Fly Machines vs Quay.io
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Fly Machines and Quay.io.
Quick Verdict
3.9/5
Fly Machines
0 reviews
3.7/5
Quay.io
0 reviews
Fly Machines is rated higher (3.9 vs 3.7). Fly Machines are Fly.io's fast-starting virtual machines for containerised workloads. Start in 300ms, stop when idle to save costs. Used for auto-scaling web services and ephemeral compute. Red Hat's hosted container image registry: unlimited free public repos, per-private-repository pricing from $15/month, automatic Clair v4 CVE scanning, robot accounts, teams, and exportable audit logs.
Fly Machines Fast-starting VMs for containerised apps at the edge | Quay.io Hosted container registry from Red Hat: free public repos, CVE scanning, per-private-repo pricing | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ | 3.7 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | usage-based | freemium |
| Starting price | From $2.19/mo | Free tier available✓ |
| Best for | Developers who want fast-starting containers that scale to zero between requests at the edge, and teams building custom control planes on a VM-per-container API | Open-source projects needing free public image hosting, and Red Hat-centric enterprises wanting managed registries with SSO, robot accounts and audit logging |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ✓ | |
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | Netherlands, Sweden, France, Germany, UK, US, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, Singapore, Australia | — |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiermanaged optioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter | free tierteam featuresssoapi access |
| Visit Fly Machines → | Visit Quay.io → | |
Fly Machines
Pros
- + ~300ms VM boot with automatic stop when idle — real scale-to-zero economics for request-driven workloads
- + Billed by the second with a fully published rate card; smallest Machine $2.19/30 days running
- + Low-level lifecycle control via REST API: create, start, stop, clone, update, destroy per VM
- + 17 regions on Fly's own hardware with per-Machine region placement
- + Fast restart from stopped state — assembled rootfs stays on the worker host
Cons
- - Fly.io-only API and infrastructure — no orchestration portability
- - Running the raw API means building your own scaling, placement retry and health logic
- - Always-on and idle costs accumulate: stopped rootfs $0.15/GB/month, volumes $0.15/GB/month, dedicated IPv4 $2/month
- - Capacity limits per region and host can make Machine placement fail
- - No free tier — only a 2-VM-hour/7-day trial — and no uptime SLA outside Enterprise plans
Quay.io
Pros
- + Unlimited free public repositories with automatic CVE scanning on every push
- + Public, predictable per-repository pricing from $15/month for 5 private repos
- + Robot accounts, team permissions, SSO and exportable audit logs aimed at compliance teams
- + Decade-plus production track record (launched 2013) with a supported upgrade path to self-managed Red Hat Quay
- + Full API, image rollback, zero-downtime garbage collection and Git build triggers
Cons
- - Per-repository billing punishes micro-repo layouts; large tiers get expensive fast
- - No published uptime SLA for the hosted service
- - Clair does not cover every language ecosystem, and remediation is entirely on the customer
- - Free tier fair-use caps (100 GB storage, 1 TB egress) are enforceable quotas
- - Overlapping product lineup (Quay.io vs Red Hat Quay vs OpenShift Platform Plus) complicates buying
Stay in the loop
Get weekly updates on the best new hosting and infrastructure providers, deals, and comparisons.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.