Fastly vs Netlify
Netlify scores higher on the AgentReady, 83/100 against 60/100. They differ on 15 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.
What each one is
Fastly. Fastly is an edge cloud platform company that helps businesses build, secure, and deliver fast, scalable sites and apps.
Netlify. All-in-one platform to build, deploy, manage, and extend modern web apps—powered by agents, AI workflows, Git, CI/CD, extensions, and serverless architecture.
Where Fastly is ahead
Fastly passes pricing understandable, and Netlify does not. That is understand, whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it.
It also holds adopt: free trial or free allowance, fast time to first request, copyable quickstart and official python sdk. Netlify misses those.
Where Netlify is ahead
Netlify passes clear product positioning, and Fastly does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.
It also holds understand: openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided and errors and status codes documented. Fastly misses those.
And on adopt, programmatic credential creation. Fastly misses it.
Finally, on operate, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, rate-limit behavior predictable and agent compatibility verified. Fastly misses those.
What neither does
Both fail llms-full.txt / full agent docs, authentication documented, no mandatory sales call, retry behavior documented, idempotency support. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.
Score, pillar by pillar
The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.
Discover. Netlify leads 93 to 80. Fastly misses clear product positioning, llms-full.txt / full agent docs; Netlify misses llms-full.txt / full agent docs.
Understand. Netlify leads 85 to 46. Fastly misses openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented; Netlify misses authentication documented, pricing understandable.
Adopt. Fastly leads 80 to 65. Fastly misses no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation; Netlify misses no mandatory sales call, free trial or free allowance, fast time to first request, copyable quickstart, official python sdk.
Operate is whether an agent can run against it in production and recover when a call fails. Netlify leads 89 to 35. Fastly misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified; Netlify misses retry behavior documented, idempotency support.
Pricing
Fastly does not publish a machine-readable starting price and has a free tier. Netlify does not publish one.
Signal by signal
| Signal | Fastly | Netlify |
|---|---|---|
| AgentReady | 60 | 83 |
| Discovery | 80 | 93 |
| Understanding | 46 | 85 |
| Adoption | 80 | 65 |
| Operability | 35 | 89 |
| Public API | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes |
| OpenAPI spec | Yes | Yes |
| CLI | Yes | Yes |
| llms.txt | Yes | Yes |
| Self-serve signup | Yes | Yes |
| Free tier | Yes | Unknown |
Which to pick
Netlify clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Fastly and Netlify. Alternatives to each: Fastly, Netlify.
An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["fastly", "netlify"]}