Head-to-head, indicative as of Oct 2026. Prices change — always confirm on the vendor page.
Quick read: pick Cloudflare Workers if your workload is zero-egress-cost apis, redirects, edge personalization and its included egress fits your traffic shape; pick Alibaba Cloud if you need reaching apac users at apac prices. For anything latency-sensitive at the edge, cold start row is the tiebreaker.
| Cloudflare Workers | Alibaba Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Edge compute (JS) | Full cloud (ECS) |
| Free tier | 100k requests/day | Trial credits |
| Paid pricing (indicative) | ~$0.50 per million requests (paid tier $5/mo) | ECS from ~$2.50/mo promo |
| Egress | Included (no egress fees) | Metered by region |
| Cold start | None (V8 isolates) | N/A |
| Regions | 300+ PoPs (anycast) | Strong APAC + global |
| Best for | Zero-egress-cost APIs, redirects, edge personalization | Reaching APAC users at APAC prices |
Try Cloudflare Workers Try Alibaba Cloud
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Last reviewed 2026-10-02 · NinjaOps SEO grid · DevOps blog