Amazon CloudFront vs Azure Front Door comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the CDN category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.2, while Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.7. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 8.6% mindshare in CDN, compared to Microsoft’s 19.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Amazon CloudFront and Azure Front Door compete in the Content Delivery Network services category. CloudFront appears to have the upper hand with its speed and ease of use for AWS users, while Azure Front Door offers a better security feature set and integrated application delivery.

Features: Amazon CloudFront offers a robust integration with AWS services, extensive edge location network reducing latency, and ease of use within the AWS ecosystem. Azure Front Door provides comprehensive security features, global application delivery integration, and combined CDN and load-balancing capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Amazon CloudFront could benefit from addressing its high pricing, expanding edge locations in Asia-Pacific, and simplifying configuration. Azure Front Door could improve by enhancing geographic flexibility, extending its feature set in hybrid environments, and providing clearer distinctions between its similar services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon CloudFront's deployment can be complex for some users, and while technical support is available, improvements in documentation and accessibility are desired. Azure Front Door offers easier deployment and management with supportive documentation, though direct support may be sporadic.

Pricing and ROI: Both Amazon CloudFront and Azure Front Door use a pay-as-you-go pricing model. CloudFront is seen as costly, requiring cost optimization to manage expenses effectively, yet it delivers significant ROI due to performance stability. Azure Front Door, despite its high cost, is valued for its extensive feature set, presenting competitive pricing relative to its capabilities, with users recognizing a positive ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudFront vs. Azure Front Door Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudFront vs. Azure Front Door

January 2025

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.6%, up from 21.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 8.6%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure Front Door is 19.7%, down from 19.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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Parth Buch

Infrastructure Architecture at Capgemini

Seamlessly manages security and dynamic content hosting in diverse applications

Hosting static content or with engineering dynamic content is beneficial. CloudFront provides a common access point, manages routing to different methods, and serves as an access point plus API routing. With AWS, maintenance is not required as it's a service offered by AWS which maintains itself. Security concerns are manageable through AWS's security mechanisms, with additional security enhancement possible through options like WAF and NACL.

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Thomas Zebar

Azure Principal Architect at Cloud Computech Consultancy

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."

"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."

More Cloudflare pros

"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."

"It has built-in DDoS protection, which protects against DDoS attacks."

"The product’s most valuable feature is the availability of the websites."

"Edge configuration and availability are vital features for easy content drop-off requests"

"The product is very well interconnected with other Amazon services."

"The most beneficial feature is capturing the static data, which is crucial for our operations."

"The solution is very easy to use."

More Amazon CloudFront pros

"The price is one of the most important aspects of the product. It's quite affordable."

"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."

"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."

"I am impressed with the tool's integrations."

"The solution is good."

"The most valuable feature is that I can have CDN and load-balancing capabilities in a single service instead of managing two separate tools."

"I particularly appreciate its load-balancing capabilities as it allows us to manage multiple instances and support a global presence effectively."

"The web application firewall is a great feature."

More Azure Front Door pros

Cons

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."

"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."

More Cloudflare cons

"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."

"There are some solutions needed for integration that are not free."

"There is a bit of a workaround required for custom domain management on CloudFront."

"AWS is redesigning its user interface and user experience for CloudFront, and there is room for improvement in certificate management."

"Improvements are needed as per customer requirements."

"They could be expanding the number of locations available. It will help users easily access content."

"Amazon CloudFront is harder to understand compared to Azure."

"With a mixed stack, things become a problem. With GCP and Azure, the DNS setup gets tricky when using CloudFront."

More Amazon CloudFront cons

"It lacks sufficient functionality."

"The product needs to improve its latency."

"There is room for improvement and they're working on it."

"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."

"In the tool, there needs to be a good amount of monitoring in the area of health probes to capture in front of what is happening."

"I'm responsible for the governance and cost control of Azure. I'm not a specialist in any products and therefore I couldn't really speak effectively to features that are lacking or missing."

"The user interface needs improvement as it is difficult to create the mapping to link the problem with your private address sources."

More Azure Front Door cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"The price is reasonable."

