OVHcloud vs Scaleway: Two French clouds: dedicated heritage vs modern cloud-native

France has two clouds, and they disagree about what a cloud is

OVHcloud and Scaleway grew out of the same market and the same decade, and both trace their origins to renting physical servers to French webmasters. From that shared starting point they drew opposite conclusions. OVHcloud decided that the future was still about machines, only more of them, better made and sold in more shapes, and it industrialised accordingly. Scaleway decided that the future was about products a developer could compose, and it spent the last decade rebuilding itself around serverless runtimes, managed data services, an identity model and a console that behaves like a modern software product.

That divergence gives a buyer a genuinely interesting choice rather than a tie-break between near-identical vendors. One offers enormous hardware range, a private network that spans everything and a portfolio wide enough to replace several suppliers. The other offers a tighter, more opinionated catalogue in which each service is designed to be used by code rather than clicked through a panel.

Both are European companies running European infrastructure, so the sovereignty argument that draws many readers here applies to each. What follows is the part that actually differs. AllCloudShop lists both platforms, at the OVHcloud account page and the Scaleway account page.

The two French platforms in outline

Where the two philosophies actually collide

The unit you think in. On OVHcloud the durable unit is frequently a server: a bare metal machine, a VPS, a hosted private cloud host. Public Cloud instances exist and are widely used, but the company's centre of gravity remains physical capacity sold at volume. On Scaleway the durable unit is a project, inside which instances, functions, buckets and databases are resources governed by policies.

How far the catalogue reaches sideways. OVHcloud sells domains, mailboxes, web hosting, telephony, private cloud and bare metal alongside its public cloud. Scaleway stays inside the cloud-native band but goes deeper there, with serverless containers, a container registry, secret management, transactional email and managed observability.

Geography. This is the clearest practical split. OVHcloud operates on three continents, so a customer with users in Canada, Singapore or Australia can be served locally. Scaleway is European only, which is a feature for sovereignty-driven buyers and a genuine constraint for anyone with an international audience.

Interface philosophy. OpenStack compatibility makes OVHcloud Public Cloud immediately familiar to anyone with OpenStack experience and slightly indirect for everyone else, because two API surfaces coexist. Scaleway's API is its own, but it is consistent across every product, and the scw tool and Terraform provider follow the same shape throughout.

What building on each is like

Scaleway is the more comfortable platform for a developer who wants to express everything in code. A project holds the resources, an IAM policy grants an application key exactly the permissions it needs, and the same command line tool creates an instance, a bucket, a managed database and a Kubernetes cluster. Serverless Containers give a middle path between a virtual machine and a full cluster, which suits teams that want deployment without cluster administration.

OVHcloud gives a developer two doors into the same house. The OVHcloud API and control panel handle the account, bare metal, VPS and product lifecycle operations, while a Public Cloud project also exposes OpenStack endpoints for instances, networks and storage. Teams with OpenStack experience will find that a gift, since existing clients, Heat templates and automation carry over. Teams without it need to learn which door to use for which task.

Documentation quality is good on both sides, and it is worth reading before committing: the OVHcloud Public Cloud documentation and the Scaleway documentation are both organised by product. For teams standardising on declarative tooling, both maintain Terraform providers, and the infrastructure as code introduction covers the habits that make either platform pleasant.

Hardware, networks and where data sits

OVHcloud's hardware story is the larger of the two by some margin. The company assembles its own servers, cools them with a water-based design and operates a fibre backbone between its sites, which is what allows bare metal to remain a volume business rather than a niche. vRack extends that advantage into networking: a private layer 2 network that can join bare metal servers, public cloud instances and private cloud hosts, even across data centres, which makes genuinely hybrid architectures straightforward.

Scaleway's hardware range is narrower but unusually interesting. Elastic Metal offers dedicated machines billed by the hour rather than by the month, which is rare and useful for burst workloads that need real hardware. Dedibox continues the monthly dedicated server tradition the company grew from. Apple silicon Mac mini servers serve iOS and macOS build pipelines, a niche almost nobody else covers in Europe. GPU instances span inference-class and training-class accelerators.

