Amazon Bedrock vs Microsoft Foundry: pricing, features and which to choose

Amazon Bedrock is part of Amazon Web Services and became generally available in 2023. It is built for developers and enterprises that want to use large language models inside their AWS accounts, with the same identity, networking, logging and compliance controls they use for other AWS services. Data sent to Bedrock stays in the customer's AWS environment and, according to AWS, is not used to train the underlying models. Customers range from startups to banks, healthcare companies and governments, and Bedrock is a common choice for teams that already run their applications on AWS and want one bill, one security model and private network access to models.

The model catalog is Bedrock's main draw. AWS lists models from AI21 Labs, Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google's Gemma, Luma AI, Meta, MiniMax, Mistral AI, Moonshot AI, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Qwen, Stability AI, TwelveLabs, Writer, xAI and Z.AI. That includes Anthropic's Claude family, Amazon's own Nova models for text, speech, images and video, Meta's Llama, OpenAI's GPT and open-weight gpt-oss models, and image models from Stability AI. Developers call them through the Converse API with the same code, so swapping models takes a parameter change. The Playground in the console lets teams compare prompts across models before writing code.

Bedrock's strengths are a broad model catalog under one API, AWS security, private networking and compliance, data that stays in your account, and mature tooling for RAG, guardrails and agents through AgentCore. Its weaknesses are AWS console complexity, pricing that spreads across many services, regional differences in model availability and slower access to some newest models than each lab's own API. Google Vertex AI is the Google Cloud equivalent. Microsoft Foundry serves Azure customers with OpenAI, Claude and thousands of other models. Hugging Face hosts open models. OpenRouter routes across providers with one key. Choose Bedrock if your stack already runs on AWS.

Microsoft Foundry is the successor to Azure AI Studio and Azure AI Foundry, and Microsoft calls it its AI app and agent factory. It serves developers and enterprises building on Azure, especially companies that already use Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Fabric and Azure security tools. The portal at ai.azure.com, SDKs and a Visual Studio Code extension cover the full cycle: choose a model, ground it in company data, build an agent, evaluate it and monitor it in production. Because it runs inside Azure subscriptions, usage counts toward existing Azure commitments, and Microsoft's regional and data zone deployments help with data residency requirements in the US, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Foundry Models gives access to more than 11,000 models, according to Microsoft's pricing page. That includes OpenAI models, which Microsoft hosts on Azure, such as the GPT-6 family that reached general availability in September 2026, plus Microsoft's own MAI models, Meta's Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, xAI's Grok and many open models from Hugging Face. Since November 2025 Anthropic's Claude models have also been available in Foundry, which Microsoft says made Azure the only cloud offering both Claude and GPT frontier models. Teams can benchmark models side by side, use a model router that picks a model per request and fine-tune or distill models through Azure Machine Learning.

Microsoft Foundry's strengths are the largest model catalog among the big clouds, first-party hosting of OpenAI models, Claude and GPT on one platform, deep Microsoft 365 and Entra integration, and agent tooling with MCP and governance built in. Its weaknesses are Azure complexity, frequent renaming that confuses documentation, pricing that changes by region and deployment type, and quotas that can limit access to new models. Amazon Bedrock is the AWS counterpart. Google Vertex AI leads with Gemini on Google Cloud. Microsoft Copilot Studio offers low-code agents for business users. Hugging Face hosts open models. Choose Foundry if your organization runs on Azure and Microsoft 365.