Fastly vs Netlify

Overview

Fastly

Stacks1.1K

Followers507

Votes153

Netlify

Stacks3.6K

Followers2.1K

Votes207

Fastly vs Netlify: What are the differences?

Introduction

Fastly and Netlify are both content delivery network (CDN) providers that help optimize and improve website performance. While they have some similarities in terms of their CDN offerings, there are key differences between the two.

Pricing and Billing: Fastly offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where customers pay for the amount of CDN traffic they use. Netlify, on the other hand, has a tiered pricing structure based on the number of sites and features required. This means that Fastly may be more suitable for websites with fluctuating traffic, while Netlify might be a better option for smaller websites with a fixed budget.
DevOps Integration: Netlify is specifically designed for developers and seamlessly integrates with popular DevOps tools like Git and continuous deployment systems. This allows developers to easily deploy and manage their websites directly from their code repositories. Fastly, on the other hand, provides powerful CDN functionalities but may require additional development work and configuration to integrate with existing DevOps workflows.
Edge Computing Capabilities: With Fastly, developers have the option to execute custom logic at the edge of the network using Fastly's Compute@Edge. This allows for dynamic content manipulation and personalization directly within Fastly's CDN. Netlify, however, focuses more on simplifying static site hosting and deployment, without providing the same level of customizable edge computing capabilities.
Global Network Reach: Fastly has an extensive global network of edge servers, strategically located in major cities worldwide. This allows for faster content delivery and reduced latency for users across geographically distributed locations. Netlify, while also providing a robust CDN, may have a slightly smaller network reach in comparison, which could impact performance for users in certain regions.
Advanced Caching Control: Fastly offers highly customizable caching configurations, allowing developers to precisely control cache behavior and cache invalidation. This level of granular control is especially valuable for websites with complex caching requirements. While Netlify also offers caching functionality, it may not provide the same level of flexibility and customization options as Fastly.
Specialized Use Cases: Fastly has established itself as a popular choice for large-scale, high-traffic websites. Its powerful CDN capabilities, along with edge computing and security offerings, make it suitable for enterprises and organizations with complex requirements. Netlify, on the other hand, is often favored by developers building static websites or deploying modern web apps, especially those using popular frameworks like React or Gatsby.

In summary, Fastly and Netlify are both CDN providers, but they differ in terms of pricing and billing models, integration with DevOps workflows, edge computing capabilities, network reach, caching control, and target use cases. The choice between the two would depend on the specific needs and requirements of your website or application.

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Advice on Fastly, Netlify

Howie

Full Stack Engineer at Yintrust

Aug 13, 2020

Decidedon

Netlify

We use Netlify to host static websites.

The reasons for choosing Netlify over GitHub Pages are as follows:

Netfily can bind multiple domain names, while GitHub Pages can only bind one domain name
With Netfily, the original repository can be private, while GitHub Pages free tier requires the original repository to be public

In addition, in order to use CDN, we use Netlify DNS.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Fastly	Netlify
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.	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.
static content delivery; event-driven content delivery; Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA); API caching; Instant Purge; Soft Purge; surrogate keys; streaming and VOD; Real-time Analytics; instant configuration; instant deploys; built on Varnish; Custom VCL upload; on-demand DDoS mitigation; Transport Layer Security; PCI compliance and compliance services; Origin Shield; real-time streaming logs; Historical Stats; Edge Dictionaries; Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator; Configuration Control Panel; stale-if-error; stale-while-revalidate; Edge Side Includes (ESI); GeoIP/geography detection; mobile device detection; edge authorization/paywalls; shopper prioritization	Global Network;Global Network;Instant Cache Validation;Atomic Deploys;API proxying;SSL for custom domains;Continuous Deployment;Link to Github or Bitbucket
Statistics
Stacks 1.1K	Stacks 3.6K
Followers 507	Followers 2.1K
Votes 153	Votes 207
Pros & Cons
Pros 28 Real-time updates 26 Fastest CDN 22 Powerful API 20 Great support 14 Great customer support Cons 1 Minimum $50/mo spend	Pros 48 Easy deploy 43 Fastest static hosting and continuous deployments 23 Super simple deploys 23 Free SSL support 16 Easy Setup and Continous deployments Cons 7 It's expensive 1 Bandwidth limitation
Integrations
Heroku WordPress Google BigQuery Magento Amazon S3 Zencoder Rackspace Cloud Files OpenStack Datadog Sumo Logic	GitHub Bitbucket

What are some alternatives to Fastly, Netlify?

CloudFlare

Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.

GitHub Pages

Public webpages hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

KeyCDN

KeyCDN offers super fast and secure content delivery for minimal loading time. In addition to the CDN, it also offers advanced image processing and many other features such as live logs and Let's Encrypt SSL.

DomainRacer

It is a blazing fast hosting solution that provides Customer Satisfaction driven Web Hosting services since 2016.

MaxCDN

The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them.

Vercel

A cloud platform for serverless deployment. It enables developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and require no supervision, all with minimal configuration.

Surge

Surge makes it easy for developers to deploy projects to a production-quality CDN through Grunt, Gulp, npm.

Webflow

Webflow is a responsive design tool that lets you design, build, and publish websites in an intuitive interface. Clean code included!

jsDelivr

jsDelivr is a free CDN for open source developers, with advanced features for javascript projects with access to NPM and Github It uses multiple CDN providers, resulting in the best possible uptime and performance.

Related Comparisons

Fastly vs Netlify: What are the differences?

Introduction

Pricing and Billing: Fastly offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where customers pay for the amount of CDN traffic they use. Netlify, on the other hand, has a tiered pricing structure based on the number of sites and features required. This means that Fastly may be more suitable for websites with fluctuating traffic, while Netlify might be a better option for smaller websites with a fixed budget.
DevOps Integration: Netlify is specifically designed for developers and seamlessly integrates with popular DevOps tools like Git and continuous deployment systems. This allows developers to easily deploy and manage their websites directly from their code repositories. Fastly, on the other hand, provides powerful CDN functionalities but may require additional development work and configuration to integrate with existing DevOps workflows.
Edge Computing Capabilities: With Fastly, developers have the option to execute custom logic at the edge of the network using Fastly's Compute@Edge. This allows for dynamic content manipulation and personalization directly within Fastly's CDN. Netlify, however, focuses more on simplifying static site hosting and deployment, without providing the same level of customizable edge computing capabilities.
Global Network Reach: Fastly has an extensive global network of edge servers, strategically located in major cities worldwide. This allows for faster content delivery and reduced latency for users across geographically distributed locations. Netlify, while also providing a robust CDN, may have a slightly smaller network reach in comparison, which could impact performance for users in certain regions.
Advanced Caching Control: Fastly offers highly customizable caching configurations, allowing developers to precisely control cache behavior and cache invalidation. This level of granular control is especially valuable for websites with complex caching requirements. While Netlify also offers caching functionality, it may not provide the same level of flexibility and customization options as Fastly.
Specialized Use Cases: Fastly has established itself as a popular choice for large-scale, high-traffic websites. Its powerful CDN capabilities, along with edge computing and security offerings, make it suitable for enterprises and organizations with complex requirements. Netlify, on the other hand, is often favored by developers building static websites or deploying modern web apps, especially those using popular frameworks like React or Gatsby.

Fastly vs Netlify

Overview

Fastly vs Netlify: What are the differences?