Provider comparison
Fastly vs Modal
Fastly
Fastly is a developer-centric edge cloud distinguished by instant cache purges (global purge in under 150ms), a powerful edge-compute platform (Compute@Edge with WebAssembly), and real-time log streaming. Built for engineering teams that need fine-grained control over caching logic and sub-millisecond cold starts at the edge, it powers some of the web's highest-traffic properties.
Modal
Modal is a serverless compute platform purpose-built for AI workloads, offering sub-second cold starts, per-second GPU billing, and a Python-native developer experience. Scale-to-zero semantics on H100, A100, and L40S accelerators eliminate idle costs entirely, making it exceptionally cost-efficient for bursty inference, fine-tuning jobs, and scheduled pipelines.