Compare / Cloudflare Workers vs Unkey

Cloudflare Workers vs Unkey

Pre-calculated from hand-checked data — Cloudflare checked 2026-08-06, Unkey checked 2026-08-06.

The short version

Cloudflare Workers wins more of our comparison points, but Unkey still fits if production APIs that want hosting, gateway policies, API keys, rate limits, and request analytics in one place describes you.

Price Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers is cheaper at every stage we model — about $10/mo even for a growing project.

Ease Tie

Both take similar effort to get a first deploy live.

Free tier Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers has a free tier; Unkey doesn't.

Features Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers comes out ahead on 5 of the 15 features we track, versus 3.

What developers say about this matchup

We couldn't find a substantive first-person discussion comparing this exact pair. We leave the section empty instead of filling it with vendor marketing or generic SEO comparisons.

At a glance

Cloudflare Workers Unkey
Best for Static sites and JS/TS apps where bandwidth costs matter or a global edge is a plus. Production APIs that want hosting, gateway policies, API keys, rate limits, and request analytics in one place.
How deploys work Deploy from Git or with the wrangler CLI; framework adapters handle SSR apps. Connect GitHub for automatic builds and branch previews, or deploy a Docker image from the Unkey CLI.
The tradeoff More platform-specific setup than the git-push hosts — adapters, wrangler config, and Workers-flavored storage. It is a young, API-specific platform with metered billing, ephemeral storage, and no managed database.
Free tier Free: unlimited static requests and bandwidth, 100,000 Worker requests per day, 3,000 build minutes per month. None

What you'd realistically pay

Free $5 $5 $18 $10 $50 Just starting Steady traffic Growing
Cloudflare Workers Unkey
Estimated monthly cost at each project stage. Estimates use each provider's real plans; euro prices are compared at a rough exchange rate.
Project stage Cloudflare Workers Unkey Cheaper
Just starting Free Free — Genuinely free for small sites — bandwidth is never billed. ≈$5/mo Starter — The $5 minimum includes $5 of usage, enough for a small, lightly used API. Cloudflare Workers
Steady traffic ≈$5/mo Workers Paid — Includes 10M requests and 30M CPU-milliseconds per month. ≈$18/mo Starter + usage — About 0.5 active vCPU and 1 GB of memory running continuously before egress or active-key charges. Cloudflare Workers
Growing ≈$10/mo Workers Paid + usage — Extra requests cost $0.30 per million; bandwidth remains free. ≈$50/mo Business — The $50 minimum becomes usage credit and raises per-instance limits to 16 vCPU and 32 GB of RAM. Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers pricing notes

  • No charges for data transfer or bandwidth on any plan.
  • Cloudflare sells its own storage (D1 database, KV, R2 objects) with separate free tiers and pricing.

Unkey pricing notes

  • Usage rates are $0.000006944 per vCPU-second, $0.000003472 per GB-second of memory, $0.00000006 per GB-second of ephemeral disk, and $0.05 per GB of egress.
  • API-key authentication through the gateway adds $0.002 per active key each month. The plan minimum is included usage credit rather than an extra charge on top.
  • Log retention is 3 days on Starter, 7 days on Pro, and 14 days on Business.

Our ratings

Ease of use

Cloudflare Workers 4/5
Unkey 4/5

Pricing clarity Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers 5/5
Unkey 4/5

Free tier Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers 5/5
Unkey 1/5

Scaling

Cloudflare Workers 5/5
Unkey 5/5

Control

Cloudflare Workers 3/5
Unkey 3/5

Feature by feature

Cloudflare Workers wins 5, Unkey wins 3, with 7 even.

Deploy workflow

Cloudflare Workers Unkey
Deploy from Git push Yes Workers Builds deploys on push from GitHub or GitLab. Yes Connect GitHub; pushes to the default branch deploy production automatically.
Preview deploys Yes Preview URLs per version and non-production branch builds. Yes Non-default branches and pull requests receive isolated preview deployments.
Official CLI Yes wrangler handles dev, deploys, logs, and storage. Yes The Unkey CLI deploys local build contexts or pre-built container images.
Instant rollbacks Yes Versioned deployments with one-command rollback. Yes Rollbacks atomically switch traffic to a previous immutable deployment.

Platform

Cloudflare Workers Unkey
Custom domains + HTTPS Yes Custom domains with automatic TLS on Cloudflare’s network. Yes Custom apex domains and subdomains include automatic TLS; plan limits apply.
Built-in CDN / edge network Yes The platform is Cloudflare’s CDN — static assets are free and cached globally. No The global gateway routes API traffic but is not a static-asset caching CDN.
Serverless functions Yes Workers are the compute model, running in 300+ locations. No Applications run as container instances rather than per-request functions.
Docker containers Partial Cloudflare Containers run alongside Workers but are newer and more limited than a real container host. Yes Build from a Dockerfile or deploy a pre-built image from a registry.
SSH / shell access No No servers to shell into. No The documented workflow exposes logs and metrics, not an interactive SSH shell.
EU hosting region Partial Code runs everywhere by default; you can restrict data (not compute) to EU jurisdiction. Yes European deployment regions are available; Starter includes three regions and paid upgrades unlock all.

Runtime & operations

Cloudflare Workers Unkey
Automatic scaling Yes Scales per request across the whole network with no knobs. Yes Horizontal autoscaling adjusts instance count from configured minimums and maximums based on CPU load.
Scale to zero Yes Workers bill per request — idle costs nothing. Partial Preview environments sleep automatically when idle; apps can also be stopped and started manually.
Scheduled jobs Yes Cron Triggers run Workers on a schedule, including on the free plan. No There is no documented first-class scheduler for cron jobs.
Managed database Partial D1 (SQLite), KV, and R2 are managed but Cloudflare-flavored; classic Postgres means an external provider. No No managed database is included; connect an external database service.
Logs & metrics built in Partial Live tail and Workers analytics included; persistent logs need Logpush or a third party. Yes Runtime logs, CPU and memory metrics, request analytics, and gateway decisions appear in the dashboard.

Watch out for

Cloudflare

  • Server-side frameworks (Next.js, Astro SSR, SvelteKit) run through adapters, which have more rough edges than Vercel or Netlify.
  • The runtime is Workers-specific: Node.js compatibility is good but not total, and storage means D1, KV, and R2 rather than a classic server.
  • The free plan enforces 100,000 Worker requests per day — static requests stay unlimited.

Unkey

  • Unkey only launched public app hosting in 2026, so its production track record is much shorter than established platforms such as Heroku, Render, or Railway.
  • The monthly plan price is a minimum with matching usage credit, not a compute bundle: CPU, memory, ephemeral disk, egress, and active keys are metered separately.
  • Storage is ephemeral and there is no managed database, so persistent data must live with another provider.

Read the full reviews: Cloudflare and Unkey. Or answer four questions to see what fits your project.