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Amazon CloudFront vs Azure Front Door comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in CDN
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Amazon CloudFront
Ranking in CDN
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Azure Front Door
Ranking in CDN
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (12th), Microsoft Security Suite (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.2%, up from 20.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 9.3%, down from 12.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure Front Door is 20.2%, up from 20.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Elham AlMoosawi - PeerSpot reviewer
Commendable solution enhancing regional connectivity and efficiency
Its main advantage is that it offers something in this region that wasn't available before; previously, you had to go outside the region to get the same level of service you can now access right here in Bahrain. It's truly incredible. Our customers are more interested in accessing CDNs and peering with each other. Moreover, building this IX has significantly changed how traffic is handled. It has enabled better regional connectivity and access to content, which was our main goal. It has saved us money and time.
Thomas Zebar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides great security with a good application firewall
The initial setup is straightforward. If you want to use the portal, CLI, or PowerShare, or you want to use automation data for one month, it's straightforward. Even when it comes to operational maintenance, it's pretty easy and straightforward. Microsoft has done a great job on that front. Maintenance generally requires someone who is a cloud administrator or similar to maintain services in general, with Front Door a small piece of a larger maintenance requirement. There's not a lot to manage, the configuration is simple. I encourage people to document the configuration and infrastructure as well as disaster recovery in case anything happens.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service."
"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"The UI and the functionality in AWS for CloudFront is much better as compared to Azure and GCP."
"The image loading process is easy and cost-effective too."
"The beneficial feature for the entire AWS community is the presence of edge location servers. These servers are strategically located in multiple locations, allowing efficient content delivery from the nearest server."
"The most valuable feature is the number of servers they can put your content in while being reliable."
"The most beneficial aspect of Amazon CloudFront is its capacity to automatically arrange resources depending on user needs, eliminating the need for on-premises management."
"Amazon CloudFront is a stable solution."
"The solution improves performance by reducing latency and cost."
"It is stable."
"Rules Engine is a valuable feature."
"The web application firewall is a great feature."
"The solution is good."
"I particularly appreciate its load-balancing capabilities as it allows us to manage multiple instances and support a global presence effectively."
"The most valuable feature is that you can implement resources globally. It does not depend on location and ability or something like that. This is to connect clients around the world."
"You can assign as many web application firewall policies as you want to the same instance of Front Door."
"The most valuable feature is that I can have CDN and load-balancing capabilities in a single service instead of managing two separate tools."
"It inspects the traffic at the network level before it comes into Azure. We can do SSL offloading, and it can detect abnormalities before the traffic comes into the application. It can be used globally and is easy to set up. It is also quite stable and scalable."
 

Cons

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"DNS Management."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."
"Technical support is lacking."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"There are some solutions needed for integration that are not free."
"The product could support any network load balancer. At present, we can use only Amazon’s load balancer application."
"The support must be improved."
"The distribution networks need to be a little bit more user-friendly in the way that new users are not able to configure the CloudFront distribution as easily as experienced users."
"Amazon CloudFront seems to have too many unnecessary products, which makes it cluttered."
"The UI could be more user-friendly."
"A lot of caching features must be added to the solution."
"They should have more Edge locations so that CloudFront can be used much more. If they can make it a little bit cheaper and better than other networks, we will be able to use it more."
"The product needs to improve its latency."
"It lacks sufficient functionality."
"The product's features are limited compared to Cloudflare. The tool also doesn't work well in a hybrid environment. I would like to see a way to add personalized APIs in the system."
"There's a limitation on the amount of global rules we can add."
"My suggestion for improvement would be to enhance the Data Export feature to include specific tables, particularly the Azure Diagnostics table."
"We should be able to use Front Door defenders with multiple cloud vendors. Currently, they can be used only with the Azure cloud. Azure Front Door should also be able to do global load balancing and provide internal front door services. Microsoft should clearly define what Traffic Manager, Application Gateway, and Azure Front Door products do. These are similar products, and people get confused between these products."
"This is a relatively expensive solution."
"The tool should improve its cost."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"The price is reasonable."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"Amazon's pricing varies depending on the data transfer."
"The policies and prices keep on changing frequently with AWS solutions"
"For CloudFront, I'm quite satisfied with the pricing. Initially, it doesn't require many resources for this specific solution."
"The product has a mid-range pricing."
"I rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten. The licensing follows a pay-as-you-go model."
"Amazon CloudFront costs less than third-party services."
"We do not have many options to optimize costs."
"Its price is really on the high side. It should be cheaper in general."
"The pricing of the solution is good."
"The product is expensive."
"It is on a pay-as-you-go basis."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"Considering the standard licensing of the tool, even though we have not checked the billing as of now, it might not be very costly."
"The transition to the premium tier has led to increased costs, making it more expensive than the classic tier."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
How do I choose between AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Global Accelerator or Amazon CloudFro...
What do you like most about Amazon CloudFront?
The solution has good security features.
What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?
We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Front Door?
It's a matter of value versus price. If we add more features and raise the price, it must remain justifiable. If we m...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Azure Front-Door
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Unilever, Spotify, Pinterest, MLB Advanced Media, Foursquare, PBS, Airbnb, Netflix, WIX, Comcast, Automobili Lamborghini, Rovio, Discovery Communications
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudFront vs. Azure Front Door and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
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