Fastly vs Cloudflare R2
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Fastly and Cloudflare R2.
Quick Verdict
3.7/5
Fastly
0 reviews
4.4/5
Cloudflare R2
0 reviews
Cloudflare R2 is rated higher (4.4 vs 3.7). Fastly is a high-performance programmable CDN used by GitHub, Spotify, and the New York Times. Compute@Edge for serverless. Real-time log streaming, advanced VCL configuration, and instant cache purge. Cloudflare R2 is S3-compatible object storage with zero egress fees — ever. $0.015/GB/month storage, no data transfer costs. Tightly integrated with Cloudflare Workers and CDN.
 Fastly Programmable CDN used by GitHub, New York Times | Cloudflare R2 Zero egress S3 storage on Cloudflare's network | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.7 (0 reviews) | 4.4 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium (free tier plus usage-based pricing) |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Engineering-led content, media, e-commerce and API platforms that need programmable caching, instant purge and real-time logs on a global edge network | Teams serving media, assets, downloads or backups where egress dominates their current object storage bill — especially those already building on Workers or Pages. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | 100+ city-level PoPs across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia/NZ | Global — Cloudflare network |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accesseu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter | free tiers3 compatibleeu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi access |
| Visit Fastly → | Visit Cloudflare R2 → | |
Fastly
Pros
- + Instant Purge with mean global purge under 150 ms and real-time log streaming into your own observability stack
- + Deep programmability: VCL plus Fastly Compute on the same edge network
- + Real free tier: 100 GB bandwidth, 500,000 requests and five TLS domains free every month
- + Large, high-density PoP footprint (100+ cities, 622 Tbps) with strong coverage in Europe and India
- + Unlimited layer 3/4 DDoS mitigation included, HTTP/3 and QUIC, full IPv6 dual-stack support
Cons
- - VCL and cache architecture have a real learning curve — overkill for simple caching needs
- - Regional bandwidth skew: $0.28/GB in Africa, India and South Korea versus $0.12/GB in NA/EU
- - Request pricing table and reviewer-quoted rates disagree; WAF pricing is unpublished
- - Free tier requires a credit card; first Compute deploy starts a limited trial
- - Legacy pre-November-2025 accounts sit on different ($50/month) terms than new sign-ups
Cloudflare R2
Pros
- + Zero egress fees on all storage classes — no data transfer bill at all
- + Standing free tier: 10 GB-month storage, 1M Class A and 10M Class B ops monthly
- + S3-compatible API works with existing SDKs and migration tooling
- + Published durability (11 nines) and a 99.9% monthly uptime SLA with credits
- + Binds directly to Workers, Pages and public buckets with no cross-product egress
Cons
- - S3 feature surface is thinner — no replication topology, simpler lifecycle tooling
- - Class A operations at $4.50/million make write-heavy workloads pricier than storage-only math
- - Infrequent Access has a 30-day minimum storage duration and retrieval fees
- - Real lock-in sits in Workers-based processing around buckets, not the storage itself
- - Not suited to analytics-style scans or small-object high-churn data
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