Storage design reflects the same split. OVHcloud offers block storage in several performance classes, object storage that speaks both S3 and Swift, and an archive tier for data that must be retained cheaply. Scaleway offers block storage tiers plus object storage with storage classes and a multi-zone option in its main region, which matters for durability requirements. The object storage explainer covers what S3 compatibility does and does not promise on either.

Resilience planning deserves a paragraph of its own. Scaleway's multiple availability zones in its main region let you spread a workload without leaving the country. OVHcloud's larger site count gives you more independent locations to choose from, and the company has made multi-site design a much more prominent part of its guidance since a fire destroyed one of its Strasbourg data centres in 2021. Whichever you choose, the backup strategy article is the right companion.

Buying, governing and paying

Both providers lean hard on European sovereignty in their marketing, and both can support it in substance, but they arrive with different corporate shapes. OVHcloud is a listed company with a formal enterprise motion, structured support levels and offers aimed at public sector and regulated buyers. Scaleway sits inside a large French telecommunications group and sells through a more product-led model with tiered support plans available on top.

Governance is where Scaleway has a clear edge for organisations that need it. Its identity and access model separates an organisation from its projects, issues keys to applications rather than only to people, and attaches policies at a granularity that lets you give an external agency access to exactly one project. OVHcloud provides account-level user management and delegation, which is adequate but less fine-grained than the project-policy model.

Cost behaviour differs mainly through catalogue shape. A mixed OVHcloud estate can combine monthly bare metal, monthly VPS and metered public cloud on one invoice, which is flexible but needs someone to reconcile it. Scaleway meters most things by the hour, with serverless products billed per invocation or per unit of runtime, which is simpler conceptually and easier to lose track of. Either way, the practice described in the budget alerts guide pays for itself in the first month.

What each does best

OVHcloud

Range, and the network that ties it together. Very few providers let a single customer run a bare metal fleet, an OpenStack public cloud project and a VMware-based private environment on one private network, under one contract, in Europe. For companies consolidating suppliers or running genuinely hybrid systems, that is the whole argument.

The second strength is reach beyond Europe. Sites in North America and Asia-Pacific mean an international audience can be served without adding a second vendor, which is something Scaleway cannot currently offer.

Scaleway

Product design. The console, the API, the command line tool and the Terraform provider all behave the same way, the identity model is genuinely useful, and the serverless tier gives teams a way to deploy without owning servers or clusters. Cockpit turns observability into a managed service rather than a side project, which is a meaningful saving for a small platform team.

The second strength is unusual hardware options in a cloud-native wrapper: hourly bare metal through Elastic Metal, Arm instances, and Apple silicon machines for mobile build pipelines. These fill gaps that most European providers leave open.

The honest downsides

OVHcloud

The portfolio is wide enough to be confusing. Products built and acquired at different times do not share a single interface, and working out which panel governs which resource takes time. The dual API surface, helpful to OpenStack users, is an extra concept for everyone else. Identity management is less granular than a project-policy model, and the company still carries reputational work from the 2021 Strasbourg fire, which made independent backups and multi-site design a standard part of any serious deployment plan.

Scaleway

Europe-only is the headline constraint. Users in the Americas or Asia will feel the distance, and a global product will eventually need a second provider. The catalogue, while coherent, has matured unevenly, so it pays to read the documentation for each service you intend to depend on rather than assuming parity. New accounts start with conservative quotas that are lifted on request, and the platform has nothing comparable to vRack for bridging into dedicated or private environments at another site.

Matching the platform to the project

OVHcloud suits organisations whose infrastructure includes physical servers, whose users are spread across continents, or whose procurement process expects a listed vendor with formal support tiers. Hosting companies, media businesses, enterprises consolidating suppliers and anyone running a hybrid estate will get the most from it. The OVHcloud account listing shows the available variants.

Scaleway suits teams building software for a European audience who want managed Kubernetes, serverless runtimes, managed databases and observability under one identity model, expressed in code from the first day. Startups, software companies and platform teams are its core audience; see the Scaleway account listing.

For further context, OVHcloud against Hetzner puts French breadth beside German focus, Scaleway against Hetzner weighs cloud-native services against raw value, and Civo against Scaleway looks at Kubernetes specifically.

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