Fastly vs Cloud Providers: A Competitive Comparison

Move to Fastly’s Edge Cloud Network

See the methodology behind how we got these numbers.

Looking to boost your website's performance, reduce costs, or get access to better features and support? Here are six reasons which set Fastly apart from other cloud providers.

1. Performance

• Powerful POPs: Fastly employs fewer, more powerful POPs in strategic locations so your users get faster results.

• Instant Purge: We invalidate stale content in 150ms on a global average¹, outperforming traditional cloud providers. Cache highly dynamic content at the edge with Fastly for better performance.

2. Cost savings

• Origin Shield: Fastly reduces origin traffic and egress costs by collapsing multiple redundant requests for the same content into one request to origin using Origin Shield.

• Configurability: Our CDN is fully configurable using flexible APIs. Deploy configuration changes in seconds, without having to engage in costly Professional Services.

• Reduced egress: If your origin servers are located with a cloud provider, you can benefit from reduced egress costs through our partner relationships.

3. Visibility

• Real-time logs: We stream real-time graphs and logs from the edge for instant visibility into traffic, performance, security threats, and troubleshooting. Avoid  batch-based processing and extra charges with traditional cloud providers.

• Logging integrations: Stream logs to your preferred logging provider to analyze requests and responses, diagnose issues, and understand customer engagement. Fastly integrates with an unprecedented 33 logging endpoints.

4. Multi-cloud broker

• Load balancing: Fastly acts as a programmable arbiter to control and route traffic for extra redundancy and resilience. We support intelligent load balancing between cloud providers, facilitating instant failover if your primary origin goes down.

• Flexibility: We support multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and on-premise architecture to give you flexibility when deciding on which core cloud services you want to use for storage, logging, compute, etc. 

5. Developer-friendly

• DevOps toolchain: We enabled deep integration through our rich APIs that let you go from plan-to-monitor, by integrating the popular and frequently used DevOps tools.

• CI/CD: Combined with our configurability and visibility, developers eliminate manual steps and limitations with a powerful CDN fully integrated with CI/CD options, including Terraform (IaC), API, GUI, and CLI to enhance your workflow and save time and money. 

• Open Source: Through our Fast Forward program, Fastly shows its support of open source and open standards, part of our mission to build a better internet. You focus on building the next big thing. We’ll make it faster, safer, and better.

6. Support

Say goodbye to long ticket queues and endless support chains. With a 98% annual average customer satisfaction (CSAT) rate² Fastly’s world-class support includes direct assistance from our engineers via chat and in-depth technical documentation.

Hear what our customers have to say

We offer industry leading value

Move to a better network. We are committed to making the switch as seamless as possible.

Try Fastly Free

Hear what analysts have to say

Fastly delivered 189% ROI
Learn more in the Forrester TEI study for CDN

Read more

Forrester names Fastly Compute a Leader
in the 2023 Wave for Edge Development Platforms

Download report

* Blog: Fastly is faster at time to first byte.

¹ 150ms mean purge time to clear cached content globally, as of December 31, 2022
² 98% annual average CSAT as of 9/30/2023