Backblaze B2 charges $0.00695 per GB per month for storage, which works out to roughly $6.95 per TB. Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage both land closer to $18 to $23 per TB for their standard hot tiers, three to four times the cost. That gap looks decisive until you factor in the line item that actually wrecks most cloud storage budgets: egress. Pull data out of Google Cloud Storage and Google bills $0.12 per GB. Pull it out of Azure Blob and Microsoft bills roughly $0.087 per GB. Backblaze, by contrast, gives away egress for free up to three times whatever you have stored each month.
This comparison breaks down Backblaze B2 pricing against Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage across every cost dimension that matters in June 2026: storage, egress, API requests, durability, uptime, and real migration effort. All three now expose S3-compatible or S3-adjacent APIs to some degree, which means the decision usually comes down to money and ecosystem lock-in rather than raw capability. We ran the numbers at 10TB, 50TB, and 100TB scale so you can see exactly where each platform wins and where the sticker price hides a much bigger bill.
Backblaze B2 already competes directly with Wasabi and Amazon S3 and with Cloudflare R2 in two other pricing fights on this site. Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage are the two hyperscaler-native options nobody has stacked directly against B2 yet, so that’s the matchup here.
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Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob Storage at a Glance
Backblaze started in 2007 as a consumer backup company and spent a decade building a reputation for cheap, reliable storage before launching B2 Cloud Storage as a standalone S3-compatible object storage product. It has stayed a specialist. Backblaze doesn’t sell compute, databases, or AI tooling. It sells storage and bandwidth, and its pricing reflects a company that competes almost entirely on cost and simplicity rather than platform breadth. The one recent departure from that flat-rate playbook is B2 Overdrive, a higher-throughput tier Backblaze launched in April 2025 starting at $15 per TB per month and engineered to sustain throughput up to 1 Tbps, according to Blocks & Files, giving customers who outgrow the standard tier’s throughput a Backblaze-native option instead of shopping elsewhere.
Google Cloud Storage sits inside a much larger stack. It’s the default landing zone for data feeding BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Dataflow pipelines, and Google prices it accordingly: cheaper than AWS S3 on raw storage in many regions, but with steep $0.12 per GB egress that assumes most of your data stays inside Google’s network rather than leaving it. Teams already committed to Google Cloud for compute or AI workloads get the most value here, since intra-Google traffic between GCS and other Google services doesn’t hit the same egress meter.
Azure Blob Storage plays a similar role inside Microsoft’s ecosystem. It underpins Azure VMs, Azure Functions, and Microsoft’s own backup and archive tooling, and it ships with four access tiers (Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive) that let you tune cost against retrieval speed. Enterprises already running Active Directory, Microsoft 365, or .NET workloads on Azure tend to land here by default rather than by a deliberate storage-cost evaluation, which is exactly the kind of decision this comparison is meant to inform.
The three products aren’t interchangeable in scope. Backblaze B2 is a single-purpose object store. Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage are storage layers inside sprawling cloud platforms with dozens of adjacent services. That context matters as much as the per-GB rate once you start comparing real bills.
Company history explains some of the pricing philosophy too. Backblaze went public on Nasdaq under the ticker BLZE in 2021 and still runs as a focused infrastructure company with storage and backup as its only real product lines. Google Cloud Storage dates back to 2010, launched as one of Google Cloud’s original services years before BigQuery or Vertex AI existed, and has grown into the default bucket layer for nearly everything else Google Cloud sells. Azure Blob Storage launched the same year as part of Microsoft’s original Azure rollout and has since become the storage backbone for Azure VMs, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Microsoft’s own SaaS products. Two of the three companies can subsidize storage pricing with revenue from compute, ads, or enterprise licensing elsewhere. Backblaze can’t, which is part of why its pricing model has to stay simple and competitive on its own merits.
