Alternatives to Fastly
In short
Fastly ranks 10th of 15 on 4 of 10 points, with Arcjet the nearest on points, and head-to-head pages set it against Cloudflare and Akamai. Four questions grade partial for Fastly. It gives no price for Bot Management, which Essential-tier Next-Gen WAF customers cannot use.
Head-to-head, with the sourced difference
- Fastly vs Cloudflare. 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, read 2026-11-04.
- Fastly vs Akamai. Both route AI bot charging to TollBit, and both partner with Skyfire (Fastly 2026-06-10, Akamai 2026-06-15); Akamai documents Web Bot Auth verification and Visa TAP, Fastly docs read did not. Source, read 2026-11-04.
All other vendors on the rubric
"Stronger" and "weaker" compare each vendor's grade with Fastly's on the five graded questions. Cost is quoted as read on 2026-11-04.
| Vendor | Points | Stronger than Fastly on | Weaker on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Akamai | 8 | verifies agents, commerce agents, reporting | nothing |
| AWS WAF Bot Control | 8 | verifies agents, per-purpose policy, charging, reporting | commerce agents |
| Cloudflare | 8 | verifies agents, per-purpose policy, reporting | nothing |
| DataDome | 8 | verifies agents, charging, reporting | nothing |
| HUMAN Security | 7 | verifies agents, per-purpose policy, reporting | commerce agents |
| Skyfire | 6 | verifies agents, charging, commerce agents | per-purpose policy |
| TollBit | 6 | charging, reporting | commerce agents |
| Vercel | 6 | verifies agents, per-purpose policy, reporting | charging, commerce agents |
| Kasada | 5 | verifies agents, reporting | charging, commerce agents |
| Arcjet | 3 | reporting | charging, commerce agents |
| Auth0 for AI Agents | 3 | reporting | verifies agents, charging |
| Imperva | 3 | reporting | per-purpose policy, charging, commerce agents |
| Stytch IsAgent | 2 | reporting | per-purpose policy, charging, commerce agents |
| Netlify | 1 | nothing | verifies agents, charging, commerce agents |
Where Fastly is not the fit
- 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).
Sources
- fastly.com: pricing
- fastly.com: how to control and monetize ai bot traffic using fastly and tollbit
- investors.fastly.com: fastly and skyfire partner enable trusted agentic commerce
- akamai.com: akamai unveils agentic security framework to power trusted ai driven interactions and commerce
- aws.amazon.com: pricing
- cloudflare.com: network cdn.md
- datadome.co: pricing
- humansecurity.com: package plans
- skyfire.xyz: skyfire.xyz
- tollbit.com: tollbit.com
- vercel.com: botid
Last reviewed 2026-11-04