Fastly vs Vercel

Edge cloud platform — CDN + compute + security + observability
vs. Frontend cloud for Next.js and modern web frameworks

Fastly website ↗Vercel 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 ↗

Vercel

Hobby (Free)

Free forever. 100 GB bandwidth, 1M functions, 360 GB-hrs memory, 1M edge requests. 1 developer. Hard caps.

Free

Pro

$20/user/month. 1 TB bandwidth, pay-as-you-go overages. Team seats, concurrent builds.

$20/mo

Enterprise

Custom pricing. SLA, SSO, audit logs, dedicated support.

Custom

Vercel website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Fastly vs hobby on Vercel.

Metric	Fastly	Vercel
bandwidth gb month	—	100 GB/month
edge requests	—	1000000 requests/month
function invocations	—	1000000 invocations/month
memory gb hrs	—	360 GB-hrs/month
team members	—	1 users

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.

Vercel · 15 features

Cron Jobs — Scheduled serverless functions. JSON config in vercel.json.
Edge Functions — V8-isolate serverless functions at edge locations. Lower cold start than Lambda.
Edge Middleware — Intercept requests at edge before hitting origin — auth, routing, A/B tests.
Git-based Deploys — Auto-deploy from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket on every push. Preview URLs for every…
Image Optimization — On-the-fly resize, format conversion (AVIF, WebP), CDN caching.
Incremental Static Regeneration — Re-generate static pages on-demand or via revalidate. Next.js-native.
Log Drains — Stream logs to Datadog, Axiom, Logtail, HTTP endpoints.
Preview Deployments — Unique URL per Git branch/PR. Password-protect or share. Infinite.
Serverless Functions — Node.js, Python, Go. AWS Lambda under the hood. Up to 15 min duration.
Speed Insights — Real User Monitoring. FCP, LCP, CLS, INP per page.
Vercel Blob — Managed object storage (S3-compatible API).
Vercel KV (Redis) — Managed Redis via Upstash. Edge-accessible.
Vercel Marketplace — One-click integrations: Supabase, Clerk, Sentry, PostHog, Resend, 100+ services.
Vercel Postgres — Managed Neon Postgres. Edge-accessible with @vercel/postgres.
Web Analytics — Privacy-friendly web analytics. Core Web Vitals, visitors, pages.

Developer interfaces

Kind	Fastly	Vercel
CLI	Fastly CLI	Vercel CLI
SDK	compute-go-starter, compute-js-starter, compute-rust-starter	@vercel/client
REST	Fastly API	Vercel REST API
MCP	—	Vercel MCP
OTHER	Compute@Edge (Wasm), VCL (Varnish)	Edge Runtime Bindings

Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Fastly and Vercel are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

Want this comparison in your AI agent's context? Install the free Staxly MCP server.