Full Specs Comparison Table
Here’s how the three platforms stack up across the specs that drive both cost and day-to-day usability. Figures reflect published list pricing for US regions as of June 2026 and exclude committed-use discounts or enterprise negotiated rates.
| Spec | Backblaze B2 | Google Cloud Storage | Azure Blob Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard/Hot storage price | $0.00695/GB/mo ($6.95/TB) | ~$0.020/GB/mo regional ($20/TB) | ~$0.018/GB/mo Hot LRS ($18/TB) |
| Egress to internet | Free up to 3x avg. storage, then $0.01/GB | $0.12/GB | ~$0.087/GB |
| Free egress partners | Unlimited via Cloudflare, Fastly, bunny.net | None published | None published |
| Free tier | 10GB storage, permanent | ~5GB (varies by region/tracker) | No permanent free storage tier |
| Write/list operations | Class B (reads): Free | ~$0.004-$0.05/10,000 (varies by class) | ~$0.05/10,000 (Hot tier writes) |
| Read operations | Included in above | ~$0.0004/10,000 | ~$0.004/10,000 |
| Durability | 99.999999999% (11 nines) | Not published as single figure | Not published as single figure |
| Uptime SLA | 99.9% | 99.9% (Standard, regional) | 99.9% (LRS) |
| Minimum storage duration | None | None (Standard tier) | None (Hot tier) |
| S3 API compatibility | Native S3-compatible API | Partial via XML API | Proprietary REST API only |
| Archive/cold tier price | Not offered (single tier) | ~$0.0012-$0.004/GB/mo | ~$0.002/GB/mo (180-day minimum) |
| Best for | Egress-heavy, cost-sensitive workloads | Google Cloud/AI-integrated pipelines | Microsoft/Azure-native enterprises |
The storage prices come from each vendor’s own Backblaze B2 pricing page, Google Cloud Storage pricing page, and Azure Blob Storage pricing page. Third-party cost trackers report some variance in the exact GCS and Azure figures depending on region and redundancy tier, which is why we’ve marked those as approximate ranges rather than single hard numbers. Even Backblaze’s own headline rate isn’t reported perfectly consistently across the board: an April 2026 comparison from LeanOps rounded B2 Cloud Storage down to roughly $6 per TB per month, a reminder that “list price” can shift slightly depending on when and where a tracker pulls its numbers.
Storage Pricing Breakdown: Why Backblaze Costs Less
Backblaze B2 pricing sits at $0.00695 per GB per month, or $6.95 per TB, a rate ZeroBuffer confirmed still holds on Backblaze’s post-May 1, 2026 price card, billed by the byte-hour with no minimum charge, no minimum file size, and no storage duration fees, per Backblaze’s own pricing page as of August 2026. There’s no tiered discount structure to game and no regional pricing maze. You store a gigabyte for a month, you pay six-tenths of a cent. The first 10GB is free permanently, not just for a trial period. Zoomed out across account sizes, G2’s 2026 pricing data shows Backblaze B2 organized into two distinct pricing editions as of its September 2026 listing, with published rates ranging from that $6.95 entry point up to $1,560 a year for the largest listed plan per G2’s June 2026 pricing page, so the per-GB math above is really describing the low end of a range that scales with account size rather than a single flat bill for every customer.
Google Cloud Storage pricing is more fragmented. Standard storage runs about $0.020 per GB per month in single-region locations like Iowa, closer to $0.023 in Northern Virginia, and climbs to roughly $0.026 in US multi-region configurations that replicate data across a wider geographic footprint. That multi-region option buys you resilience against a full regional outage, but it roughly quadruples the per-GB cost compared to Backblaze’s flat rate.
Azure Blob Storage pricing for the Hot tier with locally redundant storage (LRS) sits around $0.018 per GB per month for the first 50TB in common US regions, based on figures from Microsoft’s own pricing page and independent trackers like CloudZero and nOps. Microsoft has also run region-specific cuts. One 2026 pricing change dropped East US Hot LRS from $0.0184 to $0.0165 per GB per month, a reminder that these rates shift more often than most IT budgets account for.
Do the simple math and Backblaze B2 pricing comes out 66% to 77% cheaper than Google Cloud Storage pricing or Azure Blob Storage pricing on raw per-GB storage alone, before a single byte of egress traffic moves. At 100TB stored, that’s the difference between a $600 monthly bill on B2 and $1,800 to $2,000 on the two hyperscalers, storage costs only.
Storage Tiers: Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive Pricing Ladders
Google and Microsoft both split their object storage into multiple access tiers, letting customers trade retrieval speed for a lower per-GB rate. Backblaze doesn’t play that game. It sells one tier, at one price, and treats every object the same whether you touch it daily or once a year.
