Staxly

Fastly vs Grafana Cloud

Edge cloud platform — CDN + compute + security + observability
vs. Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana

Fastly website ↗Grafana Cloud website ↗

Pricing tiers

Fastly

Free Trial
Free allowances: 100 GB bandwidth, 1M CDN requests, 10M Edge Compute requests, 100M vCPU-ms, 500K DDoS requests.
Free
Pay-as-you-go
Usage-based rates with volume discounts. No minimum commitment.
$0 base (usage-based)
Basic Package
$1,500/month. 100M requests. Standard support.
$1500/mo
Starter Package
$6,000/month. 500M requests. Gold support.
$6000/mo
Advantage
Custom. 2B requests. Gold support.
Custom
Ultimate
Custom. 5B+ requests. Enterprise support.
Custom
Fastly website ↗

Grafana Cloud

Free
Always free. 10k metrics series + 50 GB logs/traces/profiles + 3 users + 14-day retention.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
Apache 2.0 / AGPL. Run Grafana + Mimir + Loki + Tempo yourself.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$19/mo platform fee + usage-based overages. 10k metrics series + 50 GB included. 13-month metrics retention.
$19/mo
Enterprise
$25,000/year minimum. Custom retention, premium support, BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) option.
$25000/mo
Grafana Cloud website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Fastly vs free on Grafana Cloud.

MetricFastlyGrafana Cloud
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Fastly · 16 features

  • API Security — Schema validation + rate limiting.
  • Bot Management — Behavioral bot detection + mitigation.
  • CDN — Global Varnish-based CDN with VCL customization.
  • Compute@Edge — Wasm-based serverless at 200+ POPs. Rust, JS, Go.
  • DDoS Protection — Included on all plans.
  • Fanout (WebSockets) — Persistent connection fan-out at edge.
  • Image Optimization — On-the-fly resize/format/quality.
  • Instant Purge — <150ms global cache invalidation.
  • KV Store (Config) — Edge key-value store for config.
  • Live Streaming — HLS + DASH live video delivery.
  • Log Streaming — Real-time logs to S3, Datadog, Splunk, Azure, GCS, Kafka.
  • Managed TLS — Automated cert issuance + renewal.
  • Next-Gen WAF — Signal Sciences acquired — runtime app protection.
  • Real-Time Analytics — Sub-second log streaming + metrics.
  • Secret Store — Encrypted secrets at edge.
  • Shield POP — Origin shield to reduce origin load.

Grafana Cloud · 16 features

  • Alloy (OTel agent) — Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector with Grafana additions.
  • Application Platform — Infrastructure + k8s + frontend + cloud provider integrations.
  • Beyla (eBPF auto-instrumentation) — Zero-code auto-instrumentation via eBPF for any language.
  • Faro (RUM) — Frontend observability — traces, logs, Core Web Vitals.
  • Grafana in Azure Marketplace — "Azure Managed Grafana" — Azure-native deployment.
  • Grafana Incident — Incident management with Slack-native flows.
  • Grafana OnCall — On-call scheduling + incident response (powered by Amixr).
  • Grafana SLO — Service level objective tracking + error budget visualization.
  • Grafana (visualization) — Dashboards, variables, alerting, annotations over any datasource.
  • k6 (synthetic + load testing) — Load testing + synthetic monitoring. JavaScript-based scripts.
  • Loki (logs) — Prometheus-inspired log aggregation with LogQL.
  • Mimir (metrics) — Horizontally-scalable Prometheus-compatible TSDB.
  • Pyroscope (profiling) — Continuous profiling (CPU, memory, etc.).
  • Self-Host Option — Full OSS stack deployable in your infra.
  • Tempo (traces) — High-scale distributed tracing with TraceQL.
  • Unified Alerting — Grafana-native alerting across metrics, logs, traces.

Developer interfaces

KindFastlyGrafana Cloud
CLIFastly CLIGrafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli
SDKcompute-go-starter, compute-js-starter, compute-rust-starterFaro Web SDK (RUM)
RESTFastly APIGrafana HTTP API, Loki Push API
OTHERCompute@Edge (Wasm), VCL (Varnish)Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Fastly and Grafana Cloud are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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