SAA-C03 vs AZ-104: AWS or Azure for your first associate certification?
These are the flagship associate-level certifications for their platforms, and they are the credentials employers most often name for cloud roles on AWS and Azure respectively. They are not equivalents, though: SAA-C03 is a design exam that asks which architecture best meets a requirement, while AZ-104 is an administration exam that asks how you would configure and operate resources. Choose by platform first — whichever your employer or target job uses — and then be aware that you are also choosing between a design emphasis and an operations one.
The two exams at a glance
| SAA-C03AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate | AZ-104Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | AWS | Microsoft Azure |
| Level | Associate | Associate |
| Questions | 65 | 40–60 |
| Time limit | 130 minutes | 100 minutes |
| Passing score | 720 / 1000 | 700 / 1000 |
| Exam fee | $150 | $165 |
| Valid for | 3 years | 1 year (free renewal) |
| Exam domains | 4 | 5 |
| On SaveMyCert | Fully live | Fully live |
Choose SAA-C03 if…
- Your organisation runs on AWS, or the roles you want name AWS in their listings.
- You want a design-focused credential: trade-offs between cost, resilience, performance and security across a whole platform.
- Your role is or is heading toward architect, cloud engineer or a broad build role.
- You want the AWS certification that appears most often in engineering job postings.
Choose AZ-104 if…
- Your organisation runs on Microsoft, which is common in enterprise, public sector and healthcare.
- Your work is hands-on operations: identities, storage, virtual machines, networking and monitoring.
- You want a credential whose renewal is free rather than a paid re-sit.
- You are aiming at an Azure administrator, infrastructure or systems role.
Design versus administration is a real difference
SAA-C03 questions describe a workload and ask which architecture best satisfies a constraint. Several answers usually work; one works best for the stated requirement. The skill being measured is judgement across services you may never have configured yourself.
AZ-104 questions are closer to the console. They ask which setting, which role assignment, which redundancy option, which diagnostic — the decisions an administrator makes while operating an environment. The skill being measured is applied familiarity with the platform you actually run.
Neither is harder in the abstract. Which one feels harder depends almost entirely on whether your day job is designing systems or running them.
The renewal difference over five years
AWS associate certifications are valid for a fixed term and recertifying means sitting the current exam again and paying the fee again. Azure role-based certifications expire after a year, but renewal is free through a short unproctored assessment on Microsoft Learn.
Over a career that is a meaningful gap in both money and effort, and it rarely gets factored in when people compare the two. The facts table above shows each certification’s published validity, and our cost calculator will total a multi-exam path including how each vendor handles renewal.
Do the skills transfer if you switch platform later?
The concepts transfer well; the specifics do not. Virtual networks, identity and access management, object storage, load balancing, autoscaling and managed databases all exist on both platforms, and understanding one gives you a strong head start on the other. What does not transfer is the naming, the defaults, the service limits and the console.
In practice, someone who holds one of these and moves platform is usually productive quickly but needs real hands-on time before the other certification is passable. Plan for weeks of adjustment, not days — and do not assume a second cloud certification adds much until you have actually changed platform.
Which is the better single certification to hold?
Whichever matches the platform you work on. That sounds evasive but it is the honest answer: a certification in the cloud your employer does not use is a talking point, while one in the cloud they do use is directly applicable.
If you genuinely have no constraint, look at listings for the role you want in your market and count which platform appears more. If it is close, AWS has the larger catalogue of follow-on exams and the deeper pool of third-party material, which makes it the marginally safer default for a first associate certification.