--- title: "Fastly vs Cloudflare | Agent Ready Crawlers" description: "Fastly vs Cloudflare: rubric grades side by side, the sourced difference and verdicts for platform engineers, security engineers and publisher ops." canonical: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/compare/fastly-vs-cloudflare site: "Agent Ready Crawlers" last_updated: 2026-11-04 section: "Comparisons" --- # Fastly vs Cloudflare | Agent Ready Crawlers > Fastly vs Cloudflare: rubric grades side by side, the sourced difference and verdicts for platform engineers, security engineers and publisher ops. Source: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/compare/fastly-vs-cloudflare Site: Agent Ready Crawlers Last reviewed: 2026-11-04 Head-to-head # Fastly vs Cloudflare In short Fastly exposes separate signals for suspected and verified AI crawlers and AI fetchers and redirects to a TollBit paywall; Cloudflare runs its own pay per crawl and per-purpose Search, Training and Agent controls. On verifies agents the rubric grades Fastly partial and Cloudflare yes, and on per-purpose policy the rubric grades Fastly partial and Cloudflare yes. ## The sourced difference Fastly exposes separate signals for suspected and verified AI crawlers and AI fetchers and redirects to a TollBit paywall; Cloudflare runs its own pay per crawl and per-purpose Search, Training and Agent controls. [Source](https://www.fastly.com/blog/how-to-control-and-monetize-ai-bot-traffic-using-fastly-and-tollbit), read 2026-11-04. ## Side by side | Question | Fastly | Cloudflare | | --- | --- | --- | | Tells a verified agent from a spoof | Partial; verified-bot signals for AI crawlers and fetchers; Skyfire credentials at the edge (announced); Web Bot Auth not found in docs (checked 2026-11-04) | Yes; Web Bot Auth signatures, IP validation, verified bot and signed agent directory (BotBase) | | Per-purpose policy (train, search, answer, act) | Partial; crawler versus fetcher signals, suspected versus verified | Yes; separate Search, Training and Agent controls on all plans, plus Disallow AI Training since 2026-09-15 | | Charging for access | Partial; through TollBit paywall redirect | Partial; Pay per crawl with HTTP 402, Cloudflare as Merchant of Record, private beta | | Lets signed commerce agents through | Partial; Skyfire KYA/KYAPay partnership (Jun 2026); no Visa TAP or Mastercard Agent Pay found | Partial; Visa TAP and Mastercard Agent Pay built on Web Bot Auth, managed rulesets announced Oct 2025; current rule name not confirmed in docs (checked 2026-11-04) | | Cost | no public price; sales-led | free tier covers AI Crawl Control; Pro from USD 20/month; Bot Management and BotBase are Enterprise and sales-led | | Reporting | Not published; AI bot reporting not described on pages read (checked 2026-11-04) | Yes; AI Crawl Control analytics on crawler activity, request patterns and robots.txt compliance | | Where it runs | edge: classification and actions on Fastly's edge network | edge: enforced on Cloudflare's reverse proxy, no app code needed | | Points, rank | 4 of 10, rank 10 | 8 of 10, rank 1 (tied) | | Price read 2026-11-04 | no public price for Bot Management or AI Bot Management; contact sales (checked 2026-11-04). Free tier covers up to 100,000 requests/month for delivery. | AI Crawl Control and the Search, Training and Agent controls are on all plans including Free (USD 0). Pro USD 20/month billed annually or USD 25 monthly; Business USD 200/month annually or USD 250 monthly; Enterprise Bot Management and BotBase are sales-led. Pay per crawl prices are set by the site owner (private beta). | ## Verdicts by reader Platform engineer Both are edge platforms; Fastly bot features are contact-sales. Security engineer Fastly docs read did not mention Web Bot Auth (checked 2026-11-04); Cloudflare verifies it. Publisher operations Cloudflare offers a free training opt-out; Fastly needs a sales contract. ## What each does not do ### Fastly - Bot Management is not available on the Essential platform for Next-Gen WAF (Bot Management docs). - No native per-crawl billing; charging relies on TollBit (Fastly-TollBit blog). - No public price for bot products (pricing page). ### Cloudflare - BotBase does not block traffic itself; mitigation needs Security rules or AI traffic options (BotBase docs, updated 2026-10-08). - Disallow AI Training cannot pass a no-training preference to Bing until Microsoft ships robots.txt support, targeted early 2027 (Cloudflare blog, 2026-09-15). - Web Bot Auth verification does no nonce validation today; Cloudflare relies on short expires values (Web Bot Auth docs). - Pay per crawl is not self-serve: the docs (updated 2026-07-28) tell site owners to reach out to Cloudflare to join the beta. More: [alternatives to Fastly](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/vendors/fastly/alternatives/), [alternatives to Cloudflare](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/vendors/cloudflare/alternatives/). ## Sources - [fastly.com: how to control and monetize ai bot traffic using fastly and tollbit](https://www.fastly.com/blog/how-to-control-and-monetize-ai-bot-traffic-using-fastly-and-tollbit) read 2026-11-04 - [fastly.com: pricing](https://www.fastly.com/pricing) read 2026-11-04 - [cloudflare.com: network cdn.md](https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/network-cdn.md) read 2026-11-04 - [developers.cloudflare.com: verified bots](https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/concepts/bot/verified-bots/) read 2026-11-04 - [Have it both ways: stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training](https://blog.cloudflare.com/accountable-mixed-use-ai-crawlers/) read 2026-11-04 - [developers.cloudflare.com: what is pay per crawl](https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/features/pay-per-crawl/what-is-pay-per-crawl/) read 2026-11-04 - [investors.fastly.com: fastly and skyfire partner enable trusted agentic commerce](https://investors.fastly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/fastly-and-skyfire-partner-enable-trusted-agentic-commerce) read 2026-11-04 - [Securing agentic commerce: helping AI Agents transact with Visa and Mastercard](https://blog.cloudflare.com/secure-agentic-commerce/) read 2026-11-04 Last reviewed 2026-11-04