Experience the difference.
Fly.io makes edge deployment easy with micro-VMs and a global network, but you're renting their infrastructure with no path to owning yours. See why teams that need infrastructure sovereignty choose Cycle over Fly.
The orchestration trade-off.
Evaluating the balance between power, maintenance, and usability.
Simplicity
Provides an excellent CLI and developer workflow for deploying apps globally, successfully abstracting edge routing and micro-VM provisioning.
Customizability
Configuration files offer solid control over application behavior, but underlying infrastructure topologies remain managed strictly by the platform.
Operational Burden
Low overhead for standard deployments, though debugging internal network meshes or managing stateful volumes across regions can require manual effort.
| Features & Capabilities | Cycle | Fly.io |
|---|---|---|
Infrastructure & Compute | ||
| Bring Your Own Infrastructure (BYOI) | Managed platform | |
| Automated OS / Kernel Updates | ||
| Container, VM, & Serverless Support | Containers + micro-VMs | |
Networking & Security | ||
| Zero-Config Encrypted Mesh Network | Managed internal mesh, not BYOI | |
| Automated Let's Encrypt TLS | Automated Let's Encrypt cert issuance and renewal for custom domains | |
| Built-in Dynamic Load Balancing & WAF | Built-in routing, limited WAF story | |
Storage & Telemetry | ||
| Seamless Stateful Volume Migration | Volume portability limited | |
| Agentless Metrics, Logs & Events | Built-in platform telemetry | |
Developer Experience | ||
| Immutable Configuration (No Drift) | fly.toml | |
| Native Two-Way SSH / Secure Console | fly ssh console | |
Want to see what Cycle can do for you?
Experience the only control plane that natively orchestrates Containers, VMs, and Functions across any provider with a fully automated networking fabric.