiering is flexible. Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive tiers have minimums of 0, 30, 90, and 180 days. Smart tier, now generally available in zone-redundant regions, moves blobs between Hot, Cool, and Cold without early-deletion fees.

Redundancy ranges from locally redundant storage to geo-zone-redundant copies with read access in a second region.

Hot storage costs $0.0184 per GB in East US 2, though East US and West US charge $0.0208. Immutable storage, versioning, lifecycle management, object replication, and Event Grid events are all built in, and SAS tokens play the role of presigned URLs.

Our take: The right choice when your apps use Azure Functions, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, or Entra ID for access control. Outside the Microsoft ecosystem, the missing S3 API is a limitation.

Standout features:

• Hot, Cool, Cold, Archive, and Smart access tiers
• Data Lake Storage, NFS 3.0, and SFTP access
• Immutable storage, versioning, and object replication
• Integrations with Azure Functions, Databricks, Fabric, and AzCopy

Spaces starts at $5 a month, which gives you 250 GiB of storage and 1 TiB of outbound transfer shared by all your buckets. Extra storage costs $0.02 per GiB, extra transfer $0.01 per GiB, and DigitalOcean lists no request fees. A CDN is included at no extra cost.

It’s built on Ceph and supports a large part of the S3 API but with some limits. Versioning can only be turned on through the API. Lifecycle rules handle expiration and cleanup of incomplete multipart uploads but not tag-based rules. Static sites work through a separate endpoint, without the CDN.

Cold Storage is at $0.007 per GiB a month, with a 30-day minimum and a 128 KiB minimum object size. Since April 2026, Droplets can reach Spaces over a private VPC connection that doesn’t count against the transfer allowance.

Our take: Good value for small apps on DigitalOcean that need uploads and a CDN. Backup software that expects Object Lock should go to Wasabi or Backblaze B2 instead.

Standout features:

• Built-in CDN at no extra cost
• Standard and Cold Storage classes
• Static website hosting and presigned URLs
• Terraform backend, s3cmd, Cyberduck, and rclone support

Akamai Object Storage costs $5 a month for 250 GB and adds 1 TB to your account’s transfer pool. After that, storage is $0.02 per GB and egress $0.005 per GB in most data centers, lower than DigitalOcean’s transfer rate. There are no API request charges, and Akamai says per-request fees for E3 endpoints won’t appear on any invoice before October 1, 2027.

E2 and E3 endpoints get new features, default encryption, and metrics, and E3 handles up to 20,000 requests per second and 5 PB per bucket. Static website hosting, CORS, and object-level ACLs only work on the older E0 and E1 endpoints, so Akamai recommends its CDN for serving sites.

Versioning, Object Lock, lifecycle policies, and bucket policies are all supported, and the endpoint table lists 26 locations.

Our take: A good fit if you already use Akamai’s CDN or Linode compute, or need cheap egress. New accounts get a $100 credit for 60 days to try it.

Standout features:

• Four endpoint types, with E3 for high request rates
• Versioning, Object Lock, and lifecycle policies
• Integration with Akamai CDN and Grafana Loki
• Works with AWS CLI, s3cmd, s4cmd, and Cyberduck

Vultr sells object storage in four performance tiers, and each one includes 1,000 GB of storage and 1,000 GB of outbound transfer.

Standard is $18 a month and Premium $36 which run on hard drives with an SSD index.

Performance is $50 and Accelerated $100 which use NVMe, and Accelerated reaches 10,000 operations per second and 5 Gbps, against 800 operations and 600 Mbps on Standard.

That makes Vultr one of the few providers where you pick speed per bucket. An Archive plan for cold data starts at $6 a month. Versioning and Object Lock are set when you create a bucket, and lifecycle policies move data to archival storage. A bucket that has ever used versioning can’t use archival storage.

Our take: Worth a look when you need fast object storage for AI pipelines or media. Vultr is also a Backblaze egress partner, so data can move from B2 to Vultr compute without egress fees. For small amounts of data, the $18 minimum costs more than DigitalOcean’s or Akamai’s $5 plans.

Standout features:

• Four tiers from HDD to NVMe, with published speed limits
• Archive plan and lifecycle rules for cold data
• Versioning and Object Lock at bucket creation
• Vultr CDN pull zones, Terraform, and Vultr CLI support

Hetzner charges a base price of €6.49 a month excluding VAT, which includes 1 TB of storage and 1 TB of egress. Beyond that, storage costs about €6.26 per TB a month and egress only €1 per TB. Ingress and API calls are free.

Data stays in Germany or Finland, in Falkenstein, Nuremberg, or Helsinki, which suits teams that need EU data residency. Each bucket can hold up to 100 TB and 50 million objects and handle 750 requests per second, with a limit of 100 buckets per account.

Hetzner doesn’t support replication, static website hosting, or custom domains, and it has no CDN. The base price is charged for every hour you have at least one bucket, even an empty one, and objects are billed at a minimum of 64 KB.

Our take: Excellent value for backups and app data from Hetzner servers. If your users are mostly outside Europe, or you need replicated copies, choose another provider.

Standout features:

• 1 TB of storage and egress included in the base price
• Object Lock, versioning, and lifecycle rules
• Locations in Germany and Finland
• Works with rclone, s3cmd, s5cmd, AWS CLI, and Bareos

OVHcloud charges no fees for egress, ingress, or API calls on any S3 storage class. You pay by the GiB-hour for storage only, from about $0.0081 per GiB a month for One-Zone Standard to about $0.0157 for Standard replicated across three availability zones.

It has more storage classes than most providers outside the hyperscalers. High Performance, Standard, Infrequent Access, Active Archive, and Cold Archive cover everything from fast workloads to long retention, with 30, 90, and 180-day minimums on the colder classes.

Data protection is complete for an S3 service. Object Lock, versioning, lifecycle rules, asynchronous replication, static website hosting, and server-side encryption are all supported, and buckets can be reached privately over OVHcloud’s vRack network.

OVHcloud holds ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, and 27701 certifications.

Our take: A strong option for European companies that want free egress and data residency, with regions in France, Italy, Germany, the UK, Poland, Canada, Singapore, Australia, and India. US customers buy through OVHcloud’s separate US entity.

Standout features:

• No egress, ingress, or API request fees
• Five storage classes, including tape-based Cold Archive
• Object Lock, replication, and static website hosting
• Integrations with Veeam, HYCU, Veritas NetBackup, and Terraform

Ceph is open-source storage software that provides object, block, and file storage from one cluster. Its RADOS Gateway (RGW) serves a large part of the S3 API and the OpenStack Swift API. DigitalOcean Spaces is built on it, which gives a sense of the scale it handles.

RGW supports versioning, lifecycle rules, bucket websites, bucket and object policies, notifications, and Object Lock in governance and compliance modes. Multisite replication copies data between zones, and AWS STS, multi-tenancy, and Lua scripting are there for larger setups.

The latest stable release supports full-object deduplication, bucket logging, AES-256-GCM encryption, and restore from Glacier or tape. You can use cephadm for installs and Rook for running Ceph on Kubernetes.

Our take: The serious choice for running S3-compatible storage in your premises, and an option for teams moving off MinIO’s community edition.

Standout features:

• S3 and Swift APIs through RADOS Gateway
• Object Lock, versioning, lifecycle, and multisite replication
• Object, block, and file storage in one cluster
• cephadm and Rook for Kubernetes deployments