Fastly vs Sirv
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Fastly and Sirv.
Quick Verdict
3.7/5
Fastly
0 reviews
3.4/5
Sirv
0 reviews
Fastly is rated higher (3.7 vs 3.4). 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. Sirv delivers images and videos globally with automatic format conversion, responsive sizing, and interactive features. Built for e-commerce, media, and content-heavy sites needing fast load times.
 Fastly Programmable CDN used by GitHub, New York Times | Sirv Image and video CDN with smart optimization built in | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.7 (0 reviews)✓ | 3.4 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| 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 | E-commerce and product-media teams that need zoomable, spinable, responsively delivered product imagery — especially on Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento or Drupal — without building their own image-processing stack. |
| 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 | — |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accesseu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter | free tierapi access |
| Visit Fastly → | Visit Sirv → | |
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
Sirv
Pros
- + On-the-fly image transformation from URL parameters — no build-time processing pipeline to maintain
- + 360° spin and deep zoom are first-class, not add-ons, which is what product photography actually needs
- + Generous free tier with S3 and FTP access, so originals stay portable
- + Soft limits instead of hard cutoffs — a traffic spike does not break the site
- + Long track record (since 2007) and a 99.999% SLA on Enterprise
Cons
- - 20 GB transfer on the $19 Business plan is thin for media-heavy stores; scale pricing needs a custom conversation
- - No published uptime commitment below Enterprise — failover and off-site replication are $999/month features
- - Video delivery is a secondary feature, not competitive with dedicated video platforms
- - Small vendor (roughly a dozen staff, unfunded) — weigh continuity risk and keep originals exported
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