Staxly

Fastly vs Clerk

Edge cloud platform — CDN + compute + security + observability
vs. User management and authentication as a service

Fastly website ↗Clerk website ↗

Pricing tiers

Fastly

Free Trial
Free allowances: 100 GB bandwidth, 1M CDN requests, 10M Edge Compute requests, 100M vCPU-ms, 500K DDoS requests.
Free
Pay-as-you-go
Usage-based rates with volume discounts. No minimum commitment.
$0 base (usage-based)
Basic Package
$1,500/month. 100M requests. Standard support.
$1500/mo
Starter Package
$6,000/month. 500M requests. Gold support.
$6000/mo
Advantage
Custom. 2B requests. Gold support.
Custom
Ultimate
Custom. 5B+ requests. Enterprise support.
Custom
Fastly website ↗

Clerk

Free
50k MAU included. No SSO/SAML. Perfect for side projects and early prototypes.
Free
Pro
$25/mo (or $20/mo annual). 50k MAU, $0.02 each after. 1 enterprise SSO connection per app. Webhooks, JWT templates, custom session duration.
$25/mo
Business
$300/mo (or $250/mo annual). Advanced organizations, enhanced support, additional enterprise features.
$300/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Volume MAU discounts, SLA, workspace-wide SAML SSO, dedicated support.
Custom
Clerk website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Fastly vs hobby on Clerk.

MetricFastlyClerk
mao—100 orgs/month
mau—50000 users/month
sso connections—0 connections

Features

Fastly · 16 features

  • API Security — Schema validation + rate limiting.
  • Bot Management — Behavioral bot detection + mitigation.
  • CDN — Global Varnish-based CDN with VCL customization.
  • Compute@Edge — Wasm-based serverless at 200+ POPs. Rust, JS, Go.
  • DDoS Protection — Included on all plans.
  • Fanout (WebSockets) — Persistent connection fan-out at edge.
  • Image Optimization — On-the-fly resize/format/quality.
  • Instant Purge — <150ms global cache invalidation.
  • KV Store (Config) — Edge key-value store for config.
  • Live Streaming — HLS + DASH live video delivery.
  • Log Streaming — Real-time logs to S3, Datadog, Splunk, Azure, GCS, Kafka.
  • Managed TLS — Automated cert issuance + renewal.
  • Next-Gen WAF — Signal Sciences acquired — runtime app protection.
  • Real-Time Analytics — Sub-second log streaming + metrics.
  • Secret Store — Encrypted secrets at edge.
  • Shield POP — Origin shield to reduce origin load.

Clerk · 15 features

  • Account Portal — Hosted sign-in/user profile pages at accounts.yourapp.com — zero UI code, fully …
  • Bot Protection — Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA integrated into sign-up.
  • Clerk Billing — Built-in Stripe-powered billing: subscriptions, plans, proration — ties directly…
  • Enterprise SSO (SAML/OIDC) — SAML and OIDC for enterprise customers. Per-domain connection. Pro+ (1 included)…
  • Impersonation — Act as a user from dashboard to debug. Logged.
  • JWT Templates — Custom JWT issuance for third-party backends (Supabase, Hasura, Firebase, Convex…
  • Machine Tokens (M2M) — API keys and machine tokens for service-to-service auth in addition to user sess…
  • Multi-Factor Auth — TOTP (authenticator apps), SMS OTP, backup codes. Forced or optional per user.
  • Organizations (B2B) — Multi-tenant orgs with roles, permissions, invitations, domain allowlist, and pe…
  • Passkeys (WebAuthn) — Passwordless passkey sign-in with per-device biometrics.
  • Prebuilt Components — Drop-in React components: <SignIn/>, <SignUp/>, <UserButton/>, <OrganizationSwit…
  • Sessions — Server-side session tokens. Sliding expiration by default; configurable absolute…
  • User Management — Full user CRUD, metadata (public/private/unsafe), email/phone verification, ban/…
  • Waitlist Mode — Collect sign-ups before opening the app. Approve waitlist entries to activate ac…
  • Webhooks — Events: user.created/updated/deleted, session.created, organization.* — delivere…

Developer interfaces

KindFastlyClerk
CLIFastly CLI—
SDKcompute-go-starter, compute-js-starter, compute-rust-starter@clerk/astro, @clerk/backend / @clerk/clerk-sdk-node, @clerk/chrome-extension, @clerk/clerk-expo, @clerk/clerk-js (vanilla), @clerk/clerk-react, @clerk/clerk-react-native, @clerk/nextjs, @clerk/nuxt, @clerk/remix, clerk-sdk-go, clerk-sdk-python, clerk-sdk-ruby, @clerk/tanstack-start, @clerk/vue
RESTFastly APIBackend REST API, Frontend API
MCP—Clerk MCP
OTHERCompute@Edge (Wasm), VCL (Varnish)Webhooks (Svix)
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Fastly and Clerk are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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