Start with egress, the number that decides the bill
A CDN bill is mostly outgoing traffic. Storage and compute are rounding errors beside it, so the first comparison a reader should make is the price per gigabyte of egress, multiplied by the traffic the site actually sends. Across the providers in our comparison set, that figure runs €0.01 to €0.13, which is wide enough that the choice can matter more than every other line combined.
SberCloud lists egress at RUB 1.15, and UCloud sells bandwidth inside a package instead: 200 GB/month data package, 30 Mbps peak bandwidth. Those are different shapes, not different prices. A per gigabyte rate scales with demand. A capped data package with a peak bandwidth ceiling caps your exposure and caps your speed at the same time.
So the useful first question is not which provider is cheaper per gigabyte. It is which one matches your traffic shape. Bursty, unpredictable growth favours a per unit rate. Predictable, steady volume favours a package where the ceiling is already priced. The CDN rankings are the place to line both shapes up side by side.
Note also the currency. A per gigabyte rate priced in rubles and a package priced in US dollars are not directly comparable, and the conversion you use will move the answer. Fix a currency before you compare anything.
Check the free allowance before you pay anything
Free allowances are the easiest part of a CDN contract to read and the easiest to leave on the table. SberCloud offers a free tier, with 10 TB of outgoing traffic per month of outgoing traffic included, plus 1,000,000 requests on its function pricing. That request allowance is large enough that a modest project may never cross it.
UCloud's credit is different in kind. $5 credit on contacting support after linking a credit card is available once you contact support after linking a credit card, so it takes a deliberate step to claim rather than arriving automatically. Its managed Kubernetes control plane is free, which is a yes and costs nothing, while SberCloud's control plane pricing is listed as a paid item at RUB 2.98 on its managed Kubernetes tariff.
The comparison to hold onto is between a stated allowance and a discretionary credit. An allowance you can measure against your own logs is a fact. A credit requires a support conversation, and nobody should build a forecast on it.
Price the entry plan, then multiply by what you actually need
Entry plans are the second line that surprises people, because the headline rate is rarely the rate you pay. SberCloud's entry configuration is 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB NVMe at RUB 23.75. UCloud's is 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB system disk at $5.34. The providers differ in currency and in the disk type offered in the smallest plan, so the raw figures cannot be laid next to each other without thinking.
Billing granularity is the third thing to read on the same tariff page. SberCloud bills some compute hourly and some of it per minute, and UCloud's general compute billing is hourly. Per minute billing lets you stop a job the moment it finishes instead of paying for the rest of the clock hour, which matters for bursty origins behind a CDN.
UCloud's model is monthly, with the data package and peak bandwidth sold together. SberCloud's models are hourly. A monthly commitment rewards steady volume and punishes a site that shrinks. Work out your direction of travel before picking the billing model, not after.
Test reliability and compliance before the contract
Price is only interesting if the content arrives. SberCloud publishes an uptime commitment of 99.9% on its compute product. SberCloud also offers DDoS protection, which is a yes, and that matters for any CDN origin that is reachable directly rather than shielded behind an edge.
Compliance tells you who is allowed to sign. SberCloud lists ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO/IEC 27701:2019 and ISO/IEC 27017:2015, a set that includes protection of personal data under Russian data protection law. UCloud lists CMMI Level 5, ISO 9001 and ISO 27001, a set weighted toward service management and process quality. If your buyers are Russian entities handling personal data, that distinction is close to decisive. The SberCloud review sets out the rest of the security picture.
Geographic reach is another part of reliability. SberCloud operates 9 locations in RU, with its headquarters in RU. A single region concentrates both latency and risk. Compare that against any provider you are considering for audiences outside that region, including the Alibaba Cloud review and EdgeNext review for Asia-facing traffic.
Check what the edge has to serve
A CDN fronts dynamic content as well as static files, so the origin's own capabilities decide what the edge can usefully accelerate. SberCloud's storage types are object and its object storage is S3-compatible, which is a yes. That combination means standard tooling and standard migration paths.
UCloud's managed database engines are MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB. If an origin application is written against one of those, a provider that terminates the same way removes a class of work from the migration.
Interconnect matters for origins that talk to each other. SberCloud provides Infiniband for its machine learning service depending on configuration, along with NVLink and Direct Connect. Direct Connect is the one to read carefully, because a private path between edge and origin changes both latency and the failure modes of the origin.
Weigh the support you will actually use
Support channels rarely decide a purchase and frequently decide whether a purchase goes badly. SberCloud offers email, phone and chat. UCloud's channel list is not in this set of figures, so the question to ask is narrower: who answers, in which language, and within what time.
There is a corporate point here too. SberCloud operates as LLC Cloud Technologies with a listed tax identification number, which matters for anyone signing a contract that needs a Russian legal entity. UCloud was founded in 2012, a useful signal of how long the operation has existed. The UCloud review covers the rest of the company details.
Where a provider publishes a figure, use it. Where it does not, treat that as an open question to put to their sales team before you sign, rather than assuming the answer.
Put the numbers in one table and decide
Take your own monthly egress figure, multiply it by each provider's per gigabyte rate or check it against each package ceiling, then add the entry plan, the origin compute at the granularity you would actually use, and any request charges. SberCloud's function pricing lists RUB 0.0013, RUB 14.34 and RUB 814.68, which is the shape of a bill where several small charges stack rather than one large one.
Then apply the non price filters: uptime commitment, DDoS protection, compliance coverage, region count, and whether the free allowance matches your real traffic. If two providers are within a small margin on cost, those filters settle it.
Read the SberCloud review and the UCloud review for the detail behind the numbers, and use the CDN rankings to see where the wider field lands on the same criteria.