These two are not really selling the same thing. Bunny.net sells bandwidth as a clean, flat commodity at a fraction of hyperscaler rates; Fastly sells a programmable real-time edge and prices bandwidth like the premium feature it treats it as. The per-gigabyte gap between them is not a rounding error — it is a different price bracket. Which one is right comes down to a single question: is your edge logic the product, or is the edge just a fast, cheap pipe?
Side by side
Positioning. Bunny.net: a Slovenia-based CDN, around since 2018, that sells cheap egress and has bolted on storage, video, edge scripting and a WAF to turn a cheap pipe into a platform. Fastly: a developer-centric programmable edge — public since 2019, built around instant configuration and real-time control — that powers large dynamic sites and APIs.
Pricing posture. Bunny.net: a flat per-region rate, roughly $0.01/GB in the US and Europe on its Standard network, a $1/month minimum, and no per-request fee. Fastly: metered bandwidth at premium rates — on the order of $0.12/GB in the US and Europe after a free allowance, plus a small per-10,000-request charge. On raw bandwidth for most workloads, Bunny is dramatically cheaper.
Best for. Bunny.net: asset delivery — static sites, docs portals, software downloads, media libraries, e-commerce images — where the bill should track bandwidth, not a dozen opaque dimensions. Fastly: engineering-led teams whose edge logic is the product, running dynamic content, APIs and event-driven work at the edge.
Where Bunny.net is strong
- Flat, predictable per-GB pricing that is far cheaper than the hyperscalers for bandwidth-heavy workloads.
- Region-scoped pull zones: you can pay only for the regions you actually serve, and disable expensive ones to stay in the cheap band.
- A clean dashboard and fast purging that non-specialist teams can operate confidently.
- Consistently strong independent latency results despite the low price — genuinely fast, not just cheap.
Worth considering: a smaller and thinner footprint in some emerging markets than the giants, and limited China presence. It is a weaker fit when your edge logic, rather than delivery, is the differentiator.
Where Fastly is strong
- A genuinely programmable edge — VCL and a compute platform — that lets engineers ship logic to the edge with instant deploys.
- Excellent for dynamic content, APIs and real-time use cases, with strong peering into major population centres.
- Near-instant configuration and cache purging, a long-standing developer draw.
- A mature enterprise story, powering large high-traffic properties.
Worth considering: a smaller PoP count than the largest networks, and bandwidth priced as a premium — its value is in the programmability, not the sticker price.
The pricing reality
Put a concrete workload through both and the structural difference decides the bill more than any single rate. For predictable media at volume, Bunny's flat commodity rate wins comfortably — often by a large multiple on bandwidth alone. Fastly earns its premium when you are running real logic at the edge that would otherwise sit in your origin or a separate compute tier; if you are not, you are paying for programmability you will not use. Both negotiate at scale, but the philosophies do not converge: one sells cheap bytes, the other sells a platform.
How to decide
Decide on your edge-code ambitions, not the headline rate. If the edge is where meaningful application logic lives — request manipulation, personalisation, API composition, real-time decisions — Fastly is built for exactly that and the premium buys you something. If the edge is a delivery layer for assets and media and you want a predictable, low bill, Bunny is the stronger default and the savings are real. Region mix matters too: Bunny's per-region model rewards a concentrated audience.
The honest verdict
Neither is “better” — they answer different questions. For bandwidth-heavy delivery where cost predictability is the goal, Bunny.net is hard to beat on price and holds up on performance. For teams whose product genuinely lives at the edge, Fastly's programmability is worth its premium. The expensive mistake is buying Fastly's premium for a workload that only needs a cheap pipe, or stretching Bunny into a role where you actually needed a programmable edge.
Choose Bunny.net if: your workload is asset and media delivery, you want a flat predictable bill, and edge programmability is not central. Choose Fastly if: your edge logic is part of the product, you run dynamic content and APIs, and instant control matters more than per-GB price.