"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 give the price a five out of ten."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The product has a mid-range pricing."

"Amazon's pricing varies depending on the data transfer."

"I used to work with AWS and Azure, and we provided cost comparisons for customers to help them choose the right services. Azure tends to be more user-friendly and easier to understand, while AWS may take more time."

"The policies and prices keep on changing frequently with AWS solutions"

"Amazon CloudFront costs less than third-party services."

"The product could improve its price."

"We do not have many options to optimize costs."

"Its price is really on the high side. It should be cheaper in general."

More Amazon CloudFront pricing and cost advice

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"The product is 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."

"It is on a pay-as-you-go basis."

"The pricing of the solution is good."

"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

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

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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...

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What do you like most about Amazon CloudFront?

The solution has good security features.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudFront?

I find Amazon's pricing good, rating it eight out of ten and considering it affordable and rightly placed, not expens...

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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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Azure Front Door?

Rules Engine is a valuable feature.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 9% of the time

Windows Azure CDN vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 5% of the time

AWS Global Accelerator vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 3% of the time

Fastly vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 3% of the time

Edgio vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 2% of the time

More Amazon CloudFront Competitors

Akamai vs Azure Front Door

Compared 12% of the time

AWS Global Accelerator vs Azure Front Door

Compared 11% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Azure Front Door

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Firewall vs Azure Front Door

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Azure Front Door

Compared 4% of the time

More Azure Front Door Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudFront

February 2025

Download Amazon CloudFront product report

Buyer's Guide

Azure Front Door

February 2025

Download Azure Front Door product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Azure Front-Door

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“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.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates delivery of your websites, APIs, video content or other web assets. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services products to give developers and businesses an easy way to accelerate content to end users with no minimum usage commitments. Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront is optimized to work with other Amazon Web Services, like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Route 53. Amazon CloudFront also works seamlessly with any non-AWS origin server, which stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services products, there are no long-term contracts or minimum monthly usage commitments for using Amazon CloudFront – you pay only for as much or as little content as you actually deliver through the content delivery service.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Azure Front Door is employed for securing external traffic, global load balancing, integrating web application firewalls, enabling disaster recovery, and enhancing application accessibility.

Organizations leverage Azure Front Door to support data publishing, act as a CDN, and ensure low latency for global users. Clients use it to protect numerous internet-accessible applications, integrate with DNS, and implement custom routes. Favored for caching web content and securely, efficiently distributing traffic to backend services, Azure Front Door offers SSL offloading, traffic inspection, and global scalability. Users value its affordability, ease of implementation, and web application firewall. Azure Front Door provides rich security features, traffic management, and URL rewriting. Load-balancing capabilities enhance performance with additional content security policies and bot protection. Integrations, including with GitOps, along with combined CDN and load-balancing, are also highlighted.

What are the most important features?

SSL Offloading: Reduces the burden on backend services
Traffic Inspection: Enhances security by inspecting incoming traffic
Global Scalability: Ensures performance for users worldwide
Web Application Firewall: Provides in-depth security features
Load Balancing: Distributes traffic to improve performance
URL Rewriting: Customizes URL paths for better navigation
Bot Protection: Shields applications from automated threats
Integrations: Supports technologies like GitOps
Combined CDN and Load-Balancing: Streamlines content delivery and traffic management

What are the benefits or ROI of using this service?

Affordability: Provides cost-effective solutions for web traffic management
Ease of Implementation: Streamlines setup processes for quick deployment
Enhanced Security: Offers robust protection for web applications
Improved Performance: Optimizes traffic distribution and latency
Scalability: Supports growing application demands with global reach

Azure Front Door finds usage across multiple industries due to its versatile applications. E-commerce companies benefit from improved global accessibility and speed, while financial institutions leverage its security features for protecting sensitive data. Media and entertainment sectors use its CDN capabilities for seamless content delivery, and healthcare providers rely on its compliance and protection standards for patient data security.

Microsoft

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudFront vs. Azure Front Door

January 2025

Free Report: Amazon CloudFront vs. Azure Front Door

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudFront vs. Azure Front Door and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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