Azure App Service Plan Tiers

Features comparison between the different SKUs

Edit 1: added Hybrid Connections

App Service Plan Overview

If you want to host a web app, mobile app or API app in Azure, you need an App Service Plan. Basically, this is the compute resource for your app. You have the choice between 5 SKUs:

Free

Shared

Basic

Standard

Premium

It’s easy to understand how the compute resource is growing between each tier. However, it’s not only a matter of compute power or storage space. As you are going up in the SKUs, you will also get more features. So even if you don’t need more computing power, in some cases you will have to scale up your App Service Plan to get some required feature.

I had a hard time finding a quick overview and comparison of the SKUs. The only place I found where you can get some detail is in the Azure Portal when you choose your pricing tier (while creating a new App Service Plan or scaling up).

The App Service Plan pricing page gives you some information, but not in great details. And another annoying thing is when it comes to the instance size, the naming is not consistent between the web page display (pricing page / portal) and the API (PowerShell, CLI, RM template).

Example: B1 = Tier Basic + Size Small

For Azure SQL Database or VM, it’s again a bit different.

App Service Plan Size specs

Basic, Standard and Premium are sharing the same available sizes and specs.

App Service Plan size translation:

1 = Small = 1 Core + 1.75 GB RAM

2 = Medium = 2 Core + 3.5 GB RAM

3 = Large = 4 Core + 7GB RAM

It’s quite easy to remember, the Small size just doubles each time. Also note that the Free and Shared are only available in one size.

F1 = 1 Core + 1 GB RAM

D1 = 1 Core + 0.5 GB RAM

In both case the core is shared with other tenants, and each tenant is allowed for a certain time of CPU per day (see below).