I think Durable Objects is a great product and Cloudflare have been ahead of the curve on this trend. The main difference is that the unit of code is a container image rather than a JS/WASM bundle, so you can run just about anything in there (we’ve run instances of Chrome and an OLAP database). We’re mainly focused on use cases where developers want a more powerful compute environment than they have in the browser, so we wanted to be as unrestrictive as possible about what runs in it.

The other difference is that it’s open source. We’re also working on a managed version for people who don’t want to manage a cluster, but we don’t want to tie developers to a managed platform without an open source on/off ramp.