That single-tier simplicity cuts both ways. Teams with genuinely cold data, years-old compliance archives that almost never get read, can beat Backblaze’s flat $6.95/TB rate by parking that data in Azure Archive or Google Coldline/Archive, both of which drop below $0.005 per GB per month. But those savings come with a catch: pulling anything out of a true archive tier usually means a retrieval delay measured in hours, plus the 180-day minimum storage duration Azure enforces on its Archive tier, or you eat an early-deletion penalty.
| Tier type | Backblaze B2 | Google Cloud Storage | Azure Blob Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hot/Standard | $0.00695/GB/mo (only tier) | ~$0.020/GB/mo (Standard) | ~$0.018/GB/mo (Hot) |
| Cool/Nearline | Not offered | ~$0.015/GB/mo (Nearline, after 2026 increase) | ~$0.013/GB/mo (Cool) |
| Cold/Coldline | Not offered | ~$0.004/GB/mo (Coldline) | ~$0.004/GB/mo (Cold) |
| Archive | Not offered | ~$0.0012-$0.004/GB/mo | ~$0.002/GB/mo |
| Retrieval delay on coldest tier | N/A, always instant | Milliseconds to hours | Hours (Archive priority retrieval available) |
For most workloads this comparison covers, that tiering complexity isn’t worth the trade-off. Anything you’re actively serving, backing up on a schedule, or querying for analytics stays in the hot tier regardless of provider, and that’s exactly the tier where Backblaze B2 pricing holds its biggest advantage. The tiering ladder only pays off for data you’re confident you won’t touch for months at a time.
Egress and Bandwidth Fees: Where Cloud Bills Explode
Storage price is the number vendors put on the homepage. Egress is the number that shows up on the invoice nobody budgeted for. This is where the three platforms diverge hardest.
Backblaze’s egress policy gives customers free downloads up to three times their average monthly storage, a rule Backblaze itself still states as company policy as of August 2026 and that independent tracker Shade separately confirmed the same month. Store 10TB and you get 30TB of free egress every month before any charge kicks in. Go past that and B2 bills $0.01 per GB for the overage, a rate Backblaze’s own pricing page still listed for direct egress above the allowance in May 2026, while egress routed through many CDN and compute partners remains free. On top of that base allowance, Backblaze offers unlimited free egress when data moves through Cloudflare, Fastly, or bunny.net under the Bandwidth Alliance, a partnership that effectively removes the egress meter entirely for anyone serving content through one of those CDNs.
Google Cloud Storage charges $0.12 per GB for data leaving its network to the public internet, based on figures from multiple 2026 cost-tracking sources including pricing trackers that scrape Google’s own rate cards. That’s twelve times Backblaze’s overage rate and applies from the first gigabyte past Google’s small free allowance.
Azure Blob Storage egress runs closer to $0.087 per GB for the first tier of outbound traffic, cheaper than Google’s rate but still nearly nine times what Backblaze charges once you exceed its free allowance. For any workload that serves files, images, video, or backups back out to users or other clouds, egress often ends up costing more than storage itself within a few months.
Free Tiers Compared
Backblaze gives every account 10GB of storage free, permanently, with no expiration, a policy Backblaze’s own updated pricing page still described as always free as of August 2026. Cloudflare R2, a frequent alternative in this space, matches that with 10GB free plus a million Class A operations and 10 million Class B operations monthly. Google’s free allowance is smaller and less consistent across sources, with several pricing trackers putting it around 5GB in US regions. Azure doesn’t offer an ongoing free storage tier for Blob Storage at all. New subscriptions get a limited-time trial credit rather than a permanent free allotment, which means Azure Blob pricing kicks in for real almost immediately for any sustained workload.
API Requests, Transactions, and Hidden Fees
Storage and egress dominate most bills, but request pricing matters for workloads with millions of small objects, think CI/CD artifact caches, container registries, or photo libraries with thousands of daily uploads.
Backblaze keeps this simple, and got simpler still in May 2026, when it eliminated Class A, B, and C request charges entirely and made API calls free across the board, according to Akave. Backblaze’s own transaction-pricing page confirmed as of August 2026 that Class A, B, and C calls all remain priced at $0 for standard usage, covering downloads, reads, writes, and list operations alike. There’s no separate punishing rate for list or write-heavy operations the way some competitors structure theirs.
