Fastly vs Microsoft
Microsoft is cheaper in all 1 categories where both compete.
Category by category
Each provider's cheapest published option in each category, on the axis that category is billed on. A dash means they do not sell into it.
| Category | Fastly | Rate | Microsoft | Rate | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CDN & edge delivery | Fastly | $0.120 | Azure Front Door | $0.081 | Microsoft1.5× cheaper |
| Cloud compute & VPS | — | — | Azure Virtual Machines | $0.052 | only one competes |
| GPU cloud | — | — | Azure ND H100 v5 | $6.98 | only one competes |
| Object storage | — | — | Azure Blob Storage | $0.018 | only one competes |
| Serverless functions | Fastly Compute | $50.00 | — | — | only one competes |
| Managed databases | — | — | Azure Database for PostgreSQL | $12.41 | only one competes |
About each provider
Fastly
Headquartered in US · 2 priced services
A developer-oriented CDN built around instant purging and edge compute. Priced above the discount CDNs, and sold on configurability rather than on cost per gigabyte.
Microsoft
Headquartered in US · 6 priced services
Azure is the default cloud inside enterprises already licensed for Microsoft software, where existing agreements usually matter more to the final bill than list price does.
Questions
- Is Fastly or Microsoft cheaper in 2026?
- Microsoft is cheaper in all 1 categories where both compete. Picking a provider on an aggregate "cheaper" verdict is usually a mistake — what matters is which of them is cheaper in the categories you actually buy.
- What does Fastly offer that Microsoft does not?
- In this dataset: Serverless functions. Microsoft has no priced equivalent in that category.
- What does Microsoft offer that Fastly does not?
- In this dataset: Cloud compute & VPS, GPU cloud, Object storage, Managed databases. Fastly has no priced equivalent in those categories.
- Should I use both?
- Often the cheapest answer, and the table above shows where the seams are. Splitting workloads across providers costs you cross-provider data transfer and a second bill to reason about, so it pays off when the per-category gap is large and the traffic between them is small.