Hetzner wins on price-per-compute for European deployments — up to 3x cheaper than Vultr for equivalent specs. Vultr wins on global reach with 32 locations, GPU compute, and NVMe bare metal options. Your choice depends on geography and workload type.
Hetzner and Vultr are both top contenders for budget-conscious cloud deployments, but they approach value differently and excel in different scenarios. In 2026, both have expanded their offerings while maintaining their respective core strengths.
Hetzner Cloud remains Europe's undisputed value leader for cloud compute. A Hetzner CX32 (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 80GB SSD) costs approximately 7 euros per month — a level of pricing that Vultr and other global providers simply cannot match in European data centers. Hetzner operates in Nuremberg and Falkenstein (Germany), Helsinki (Finland), and expanded into Ashburn (Virginia, USA) and Singapore. The US and Singapore locations mean Hetzner is no longer exclusively European, but their pricing advantage is most pronounced in the EU regions. For agencies, developers, and infrastructure teams deploying in Europe, Hetzner is almost always the computationally cheaper option. Our Hetzner accounts offer server limits from 5 ($45) to 100 ($999) servers, making them ideal for deployments that need many concurrent instances.
Vultr's differentiator is breadth of presence. With 32 global locations including cities like Mumbai, Seoul, Osaka, Melbourne, Johannesburg, and São Paulo that Hetzner does not cover, Vultr is the better choice when your user base is distributed globally. Vultr also offers Cloud GPU instances (NVIDIA A100 and A40), NVMe-backed High Frequency Compute instances, and bare metal servers — all accessible through the credit-based accounts we sell. Our Vultr accounts provide $200 to $300 in credits for $30 to $99.
For workloads entirely in Europe: Hetzner wins decisively. The compute value difference is too large to ignore — running 10 Hetzner servers costs less than 3 equivalent Vultr servers in EU regions. For global workloads that need presence in Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, or the Pacific: Vultr wins by default since Hetzner simply does not have those locations. For GPU compute and ML workloads: Vultr wins as Hetzner's GPU options are limited compared to Vultr's cloud GPU catalog. Both providers are excellent choices, and many teams use both — Hetzner for European origin infrastructure and Vultr for global edge presence.
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