Google Cloud Storage splits operations into Class A (writes, lists) and Class B (reads), with third-party trackers reporting figures anywhere from $0.004 to $0.05 per 10,000 operations depending on the specific operation type and source. That spread reflects real inconsistency across Google’s own regional pricing pages rather than sloppy research, and it’s worth confirming the exact rate for your region directly on Google’s pricing calculator before committing to a workload with heavy request volume.
Azure Blob Storage transaction costs run roughly $0.05 per 10,000 write operations and about $0.004 per 10,000 read operations on the Hot tier, per pricing-tracker data cross-referenced against Microsoft’s published rate cards. For workloads that generate huge numbers of small writes, like log aggregation or IoT telemetry, this line item can add up faster than the storage cost itself.
The practical takeaway: if your workload is request-heavy rather than storage-heavy, run the numbers on operations pricing specifically rather than assuming the provider with the cheapest per-GB storage automatically wins.
Durability, Uptime, and Reliability Track Record
Backblaze publishes a specific durability figure: 99.999999999%, commonly shortened to 11 nines, documented on its resiliency and durability page. In plain terms, Backblaze says that if you stored a million objects for 10 million years, you’d expect to lose roughly one file. That figure matches the 11-nines standard AWS has long published for S3 Standard, giving both companies an identical durability claim on paper.
Google and Microsoft’s storage documentation, at least in the pages we reviewed for this comparison, doesn’t surface an equally explicit single-number durability guarantee for Google Cloud Storage Standard or Azure Blob Storage LRS. Both companies describe redundant, multi-device replication architecture designed for high durability, but neither publishes the same simple “11 nines” headline figure Backblaze and AWS use. That doesn’t necessarily mean lower actual durability, both are backed by hyperscaler-grade infrastructure, but it does mean Backblaze and AWS give customers a cleaner number to point to in a compliance document.
All three platforms publish a 99.9% uptime SLA for their standard storage tier, so nobody has a formal edge on availability commitments.
Backblaze also does something neither Google nor Microsoft does: it publishes quarterly hard drive failure statistics for the physical drives underpinning its storage, a practice it has kept up for over a decade. The most recent data, covering Q4 2025, shows an annualized failure rate of 1.13% for that quarter and 1.36% for full-year 2025, based on more than 30.5 million drive-days of operation. It’s a level of infrastructure transparency you won’t find published anywhere on Google Cloud or Azure’s storage documentation, and it gives customers an unusually direct window into the hardware actually holding their data. You can see the underlying numbers on Backblaze’s own hard drive test data page.
S3 API Compatibility and Migration Tooling
Amazon S3’s API became the de facto standard for object storage years ago, and how closely a competitor mirrors it determines how easily you can move data and tooling without rewriting application code. For reference, AWS S3’s own pricing page still lists Standard storage at roughly $0.023 per GB per month, the baseline every alternative in this space gets measured against.
Backblaze B2 ships a native S3-compatible API, documented directly by Backblaze, that lets most S3 SDKs, CLI tools, and backup software connect to B2 by changing an endpoint URL and a set of credentials. Tools like rclone, restic, Duplicati, and Veeam all support B2 as a first-class S3-compatible target.
Google Cloud Storage offers an XML API that mirrors a meaningful subset of S3’s operations, enough that many S3-aware tools can connect with configuration changes, but it isn’t a complete drop-in replacement for every S3 feature. Teams migrating complex S3-dependent applications to GCS should expect to test thoroughly rather than assume a pure endpoint swap will work.
Azure Blob Storage takes a different path entirely. It uses Microsoft’s own REST API rather than an S3-compatible interface, which means tools built specifically for S3 generally need a translation layer, a gateway product, or an Azure-specific SDK integration to work at all. That’s a meaningfully higher migration lift for any team currently standardized on S3-compatible tooling.
For teams that value portability, being able to point the same backup script or CDN origin config at multiple providers without rewriting it, Backblaze B2’s native S3 compatibility is a real, practical advantage over Azure’s proprietary approach and a modest one over Google’s partial compatibility.
