Amazon Bedrock vs OpenAI: Token Pricing, Speed & Intelligence
Full comparison of Amazon Bedrock and OpenAI — live token pricing, latency, throughput, context window, strengths, weaknesses, and best use cases. Updated July 2026.
Amazon Bedrock
AWS-native LLM access — Nova, Claude, Llama, and more via one API
Amazon Bedrock is AWS's managed LLM service, providing access to Amazon's own Nova models alongside third-party models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and others. It integrates natively with the AWS ecosystem including IAM, VPC, and CloudWatch, making it the default choice for teams already on AWS.
OpenAI
GPT-4o, o3, and the world's most widely-used AI API
OpenAI is the creator of the GPT model family and the ChatGPT product. Their API provides access to frontier models including GPT-4o, the o-series reasoning models, and the GPT-4.1 long-context family. Pricing is competitive for frontier-tier capability, with prompt caching available on most models.
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Live token pricing
Strengths & weaknesses
Amazon Bedrock
OpenAI
Key differentiators
The only way to run Claude, Llama, and Amazon Nova within your own AWS VPC — data never leaves your account.
The most widely-integrated LLM API — virtually every AI framework and tool supports OpenAI natively.
Frequently asked questions
Amazon Bedrock FAQs
What models are available on Amazon Bedrock?
Amazon Bedrock offers Amazon Nova (Micro, Lite, Pro), Anthropic Claude (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus), Meta Llama 3.x, Mistral, Cohere, and others. The catalog varies by AWS region.
How does Amazon Bedrock pricing work?
Bedrock uses on-demand pricing per 1M tokens, similar to direct provider APIs. Provisioned throughput is available for guaranteed capacity at a fixed hourly rate. Prices are generally comparable to or slightly above direct provider pricing.
Is Amazon Bedrock HIPAA-compliant?
Yes. Amazon Bedrock is covered under AWS's HIPAA BAA, making it suitable for healthcare applications that require HIPAA compliance. Data processed through Bedrock stays within your AWS account.
OpenAI FAQs
How much does the OpenAI API cost?
GPT-4o costs $2.50/1M input tokens and $10/1M output tokens. GPT-4o-mini is $0.15/$0.60 per 1M tokens. Prompt caching cuts input costs by 50% on eligible requests.
What is the difference between GPT-4o and o3?
GPT-4o is a fast, multimodal model optimised for chat, vision, and coding. o3 is a reasoning model that uses chain-of-thought to solve complex problems — it is slower and more expensive but significantly more capable on math, science, and hard coding tasks.
Does OpenAI support prompt caching?
Yes. Prompt caching is available on GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o3, and o4-mini. Cached input tokens are billed at 50% of the standard input price, making long-context and repeated-system-prompt workloads significantly cheaper.
Provider resources
Amazon Bedrock — AWS-native LLM access — Nova, Claude, Llama, and more via one API
Amazon Bedrock is AWS's managed LLM service, providing access to Amazon's own Nova models alongside third-party models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and others. It integrates natively with the AWS ecosystem including IAM, VPC, and CloudWatch, making it the default choice for teams already on AWS.
The only way to run Claude, Llama, and Amazon Nova within your own AWS VPC — data never leaves your account.
OpenAI — GPT-4o, o3, and the world's most widely-used AI API
OpenAI is the creator of the GPT model family and the ChatGPT product. Their API provides access to frontier models including GPT-4o, the o-series reasoning models, and the GPT-4.1 long-context family. Pricing is competitive for frontier-tier capability, with prompt caching available on most models.
The most widely-integrated LLM API — virtually every AI framework and tool supports OpenAI natively.
Key strengths compared
Amazon Bedrock
- ▸Native AWS integration — IAM, VPC, CloudWatch, S3
- ▸Access to Claude, Llama, Mistral, and Amazon Nova via one API
- ▸Enterprise compliance: SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR
OpenAI
- ▸Largest ecosystem & third-party integrations
- ▸Best-in-class function calling & structured outputs
- ▸Prompt caching on all major models
Provider category context
Amazon Bedrock is a cloud, founded in 2023. OpenAI is a frontier lab, founded in 2015. The category difference means these providers serve partially overlapping use cases — compare the model lists and pricing tables above to find the best fit for your specific workload.
How to choose between them
Choose Amazon Bedrock if you need native aws integration — iam, vpc, cloudwatch, s3. Choose OpenAI if you need largest ecosystem & third-party integrations. For high-volume production workloads, run a cost comparison using the token pricing table above with your actual prompt/completion token ratio — the cheapest provider depends heavily on your input-to-output token ratio.