The short answer: both are European clouds with EU data residency, so this comparison is about philosophy, not geography. Scaleway is the broad catalog: dozens of products from GPU clusters to serverless containers, postpaid. RareCloud is the focused one: servers, Kubernetes, storage and networking on our own OpenStack metal, billed hourly against a credit balance that is a hard spending limit, with an MCP server for AI agents and engineers answering support. Entry point: €3.99 per month, billed hourly.
Are they not solving the same problem?
Partly. If "European cloud" is your only requirement, both qualify: EU datacenters, EU jurisdiction, GDPR by default, EUR invoices with proper VAT handling.
The split appears in how much cloud you want to operate. Scaleway gives you a hyperscaler-shaped catalog (serverless, managed databases, GPU fleets, IoT) at European prices. RareCloud deliberately ships a small, sharp set: cloud servers, managed Kubernetes, volumes, load balancers, classic KVM and Windows servers, web hosting and proxies, all behind one console and one credit balance.
How does billing compare?
Scaleway is postpaid with per-resource metering across a large catalog. Powerful, but month-end bills require active cost management, and their own forums are full of "forgotten resource" stories, as on every postpaid cloud.
RareCloud is balance-based. You top up, resources bill hourly against the balance, every cloud server has an automatic monthly cap, and your balance is a hard ceiling, so an empty balance is the worst case. For agencies and solo developers this turns cost control from a discipline into a property of the platform.
What about Kubernetes?
Scaleway Kapsule is mature, with autoscaling pools and a free control plane on the base tier.
RareCloud managed Kubernetes runs Gardener on our own OpenStack region in Bucharest: real clusters with a managed control plane, self-healing nodes and hibernation for idle clusters, priced as the sum of the worker nodes (a 3-node starter cluster lands at €44.97 per month). Smaller feature surface than Kapsule today, stated honestly, but the same console, balance and API as everything else you run with us.
Which is better for AI-driven workflows?
Scaleway leans into AI as infrastructure: GPU instances, inference endpoints, model hosting.
RareCloud leans into AI as the operator: an official MCP server so Claude, Cursor or any MCP client can manage your infrastructure, scoped API tokens that separate read from write per integration, and an activity log that records what every agent did. If your question is "where do I train models", Scaleway. If it is "how does my coding agent safely manage my servers", that is the product we are building.
Pricing snapshot (June 2026)
| RareCloud | Scaleway | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry cloud server | €3.99/mo, hourly billed, monthly cap | ~€4/mo class (Stardust/DEV ranges) |
| Billing | Balance-based, hard limit by design | Postpaid, metered |
| Kubernetes | Gardener-managed, pay for nodes | Kapsule, free base control plane |
| AI tooling | MCP server, scoped tokens, activity log | GPU and inference products |
| Support | Engineers on tickets, not first-line scripts | Tiered plans, paid levels for fast SLAs |
So which one should you pick?
Pick Scaleway when you need catalog breadth: GPUs, serverless, managed databases, object storage at scale.
Pick RareCloud when you want a focused European platform where spending cannot run away, your accountant gets clean EUR VAT invoices, support is a human engineer, and your AI tools are first-class citizens of the account rather than an afterthought.