Real Monthly Costs at 10TB, 50TB, and 100TB
Per-GB rates are hard to reason about at a glance, so here’s what the published list pricing actually works out to at three common scales, each modeled with a moderate egress scenario. These are storage-plus-egress estimates only, excluding request fees, taxes, and any committed-use or reserved-capacity discounts, which can meaningfully lower the Google and Azure numbers for large, predictable workloads.
| Scenario | Backblaze B2 | Google Cloud Storage | Azure Blob Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10TB stored, 5TB egress/mo | $60 (egress free under 3x rule) | $320 | $267 |
| 50TB stored, 20TB egress/mo | $300 (egress free under 3x rule) | $3,400 | $2,640 |
| 100TB stored, 50TB egress/mo | $600 (egress free under 3x rule) | $8,000 | $6,150 |
The pattern holds at every scale we tested: Backblaze’s free-egress-under-3x policy means storage cost is effectively the entire bill for any workload where downloads don’t wildly outpace what’s stored, while Google Cloud Storage pricing and Azure Blob Storage pricing both scale up sharply once meaningful egress enters the picture. At 100TB with 50TB of monthly egress, Google Cloud Storage costs more than 13 times what Backblaze B2 charges for the same workload.
Workloads that rarely move data out, cold archival backups that get written once and almost never read, will see a smaller relative gap, since egress isn’t doing much work in that scenario either way. The gap widens fastest for anything that looks like a CDN origin, a media library, or a public dataset.
5 Real-World Use Cases and Which Provider Fits Best
The right platform depends heavily on what you’re actually doing with the storage, not just the sticker price. Here’s how five common workloads shake out in practice.
When Backblaze B2 Is the Clear Choice
A streaming site or stock-footage marketplace that serves large files to thousands of viewers a day is exactly the egress-heavy profile Backblaze B2 was built for. Pairing B2 with a Bandwidth Alliance CDN partner like Cloudflare or bunny.net removes egress costs almost entirely, something neither Google Cloud Storage nor Azure Blob Storage can match without layering a separate CDN contract on top of their own per-GB egress fees. A startup storing CI/CD build artifacts, Docker image layers, and test coverage reports fits a similar pattern: a technical, relatively small audience pulling data regularly, where B2’s flat $6.95/TB rate and native S3 compatibility with tools like rclone keep both cost and engineering effort low. Independent backup software vendors and NAS device makers have also standardized on B2 as a default off-site target for exactly this reason, since it slots into existing S3-based backup workflows without a rewrite.
When the Hyperscalers Make More Sense
A team running training data through BigQuery, Vertex AI, or Dataflow benefits from keeping that data in Google Cloud Storage, since traffic between GCS and other Google Cloud services doesn’t hit the same $0.12/GB internet egress meter that applies to public downloads. The integration value there outweighs the higher raw storage price for most AI-heavy teams. An organization already running Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and Azure VMs will find Azure Blob Storage the path of least resistance for backup targets, particularly when using Azure Backup or Azure Site Recovery, both of which integrate natively with Blob Storage tiers and simplify a lot of the operational overhead a third-party target would otherwise add. And a healthcare or financial services company that needs geographically redundant storage across multiple compliance-mapped regions, with tight integration into existing cloud governance and audit tooling, often defaults to whichever hyperscaler already holds its compute and identity stack, even at a real cost premium, because the operational integration outweighs the per-GB savings on paper.
How to Migrate to Backblaze B2: Step-by-Step Guide
Moving an existing bucket from Google Cloud Storage or Azure Blob Storage to Backblaze B2 is a same-day project for most teams, especially using rclone, an open-source tool that natively supports all three platforms as S3-compatible or native remotes. The bigger the dataset, the more the migration becomes a bandwidth and scheduling problem rather than a technical one, so plan the transfer window around your source provider’s own egress costs too. Remember that pulling data out of Google Cloud Storage to migrate it elsewhere still costs $0.12 per GB, and pulling it out of Azure Blob Storage costs roughly $0.087 per GB, so a 50TB migration alone can run into thousands of dollars in one-time egress fees before you save a cent on the new platform. Factor that one-time cost into your break-even timeline rather than being surprised by it on the final bill from your old provider.
- Create a Backblaze account and a new B2 bucket, choosing private or public access based on your use case.
- Generate an application key with read/write scope limited to that bucket, rather than a master key, to limit blast radius if credentials leak.
- Install rclone and configure two remotes, one pointing at your source (Google Cloud Storage or Azure Blob Storage) and one pointing at your new B2 bucket, using each provider’s respective auth method.
- Run a dry-run sync first to confirm object counts and total size match expectations before moving real data.
- Run the full sync during a low-traffic window, and re-run it a second time afterward to catch any objects written during the transfer.
- Verify checksums on a sample of migrated objects to confirm data integrity before cutting over.
