Fastly vs LaunchDarkly
Edge cloud platform — CDN + compute + security + observability
vs. Enterprise feature management, experimentation, release automation
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
LaunchDarkly
Developer (Free)
Free forever. Unlimited seats + flags + projects. 30 SDKs. 5K session replays/mo. 10M logs/traces.
Free
Foundation
$12/month per service connection + $10/month per 1K client-side MAU. Unlimited seats, experimentation, SSO.
$12/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Advanced targeting, release automation, workflows, approvals, SAML/SCIM, custom roles.
Custom
Guardian
Custom. All Enterprise + release monitoring, guardrail metrics, auto pause/rollback.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Fastly vs developer on LaunchDarkly.
| Metric | Fastly | LaunchDarkly |
|---|---|---|
| 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.
LaunchDarkly · 15 features
- AI Configs — Manage AI prompts, models, and parameters as flags.
- Approvals — Require co-sign before flag changes in prod.
- Audit Log — Every change logged with user + timestamp.
- Auto Pause/Rollback — Guardrail metrics auto-revert a bad release.
- Code References — Scan code for flag references + stale flag cleanup.
- Contexts — Multi-context targeting: user + organization + device in one evaluation.
- Experimentation — A/B/n testing with stat significance. Bayesian + frequentist.
- Feature Flags — Boolean, multivariate (string/number/JSON) flags with targeting rules.
- Observability — Logs + traces + errors linked to flag changes.
- Relay Proxy — Self-hosted evaluation proxy for compliance / low-latency.
- Release Pipelines — Progressive rollout workflows with guards + approvals.
- SAML / SCIM — Enterprise SSO + SCIM provisioning.
- Session Replay — Frontend session recordings tied to flag exposure.
- Targeting Rules — Rule-based targeting on user attributes, country, device, custom contexts.
- Workflows — Scheduled flag changes + conditional workflows.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Fastly | LaunchDarkly |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Fastly CLI | LaunchDarkly Relay Proxy |
| SDK | compute-go-starter, compute-js-starter, compute-rust-starter | go-server-sdk, launchdarkly-android-client-sdk, launchdarkly-ios-client-sdk, launchdarkly-java-server-sdk, launchdarkly-js-client-sdk, launchdarkly-node-server-sdk, launchdarkly-react-client-sdk, launchdarkly-react-native-client-sdk, LaunchDarkly.ServerSdk, launchdarkly-server-sdk-python |
| REST | Fastly API | LaunchDarkly REST API |
| OTHER | Compute@Edge (Wasm), VCL (Varnish) | Streaming Flag Eval, Webhooks |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Fastly and LaunchDarkly are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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