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Amazon CloudFront vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 29, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudFront
Ranking in CDN
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cloudflare
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)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 9.6%, down from 12.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.2%, up from 20.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

XYX ABC - PeerSpot reviewer
Top-notch in terms of customer service and offers pay-as-you-go model with a free tier
With a mixed stack, things become a problem. With GCP and Azure, the DNS setup gets tricky when using CloudFront. With AWS, it's smooth and streamlined. Their GUI provides all the details and is very easy to navigate. The challenge starts to occur because AWS gives you only one DNS endpoint for the entire service. This single endpoint covers your CDN, AWS server, and domain migration needs. If you use any other solution like GCP or Azure, you face additional configuration changes and account management. You need separate accounts for AWS CloudFront and your chosen platform, like GCP. This means securing and managing two separate accounts – an extra responsibility. With Cloudflare, you just need one account and pay for it. Managing the complex DNS details isn't your burden. However, on the flip side, CloudFront might require more hands-on management on your part.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to deliver content to users nearby."
"One of the most valuable features of CloudFront is the reduced latency due to its edge locations, which results in a very fast delivery of data."
"The best feature of Amazon CloudFront is its simplified process and easy integration."
"The solution has good security features."
"It has built-in DDoS protection, which protects against DDoS attacks."
"The most beneficial feature is capturing the static data, which is crucial for our operations."
"It is stable."
"The AWS environment was very helpful in terms of integration."
"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."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The technical support is good."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
 

Cons

"There is a bit of a workaround required for custom domain management on CloudFront."
"The product could support any network load balancer. At present, we can use only Amazon’s load balancer application."
"The user interface could be improved."
"Improvements are needed as per customer requirements."
"With a mixed stack, things become a problem. With GCP and Azure, the DNS setup gets tricky when using CloudFront."
"Amazon CloudFront seems to have too many unnecessary products, which makes it cluttered."
"A lot of caching features must be added to the solution."
"One of the biggest challenges with Amazon CloudFront is their pricing policy"
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"DNS Management."
"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."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"Support response time could be improved."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is affordable."
"The solution’s price is reasonable."
"Amazon CloudFront costs less than third-party services."
"Amazon CloudFront is an expensive solution."
"Compared to competitors like Azure and Google, we find AWS pricing to be advantageous."
"I rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten. The licensing follows a pay-as-you-go model."
"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 product has a mid-range pricing."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The price is reasonable."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 6, 2013
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 CloudFront global content delivery network was the better fit for us. We decided to go w...
What do you like most about Amazon CloudFront?
The solution has good security features.
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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
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.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Unilever, Spotify, Pinterest, MLB Advanced Media, Foursquare, PBS, Airbnb, Netflix, WIX, Comcast, Automobili Lamborghini, Rovio, Discovery Communications
Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudFront vs. Cloudflare and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.