Amazon Web Services (AWS) vs Fastly Comparison

Why choose Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 8/10)
• Higher Reliability score (9/10 vs 7/10)
• Better fit for enterprise (10/10 vs 8/10)
• Includes Managed Kubernetes, which Fastly lacks
• Includes VPS Hosting, which Fastly lacks

Why choose Fastly

Our data shows no clear advantage over Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Pros

• The service catalogue is unusually broad, with over 200 services across 38 regions, so most infrastructure needs can be met on one platform.
• EC2 has a 99.99% region-level SLA with credits of up to 100%, and instances unavailable for more than six minutes in an hour are not billed for that hour.
• The free plan gives up to $200 in credits, and more than 30 always-free services let new teams experiment at low cost.
• Support scales from a $29 minimum up to dedicated Enterprise and Unified Operations tiers for mission-critical workloads.
• G2 rates it 4.4 across more than 17,000 reviews, and reviewers praise its scalability and global reach.

Cons

• Reviewers widely cite a steep learning curve across the console and services.
• Usage pricing is complex and can produce unexpected bills unless spend is monitored closely.
• Paid support is billed as a percentage of total AWS spend, so support costs rise with usage.
• A July 2025 billing console bug showed customers estimated charges in the billions, which hurt trust in its cost tooling.

Fastly

Pros

• Instant Purge clears cached content worldwide in about 150 ms, which suits news and e-commerce sites that change content often.
• VCL and WebAssembly-based Compute give engineers fine control over edge logic per request.
• Real-time log streaming to more than 30 endpoints, including Datadog, Splunk, and BigQuery, is included.
• The Next-Gen WAF, from the Signal Sciences acquisition, is known for low false-positive rates (a vendor claim reported by Technologymatch).
• Self-serve sign-up includes free monthly allowances for delivery, compute, storage, and TLS.

Cons

• Reviewers describe VCL as hard to learn and say the dashboard is complex for beginners.
• Region-based bandwidth rates make monthly bills hard to predict, especially for smaller companies.
• About 76 POPs, far fewer than Cloudflare or Akamai, with no presence in mainland China, Russia, or the CIS region.
• Some PeerSpot reviewers report slow support responses.
• Bot management and the full security suites are sold by sales quote only.