Cloudflare Workers vs AWS Lambda: edge computing comparison (2026)

At a glance

• Cold start: Workers ~0 ms (V8 isolates) vs Lambda 200-1000 ms (containers). Direct UX impact on every request.
• Egress: Workers $0 vs Lambda/S3 ~$0.09/GB. This is the dominant cost for any app serving data to the Internet.
• Requests: Workers $0.30/million (10M included) vs Lambda $0.20/million (1M included). Lambda is slightly cheaper at scale, but Workers includes 10x more free volume.
• Ecosystem: Lambda wins on deep AWS integration (VPC, RDS, SQS). Workers wins on edge-native services (R2, D1, Vectorize, Workers AI).
• When to choose: Workers for Internet-facing apps, Lambda for AWS-internal workloads.

The real comparison

Both are serverless, but the bill looks completely different once data starts leaving. This is not a theoretical comparison: the numbers below come from real production workloads.

Cloudflare Workers

• Runtime: V8 isolates. No container, no cold start latency. Your code runs in milliseconds, everywhere in the world.
• Egress: zero. This is the feature that changes the cost equation for any app serving files, images, videos or API responses to the Internet.
• Ecosystem: R2 (object storage, S3-compatible, zero egress), D1 (SQL at the edge), Vectorize (vector database), Workers AI (inference at the edge), Durable Objects (stateful compute).

AWS Lambda

• Runtime: containers. Cold starts are real: 200-1000 ms on first invocation, then warm. Provisioned concurrency mitigates this but adds cost.
• Egress: $0.09/GB from S3 and CloudFront. For 1 TB/month, that is ~$90 — just for data leaving AWS.
• Ecosystem: S3, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, EventBridge, Step Functions. Unmatched depth if you are already on AWS.

Cost comparison: a real example

An API serving 15 million requests/month, with 5 ms CPU average, storing and serving 1 TB of files per month:

The egress cost alone makes Cloudflare Workers ~5x cheaper for this workload. And the cold start advantage means better UX at the same time.

When to choose which

• Choose Workers if: you serve data to the Internet (egress = 0), you want a simple stack (compute + storage + AI from one provider), or you care about global latency and cold starts.
• Choose Lambda if: you are already deeply on AWS (VPC, RDS, SQS, EventBridge), your traffic stays internal (no Internet egress), or you need services with no Workers equivalent (e.g., Kinesis).

For most new projects and startups, Workers is the better default. The egress cost advantage alone justifies the choice.

Start with a free audit: Freelance Cloudflare Workers developer, or read our Cloudflare Workers pricing guide.

Sources

• Cloudflare Workers pricing
• AWS Lambda pricing