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 in a Bucharest cloud region, billed hourly with a monthly cap on servers, volumes and Kubernetes nodes, 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) 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 account.
How does billing compare?
Both meter cloud resources and invoice after the month. The difference is the size of the catalog you are metered on.
Scaleway meters a large catalog, resource by resource. Powerful, but month-end bills need active cost management, as on every postpaid cloud with many moving parts.
RareCloud meters a short list, hourly, and servers, volumes and Kubernetes nodes stop costing more once they reach their monthly price. For agencies and solo developers, that means the month-end bill can be estimated before it arrives, without anyone auditing a long list of metered line items. The invoice arrives at the end of the month (and on the 15th as well, until your account has paid two invoices); credit you hold pays it automatically. A spending alert shows in the console when the month passes the amount you set, and a credit alert emails you when your balance is running low. The details are in how cloud billing works.
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 autoscaling worker pools, 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, account 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, with tools that spend money, delete or interrupt something refusing to run without an explicit confirm, scoped API tokens that separate read from write per integration, and an activity log that records service and billing actions. 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 (checked 8 October 2026)
| RareCloud | Scaleway | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry cloud server | €3.99/mo (1 vCPU, 2 GB), hourly billed, monthly cap | see Scaleway's pricing page |
| 2 vCPU / 8 GB | G-2: €14.99/mo with 100 GB disk and public IPv4 | BASIC2-A2C-8G: about €25.18/mo compute, plus public IPv4 (€0.005/h) and block storage |
| Billing | Hourly, monthly cap per resource, invoiced monthly | Postpaid, metered |
| Kubernetes | Gardener-managed, pay for nodes | Kapsule, free base control plane |
| AI tooling | MCP server with confirm-gated writes, scoped tokens, activity log | GPU and inference products |
| Support | Engineers on tickets, 24/7 | Tiered plans, paid levels for fast SLAs |
Scaleway figures are PAR-1 list prices excluding VAT; their monthly figure is 730 hours of the hourly price.
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 with a monthly cap on servers, volumes, Kubernetes nodes and load balancers, your accountant gets invoices in EUR or USD from an EU company, support is a human engineer, and your AI tools are first-class citizens of the account rather than an afterthought.