Blue-green spins up a parallel environment, runs smoke tests, then flips traffic. Rollback is fast — just flip back. Cost: double the infrastructure during the cutover window.
Canary releases incrementally route a percentage of traffic to the new version, watching metrics. Slower to fully roll out but cheaper to run.
For solo and small-team operations, blue-green is simpler to operate. Reserve canary for sites where the rollout itself is the risk you are mitigating.