- Update your application’s storage endpoint configuration to point at B2’s S3-compatible endpoint instead of the old provider.
- Keep the old bucket live in read-only mode for a validation window, typically one to two weeks, before decommissioning it.
A basic rclone sync command for moving data from Google Cloud Storage to Backblaze B2 looks like this once both remotes are configured:
rclone sync gcs-remote:my-bucket b2-remote:my-b2-bucket --progress --transfers 16 --checkers 32The --transfers and --checkers flags control parallelism. Higher values speed up large migrations but can hit rate limits on either provider, so it’s worth starting conservative and scaling up once you confirm neither side is throttling.
Pros and Cons of Each Platform
Backblaze B2
- Pro: Lowest storage price of the three at $6.95/TB, with simple, flat, non-tiered pricing
- Pro: Free egress up to 3x average storage, plus unlimited free egress through Bandwidth Alliance CDN partners
- Pro: Native S3-compatible API with broad third-party tool support
- Con: No compute, database, or AI services, purely a storage product
- Con: Single storage tier, no built-in Cool/Cold/Archive pricing ladder like Azure or GCS
Google Cloud Storage
- Pro: Deep native integration with BigQuery, Vertex AI, and the rest of Google Cloud’s data stack
- Pro: Multiple storage classes (Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive) for fine-grained cost tuning
- Con: Highest egress cost of the three at $0.12/GB
- Con: Storage pricing varies meaningfully by region and redundancy tier, making bill estimation harder
Azure Blob Storage
- Pro: Tight integration with Azure VMs, Azure Backup, and Microsoft’s enterprise identity stack
- Pro: Four access tiers (Hot, Cool, Cold, Archive) give granular control over cost versus retrieval speed
- Con: No native S3 API, requiring a translation layer for S3-based tooling
- Con: No permanent free storage tier for new accounts
Cloud Object Storage Market Trends in 2026
The pricing pressure driving this comparison isn’t happening in a vacuum. The global cloud storage market is on track to reach $172.97 billion in 2026, according to MarketsandMarkets, which projects the market to keep growing at a 17.1% compound annual rate through 2031, reaching $380.15 billion. Other research firms put the 2026 figure anywhere from roughly $150 billion to nearly $198 billion depending on methodology, but every major estimate agrees the category is expanding fast, driven heavily by AI training data, video, and backup workloads that all generate outsized egress traffic.
That growth has intensified pressure on hyperscaler egress pricing specifically. Cloudflare R2 built its entire go-to-market pitch around “zero egress fees” when it launched its current pricing model, and Backblaze has leaned harder into its own Bandwidth Alliance partnerships in response. Both are chipping away at what has historically been one of AWS, Google, and Microsoft’s most profitable and least-scrutinized line items. For customers, that competitive pressure is starting to show up as genuine savings rather than just marketing.
Expect this pricing fight to keep escalating through the rest of 2026. Storage itself is close to a commodity at this point. Egress and API request pricing are where these companies still have real margin to defend, and where the next round of competitive cuts is most likely to land.
The knock-on effect shows up in how fast S3-compatible tooling has spread. Backup software, CDN origins, and self-hosted apps increasingly ship with a generic S3-compatible storage option rather than hardcoding support for one vendor, precisely because customers now expect to compare Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2, and AWS S3 against each other before committing. Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage sit slightly outside that trend today given their proprietary or partial API surfaces, which is one reason their egress and storage pricing has faced less direct competitive pressure than AWS has felt from the smaller S3-compatible challengers.
Verdict: Which Cloud Storage Platform Should You Choose in 2026
Choose Backblaze B2 if cost is your primary driver and you’re not deeply locked into Google or Microsoft’s broader cloud ecosystem. The combination of $6.95/TB storage, free egress up to 3x your stored volume, and native S3 compatibility makes it the cheapest realistic option for the large majority of object storage workloads, particularly anything that serves files, video, or backups to end users. Our 100TB scenario showed B2 costing $600 a month against $6,150 to $8,000 for the same workload on Azure or Google, a gap too large to ignore without a specific integration reason not to switch.
Choose Google Cloud Storage if your data already feeds BigQuery, Vertex AI, or other Google Cloud data and AI services. The integration value and reduced friction of keeping data inside Google’s network can outweigh the higher storage and egress costs, especially for workloads where most consumption happens inside Google Cloud rather than out to the public internet.
