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Fastly vs imgix: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here is a comparison between Fastly and imgix, highlighting the key differences between the two.

  1. Edge Cloud Platform vs Image Processing as a Service: Fastly is primarily an edge cloud platform that offers content delivery network (CDN) services, while imgix focuses on providing image processing as a service. Fastly enables faster web and mobile content delivery through its globally distributed network of servers, while imgix helps developers optimize, resize, and transform images on-the-fly.

  2. Dynamic Content vs Static Content: Fastly specializes in delivering dynamic content, such as APIs, streaming videos, and personalized web pages. It excels in handling real-time content updates and offers advanced caching and edge computing capabilities to improve dynamic content delivery. On the other hand, imgix is specifically designed for optimizing and delivering static images efficiently, ensuring responsive images across various devices.

  3. Developer Control and Customizability: Fastly provides developers with a high degree of control, allowing them to write custom code (using Varnish Configuration Language, VCL) to define how content is delivered and cached at the edge. It offers extensive customization options, powerful scripting capabilities, and full access to HTTP headers. Imgix, while offering a range of configuration options, focuses more on simplicity and ease of use, providing developers with predefined image processing parameters to quickly optimize images.

  4. Pricing Model: Fastly charges based on bandwidth usage and the number of requests made to its network, making it suitable for organizations that require both high-speed content delivery and scalability. Imgix, on the other hand, operates on a pricing model that is based on the number of processed images per month, without considering bandwidth or request volume. This can be advantageous for organizations primarily focused on image optimization and handling a fixed number of images.

  5. Real-Time Analytics vs Image Insights: Fastly offers real-time analytics and visibility into how content is being delivered and consumed, allowing organizations to monitor performance, troubleshoot issues, and gain actionable insights. It provides detailed metrics, logs, and live event streaming for efficient monitoring and analysis. Imgix, though providing some basic image transformation statistics, does not offer extensive analytics capabilities, as its core focus is primarily image processing rather than content delivery.

  6. Community and Support Ecosystem: Fastly enjoys a thriving community of developers and offers comprehensive support resources, including documentation, tutorials, webinars, and community forums. It also provides dedicated support for enterprise customers. Imgix, while offering support resources and documentation, may not have as extensive a community or support ecosystem as Fastly, as its service is more narrowly focused on image processing.

In Summary, Fastly is an edge cloud platform that focuses on delivering dynamic content, offering developer control and customizability, real-time analytics, and extensive community support. Imgix, on the other hand, emphasizes image processing as a service, providing simplicity, ease of use, and a pricing model based on the number of processed images.

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Pros of Fastly
Pros of imgix
  • 28
    Real-time updates
  • 26
    Fastest CDN
  • 22
    Powerful API
  • 20
    Great support
  • 14
    Great customer support
  • 7
    Instant Purging
  • 7
    Custom VCL
  • 6
    Good pricing
  • 6
    Tag-based Purging
  • 5
    HTTP/2 Support
  • 4
    Speed & functionality
  • 4
    Image processing on demande (Fastly IO)
  • 4
    Best CDN
  • 28
    Image processing on demand
  • 24
    Easy setup
  • 18
    Smart Cropping
  • 18
    Reduce Development Costs
  • 15
    Efficient
  • 12
    Insanely Fast
  • 11
    Filters, resizing, blur and more as url parameters
  • 10
    Easy to understand pricing
  • 9
    Professional Features and Options
  • 6
    Excellent Face Detection
  • 6
    Lightyears better than ImageMagick
  • 5
    S3 as source
  • 4
    Great for Dynamic Compositing
  • 4
    Scales to your company's needs
  • 1
    Free tier
  • 1
    Amazing support
  • 1
    Great libraries and integrations
  • 1
    Automatic scrset generation
  • 1
    Forward thinking
  • 1
    Video encoding
  • 1
    Fast Image Delivery

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Cons of Fastly
Cons of imgix
  • 1
    Minimum $50/mo spend
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    What is Fastly?

    Fastly's real-time content delivery network gives you total control over your content, unprecedented access to performance analytics, and the ability to instantly update content in 150 milliseconds.

    What is imgix?

    imgix is the leading platform for end-to-end visual media processing. With robust APIs, SDKs, and integrations, imgix empowers developers to optimize, transform, manage, and deliver images and videos at scale through simple URL parameters.

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    What companies use Fastly?
    What companies use imgix?
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    What tools integrate with Fastly?
    What tools integrate with imgix?

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    What are some alternatives to Fastly and imgix?
    CloudFlare
    Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.
    Akamai
    If you've ever shopped online, downloaded music, watched a web video or connected to work remotely, you've probably used Akamai's cloud platform. Akamai helps businesses connect the hyperconnected, empowering them to transform and reinvent their business online. We remove the complexities of technology, so you can focus on driving your business faster forward.
    Netlify
    Netlify is smart enough to process your site and make sure all assets gets optimized and served with perfect caching-headers from a cookie-less domain. We make sure your HTML is served straight from our CDN edge nodes without any round-trip to our backend servers and are the only ones to give you instant cache invalidation when you push a new deploy. Netlify is also the only static hosting service with integrated continuous deployment.
    Varnish
    Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.
    StackPath
    Build your applications and services at the edge, with Edge Computing and Edge Services that give you high performance, full security, and total control.
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