OpenAI vs Amazon Bedrock: Token Pricing, Speed & Intelligence

Full comparison of OpenAI and Amazon Bedrock — live token pricing, latency, throughput, context window, strengths, weaknesses, and best use cases. Updated July 2026.

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.

CodingChatVisionReasoningAgents

Proprietary models

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.

AWS-nativeEnterprise complianceMulti-modelHIPAA workloadsAgents

Proprietary modelsHosts open weights

Key metrics

Cheapest input ($/1M)

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Cheapest output ($/1M)

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Peak throughput

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Best latency (TTFT)

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Intelligence score

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Context window

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Live token pricing

Strengths & weaknesses

OpenAI

Largest ecosystem & third-party integrations

Best-in-class function calling & structured outputs

Prompt caching on all major models

o3/o4-mini reasoning models for complex tasks

1M+ token context on GPT-4.1

No open-weight models — full vendor lock-in

Output pricing is among the highest for frontier tier

Rate limits can be restrictive on lower tiers

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

Provisioned throughput for guaranteed capacity

No data leaves your AWS account

More complex setup than standalone inference APIs

Pricing can be higher than direct provider APIs

Latency overhead from AWS abstraction layer

Key differentiators

OpenAI

The most widely-integrated LLM API — virtually every AI framework and tool supports OpenAI natively.

Amazon Bedrock

The only way to run Claude, Llama, and Amazon Nova within your own AWS VPC — data never leaves your account.

Frequently asked questions

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.

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.

Provider resources

OpenAI

Provider page Website Pricing Docs

Amazon Bedrock

Provider page Website Pricing Docs

OpenAI — GPT-4o, o3, and the world's most widely-used AI API

The most widely-integrated LLM API — virtually every AI framework and tool supports OpenAI natively.

Amazon Bedrock — AWS-native LLM access — Nova, Claude, Llama, and more via one API

The only way to run Claude, Llama, and Amazon Nova within your own AWS VPC — data never leaves your account.

Key strengths compared

OpenAI

▸Largest ecosystem & third-party integrations
▸Best-in-class function calling & structured outputs
▸Prompt caching on all major models

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

Provider category context

OpenAI is a frontier lab, founded in 2015. Amazon Bedrock is a cloud, founded in 2023. 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 OpenAI if you need largest ecosystem & third-party integrations. Choose Amazon Bedrock if you need native aws integration — iam, vpc, cloudwatch, s3. 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.