Choose Azure Blob Storage if your organization already runs on Azure for compute, identity, and backup tooling. The tiered Hot/Cool/Cold/Archive structure and native integration with Azure Backup make it the path of least resistance for Microsoft-centric enterprises, even though it costs more than Backblaze on a pure per-GB basis and lacks S3 compatibility.
For teams with no existing hyperscaler commitment starting a new project from scratch in June 2026, the data points clearly toward Backblaze B2 as the default choice, with Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage reserved for situations where platform integration specifically justifies the extra cost.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Backblaze B2 actually S3-compatible?
Yes. Backblaze publishes a native S3-compatible API that works with most S3 SDKs, CLI tools, and backup software by changing the endpoint URL and credentials, according to Backblaze’s own documentation.
How much does Backblaze B2 pricing actually cost per terabyte?
Backblaze B2 pricing is $0.00695 per GB per month, which works out to $6.95 per TB per month, with the first 10GB free permanently.
Does Google Cloud Storage or Azure Blob Storage ever get cheaper than Backblaze B2?
At list pricing, rarely. Large enterprises with committed-use discounts or reserved capacity agreements can narrow the gap substantially, but few organizations negotiate rates that close a 3-4x storage price gap plus a 9-12x egress price gap entirely.
What is the Bandwidth Alliance and how does it affect Backblaze B2 pricing?
The Bandwidth Alliance is a partnership between Backblaze and CDN providers including Cloudflare, Fastly, and bunny.net that eliminates egress fees entirely when data moves from B2 through one of those networks, on top of B2’s standard free-egress-up-to-3x-storage allowance.
Can I use the same backup software with all three providers?
Most modern backup tools that support S3 will work with Backblaze B2 directly. Google Cloud Storage requires checking for XML API support specifically. Azure Blob Storage usually needs a dedicated Azure connector or plugin rather than generic S3 support.
Which provider has the best durability guarantee?
Backblaze B2 and Amazon S3 both publish an identical 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability figure. Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage didn’t surface an equally explicit single-number durability claim in the official pages reviewed for this comparison, though both run on hyperscaler-grade redundant infrastructure.
Does Azure Blob Storage or Google Cloud Storage offer an archive tier like AWS Glacier?
Yes. Azure’s Archive tier runs around $0.002 per GB per month with a 180-day minimum storage duration, while Google Cloud Storage’s Archive class runs between roughly $0.0012 and $0.004 per GB per month depending on region. Backblaze B2 doesn’t offer a separate archive tier, it uses a single flat-rate storage class instead.
Is switching cloud storage providers difficult?
Not for most workloads. Tools like rclone support all three platforms and can sync a bucket in a few hours to a few days depending on data volume, with the main effort being updating application configuration and validating data integrity afterward rather than the transfer itself.
Do Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob Storage all support object versioning and immutability?
Backblaze B2 supports Object Lock for write-once-read-many immutability, commonly used for ransomware-resistant backups. Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage both offer their own retention-policy and immutable-storage features, though the exact configuration steps and terminology differ across each provider’s console and API, so scripts that toggle these settings generally need to be rewritten rather than ported directly.
Why does Google Cloud Storage pricing vary so much between sources?
Google prices Standard storage differently by region and by whether you choose a single-region or multi-region bucket, and it has also changed specific tier prices, including a 2026 Nearline multi-region increase from $0.010 to $0.015 per GB per month. That combination of regional variance and mid-year changes is why published estimates for Google Cloud Storage pricing range from roughly $0.020 to $0.026 per GB per month depending on configuration.
Related Coverage
- Backblaze B2 vs Wasabi vs S3: $6.95 vs $23 per TB [2026]
- Cloudflare R2 vs S3 vs Backblaze B2: $0 Egress [2026]
- IDrive vs Backblaze: 5TB for $70 vs Unlimited [2026]
- AWS vs Azure 2026: 31% vs 24% Market Share and a 75% Archive Cost Gap [Tested]
- ECR vs ACR vs Artifact Registry: $5/mo Floor Gap [2026]
- Cloud Cost Optimization: 7 Strategies That Actually Work
- Vast Data $1B Round at $30B: NVIDIA’s AI Storage Bet [2026]
For more cloud storage and infrastructure pricing coverage, browse the full cloud computing archive.
