Compare / Unkey vs Deno Deploy
Unkey vs Deno Deploy
Pre-calculated from hand-checked data — Unkey checked 2026-08-06, Deno Deploy checked 2026-08-06.
The short version
Deno Deploy 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 Deno Deploy
Deno Deploy is cheaper at most of the stages we model.
Ease Tie
Both take similar effort to get a first deploy live.
Control Unkey
Unkey gives you more control over the stack — the flip side of the convenience trade.
Free tier Deno Deploy
Deno Deploy has a free tier; Unkey doesn't.
Features Deno Deploy
Deno Deploy comes out ahead on 5 of the 15 features we track, versus 1.
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
| Unkey | Deno Deploy | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Production APIs that want hosting, gateway policies, API keys, rate limits, and request analytics in one place. | JavaScript and TypeScript sites, full-stack framework apps, and APIs that benefit from built-in previews, databases, cron, caching, and telemetry. |
| How deploys work | Connect GitHub for automatic builds and branch previews, or deploy a Docker image from the Unkey CLI. | Connect GitHub for builds on every push or run deno deploy from the CLI; framework presets configure common JavaScript stacks automatically. |
| The tradeoff | It is a young, API-specific platform with metered billing, ephemeral storage, and no managed database. | It runs the Deno runtime, not Node itself, and its two-region managed footprint and $0.50/GB egress overage trail broader competitors. |
| Free tier | None | Free: 1M requests, 20 GB egress, 15 CPU hours, 350 GB-hours of memory, and 1 GiB each of volume and KV storage per month. |
What you'd realistically pay
Unkey Deno Deploy
| Project stage | Unkey | Deno Deploy | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Just starting | ≈$5/mo Starter — The $5 minimum includes $5 of usage, enough for a small, lightly used API. | Free Free — A small app can stay inside the monthly allowance; it pauses if any enforced Free limit is exhausted. | Deno Deploy |
| Steady traffic | ≈$18/mo Starter + usage — About 0.5 active vCPU and 1 GB of memory running continuously before egress or active-key charges. | ≈$20/mo Pro — Includes 5M requests, 200 GB egress, 40 CPU hours, and 1,000 GB-hours of memory. | Unkey |
| Growing | ≈$50/mo Business — The $50 minimum becomes usage credit and raises per-instance limits to 16 vCPU and 32 GB of RAM. | ≈$30/mo Pro + request usage — A representative 10M-request month is $20 plus $10 request overage, before any CPU, memory, storage, or egress overage. | Deno Deploy |
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.
Deno Deploy pricing notes
- Pro overages are $2 per million requests, $0.50 per GB of egress, $0.05 per CPU hour, and $0.016 per GB-hour of memory.
- Pro includes 5 GiB of volume storage and 5 GiB of Deno KV storage; extra storage and KV operations have separate usage rates.
- Free has no paid overage: applications pause when an allowance is exhausted. Free and Pro do not include a reliability SLA.
Our ratings
Ease of use
Pricing clarity
Free tier Deno Deploy
Scaling Unkey
Control Unkey
Feature by feature
Unkey wins 1, Deno Deploy wins 5, with 9 even.
Deploy workflow
| Unkey | Deno Deploy | |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy from Git push | Yes Connect GitHub; pushes to the default branch deploy production automatically. | Yes Link GitHub and every pushed commit triggers an integrated build with streamed logs and caching. |
| Preview deploys | Yes Non-default branches and pull requests receive isolated preview deployments. | Yes Every Git branch has its own timeline and URL, and every revision receives an immutable preview URL. |
| Official CLI | Yes The Unkey CLI deploys local build contexts or pre-built container images. | Yes The deno deploy command creates, configures, and deploys applications from a terminal or CI pipeline. |
| Instant rollbacks | Yes Rollbacks atomically switch traffic to a previous immutable deployment. | Yes A timeline can be locked to any previous revision to restore it without rebuilding the application. |
Platform
| Unkey | Deno Deploy | |
|---|---|---|
| Custom domains + HTTPS | Yes Custom apex domains and subdomains include automatic TLS; plan limits apply. | Yes Custom domains include automatic Let’s Encrypt certificates; wildcard domains require Pro or higher. |
| Built-in CDN / edge network | No The global gateway routes API traffic but is not a static-asset caching CDN. | Yes A built-in HTTP edge cache respects standard cache headers and supports tag-based global invalidation. |
| Serverless functions | No Applications run as container instances rather than per-request functions. | Yes JavaScript and TypeScript applications run in isolated serverless environments that start on demand. |
| Docker containers | Yes Build from a Dockerfile or deploy a pre-built image from a registry. | No Deno Deploy builds source code for its own Deno runtime and does not accept arbitrary Docker images. |
| SSH / shell access | No The documented workflow exposes logs and metrics, not an interactive SSH shell. | No There is no interactive SSH shell; use build logs, runtime logs, traces, metrics, or the CLI. |
| EU hosting region | Yes European deployment regions are available; Starter includes three regions and paid upgrades unlock all. | Yes Applications can run in the managed Europe execution region, although database residency depends on the selected database. |
Runtime & operations
| Unkey | Deno Deploy | |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic scaling | Yes Horizontal autoscaling adjusts instance count from configured minimums and maximums based on CPU load. | Yes The platform automatically starts multiple isolated application instances across or within regions as traffic requires. |
| Scale to zero | Partial Preview environments sleep automatically when idle; apps can also be stopped and started manually. | Yes Idle applications stop after an implementation-selected period between five seconds and ten minutes, then restart on request. |
| Scheduled jobs | No There is no documented first-class scheduler for cron jobs. | Yes Deno.cron jobs are discovered at deploy time, scheduled by the platform, and monitored in the dashboard. |
| Managed database | No No managed database is included; connect an external database service. | Yes Provision Deno KV or managed Prisma Postgres, or attach an externally hosted PostgreSQL database. |
| Logs & metrics built in | Yes Runtime logs, CPU and memory metrics, request analytics, and gateway decisions appear in the dashboard. | Yes Logs, OpenTelemetry traces, request and outbound-call metrics, filtering, and dashboards are included. |
Watch out for
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.
Deno Deploy
- Applications run on Deno rather than Node itself. Node and npm compatibility is broad, including native add-ons and subprocesses, but framework-specific edge cases still exist.
- The managed platform currently has two execution regions, the US and Europe; Deploy Classic had a broader footprint before it shut down in July 2026.
- Free and Pro have no published reliability SLA; a 99.95% SLA is reserved for Enterprise.
- Free-tier apps pause when the monthly allowance is exhausted; there is no paid overage on Free.
Read the full reviews: Unkey and Deno Deploy. Or answer four questions to see what fits your project.