Staxly

Fastly vs DigitalOcean

Edge cloud platform — CDN + compute + security + observability
vs. The developer cloud — Droplets, Kubernetes, Managed DBs, App Platform

Fastly website ↗DigitalOcean 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 ↗

DigitalOcean

Functions (Serverless)
Free 90k GB-sec/month. $0.0000185 per GB-sec after.
$0 base (usage-based)
App Platform — Free
Static sites free forever. 3 static sites per account.
Free
Droplet — Basic 512MB
Shared CPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD, 500 GiB transfer. Cheapest starting tier.
$4/mo
Spaces Object Storage
$5/month — 250 GB storage + 1 TB outbound. S3-compatible.
$5/mo
App Platform — Basic
$5/month per app. 512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 1 GB bandwidth.
$5/mo
Droplet — Basic 1GB
Shared CPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB SSD.
$6/mo
Kubernetes (DOKS)
Starts at $12/month (1 node). Control plane free.
$12/mo
Droplet — Basic 2GB
1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD, 2 TB transfer.
$12/mo
Load Balancer
$12/month. Supports HTTP/3 + Let's Encrypt.
$12/mo
Managed Postgres — Basic
1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10 GB SSD. Single node.
$15/mo
Droplet — CPU Optimized
2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM dedicated. Best for CPU-bound workloads.
$42/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Volume discounts, dedicated support.
Custom
DigitalOcean website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Fastly vs functions on DigitalOcean.

MetricFastlyDigitalOcean
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

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.

DigitalOcean · 14 features

  • App Platform — Heroku-style PaaS. Deploy from Git. Auto-HTTPS, auto-scale, zero-downtime deploy…
  • Backups — Weekly automated backups (20% of Droplet cost). Manual snapshots.
  • Block Storage Volumes — SSD block storage attachable to Droplets. Snapshot support.
  • DigitalOcean GenAI Platform — Managed AI agents, model-as-a-service (Llama, Mistral), knowledge bases.
  • DNS — Free DNS hosting for your domains.
  • DOKS (Kubernetes) — Managed Kubernetes. Free control plane. Node auto-repair.
  • Droplets — Virtual machines with shared or dedicated CPU. 20+ one-click Marketplace images.
  • Functions — Serverless functions. Node, Python, Go, PHP, Ruby. Pay-per-execution.
  • Load Balancers — Layer 4/7 load balancing with HTTP/3 + Let's Encrypt.
  • Managed Databases — Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, OpenSearch, Valkey. Automated backups + …
  • Marketplace — 300+ one-click Droplet + Kubernetes apps.
  • Monitoring — Built-in metrics + alerts for Droplets, DBs, Load Balancers.
  • Spaces — S3-compatible object storage with built-in CDN.
  • VPC — Private networking. Free. Automatic default VPC per region.

Developer interfaces

KindFastlyDigitalOcean
CLIFastly CLIdoctl CLI
SDKcompute-go-starter, compute-js-starter, compute-rust-startergodo (Go), pydo (official py), python-digitalocean
RESTFastly APIDigitalOcean REST API
MCP—DigitalOcean MCP
OTHERCompute@Edge (Wasm), VCL (Varnish)—
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Fastly and DigitalOcean are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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