Oracle Cloud is generous compute shapes and an unusually cheap egress policy. Hetzner is the price-per-core leader, by a wide margin. This page puts the two side by side — the live configurations and prices from our catalogue, then the differences that actually decide the choice.
| In our catalogue | Oracle Cloud | Hetzner |
|---|---|---|
| Product | Buy Oracle Cloud Account | Buy Hetzner Account |
| Configurations in stock | 16 | 3 |
| Lowest price | $40 | $55 |
| Highest price | $90 | $250 |
| Example options | FT $300 / Phoenix / FT $300 / Singapore / Free Trial $300 / Singapore | 5 Server Account / 10 Server Account / Hetzner Cloud Server |
| View options | View options |
Prices and configuration counts are read from the live catalogue. Specifications are listed exactly as supplied; nothing here is estimated.
Billing model is the real difference
Everything else on this page is secondary to one structural difference: Oracle Cloud meters what you use, and Hetzner charges a published monthly figure. That is not a pricing detail, it is a difference in who carries the uncertainty.
With Oracle Cloud you pay for exactly the compute-seconds, requests and gigabytes you consume, which is honest for elastic workloads and unnerving for fixed ones — the bill is knowable only in arrears. With Hetzner the number is fixed in advance and idle capacity is your problem rather than your accountant’s.
If an unexpected invoice would be a genuine problem rather than an annoyance, that constraint decides this comparison before any feature does.
Where Oracle Cloud is the stronger choice
Price on the axes that usually hurt. Egress allowances are markedly more generous than the other large platforms, and the compute shapes are competitive.
Best suited to: teams that want hyperscaler-shaped infrastructure without hyperscaler-shaped data transfer bills, and anyone running Oracle software.
Regions: A wide and still-expanding region list, with many single-region countries covered for residency reasons.
Worth knowing: Tenancy and compartment concepts differ from the other platforms; budget time for the mental model rather than assuming AWS habits transfer.
Where Hetzner is the stronger choice
Economics. For a given amount of CPU and RAM, Hetzner is routinely a fraction of a hyperscaler’s price, with a bandwidth allowance that makes egress a non-issue for most workloads.
Best suited to: teams that need raw compute and are happy to operate it themselves.
Regions: Germany and Finland, with a US presence — the European sites are the core of the offering.
Worth knowing: The acceptable-use rules are enforced, and the support model is efficient rather than hand-holding. It suits teams that already know what they are doing.
The trade-offs, stated plainly
Oracle Cloud: A smaller ecosystem, fewer third-party integrations, and a much smaller pool of engineers who have used it in anger.
Hetzner: Almost no managed services. You get excellent servers and a competent network; databases, queues, backups and monitoring are yours to run.
How to choose between them
- Choose Oracle Cloud if your workload is Egress-heavy workloads, Oracle Database, and teams optimising a bill rather than an ecosystem
- Choose Hetzner if your workload is Self-managed workloads, build farms, batch processing and anything where the bill is dominated by CPU hours
- Choose neither if the shape of the work does not match either — the full catalogue has eight other platforms, and the comparison tool will hold four of them side by side.
Related reading
- Buy Oracle Cloud Account – every Oracle Cloud configuration in stock
- Buy Hetzner Account – every Hetzner configuration in stock
- How to choose a cloud provider – the framework behind this comparison
- How cloud billing works – why the billing model matters more than the sticker price
- Compare up to four accounts side by side
Questions
Common questions about this comparison
Is Oracle Cloud cheaper than Hetzner?
The prices in the table above are the live catalogue prices for the accounts we stock, so you can compare those directly. Running cost is a separate question and depends on the billing model: Oracle Cloud bills per unit consumed and Hetzner bills a fixed monthly figure, which means the cheaper account is not always the cheaper month.
Can I run the same workload on both?
For ordinary Linux servers, databases and web applications, yes. The divergence starts when you adopt a platform's proprietary managed services — a specific queue, function runtime or identity model — because those are what make a migration expensive later.
Which one is better for Egress-heavy workloads?
That is Oracle Cloud's stated strength, so it is the natural starting point. It is still worth checking region availability and the billing model against your own constraints before committing.
What do I actually get when I buy an account here?
The configuration named on the product page and nothing beyond it — the vCPU figure, region, account age or credit exactly as listed. Both product pages set out every option in stock with its own price.