Runpod logo Salad logo

Runpod vs Salad

Runpod rents GPU instances you hold onto, with persistent storage and SSH access. Salad spreads replicas of one container across thousands of idle PCs worldwide, so capacity grows by adding replicas.

Jump to: What's good Pricing GPUs Services Company details Alternatives

What's good about...

Runpod logo Runpod

  • Deploy affordable GPUs in under a minute
  • Scale across 30+ regions worldwide
  • SOC 2 Type II certified, 99.9% uptime SLA
  • Flexible billing: pay by the second, no commitments
  • Multi-node Clusters scale to thousands of GPUs
  • Built-in deployments, autoscaling & monitoring

Salad logo Salad

  • 60,000+ daily active GPUs across 190+ countries
  • Consumer cards from GTX 1050 Ti to RTX 5090
  • Four priority levels trade interruption risk against cost
  • SOC 2 Type I compliant, containers isolated by hypervisor
  • No charge while your container downloads and starts

Price comparison

How do Runpod's prices compare against Salad?

VM Small

Runpod Runpod
$43.20 /mo 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM (Compute-Optimized)
Salad Salad
--

VM Medium

Runpod Runpod
$86.40 /mo 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM (Compute-Optimized)
Salad Salad
--

VM Large

Runpod Runpod
$172.80 /mo 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM (Compute-Optimized)
Salad Salad
--

Block Storage

Runpod Runpod
$10.00 /mo 100 GB
Salad Salad
--

Free egress allowance

Runpod Runpod
Free and unlimited
Salad Salad
--

1 TB of egress beyond allowance

Runpod Runpod
Free and unlimited
Salad Salad
--

Salad logo Salad Pricing Details

Salad bills per second while an instance runs, and charges nothing while a container group allocates or pulls its image.

GPU container groups are priced per GPU per hour at one of four priority levels, vCPU and RAM included. CPU-only groups bill per vCPU and per GB. Credits are prepaid, with volume discounts of 2-10%.

GPU Fleet Overview

Same GPU, Both Providers

On-demand price per GPU-hour.

Runpod Runpod
Salad Salad
RTX 5090 $0.69 $0.45 RTX 4090 $0.34 $0.30 RTX 3090 $0.22 $0.25 RTX 5080 $0.39 $0.42

Billing Options

Runpod Runpod
On-DemandReservation
Salad Salad
On-DemandSpot

Available Models

Runpod and Salad each offer 35 GPU models.

Runpod Runpod
H100(10) H200(6) A100(7) RTX PRO 6000(3) B200(3) L40S(3) B300(4) RTX A6000(3) RTX 5090(3) V100(2)
View all 35 GPUs →
Salad Salad
RTX 5090(2) RTX 4090(2) A5000(2) RTX 3090(2) RTX 4080(2) RTX 5080(2) RTX 4060(2) RTX 3060(4) RTX 3060 Ti(2) RTX 3070(2)
View all 35 GPUs →

Heads up: A provider's own page may quote a different figure, for example on tax, region or a promotion. A monthly-only plan shows a derived hourly rate. Plan figures take each provider's closest match to a common setup. Verify before provisioning. More on how we price.

Which services do they offer

Here are some managed services that Runpod and Salad offer:

Service Runpod Salad
Block Storage
GPU-powered Servers
Managed Containers
Python Notebooks
Virtual Private Server (VPS)

Company details

Website
Runpod Runpod
www.runpod.io
Salad Salad
salad.com
Headquarters
Runpod Runpod
United States of America US flag
Salad Salad
United States of America US flag
Founded
Runpod Runpod
2022
Salad Salad
2018
Data Center Locations
Runpod Runpod
32
Salad Salad
--
Example Customers
Runpod Runpod
Zillow, CivitAI, Wix, OpenAI, Perplexity, Cursor
Salad Salad
Discord, Stability AI, Blend, undetectable.ai, Civitai

Alternatives to consider

Compare Runpod and Salad against other cloud providers.

View all comparisons

Our data for Runpod was last updated on Sept. 11, 2026, and for Salad on Sept. 11, 2026.