Amazon CloudFront vs Cloudflare comparison

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Amazon CloudFront

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 29, 2024

Cloudflare and Amazon CloudFront are leading content delivery networks. User reviews indicate that while Cloudflare is more cost-effective and offers commendable customer service, Amazon CloudFront stands out in scalability and advanced features.

Features: Cloudflare focuses on security measures, DDoS protection, and simplified management. Amazon CloudFront integrates robustly with AWS services and provides superior customization options. Cloudflare offers built-in security, whereas Amazon CloudFront provides powerful integrations and advanced features.

Room for Improvement: Cloudflare users highlight the need for more advanced reporting and analytics options. Users also desire improvements in setup simplicity. Additionally, richer analytics are requested. Amazon CloudFront users suggest better setup simplicity and more comprehensive documentation. Enhanced simplicity in the initial setup process is needed. Further improvement in its support materials is necessary.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudflare is noted for rapid deployment and responsive customer support. Users find the setup process straightforward and support efficient. Amazon CloudFront presents a steeper learning curve but benefits from extensive AWS support resources. Deployment is complex but supported by comprehensive AWS assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Cloudflare's pricing is considered more budget-friendly, offering favorable ROI due to its broad feature set. Amazon CloudFront commands a higher price, justified by high scalability and integration capabilities. It demands a more significant initial investment but balances it with advanced features and scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudFront vs. Cloudflare Report (Updated: October 2024).

Amazon CloudFront vs. Cloudflare

October 2024

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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:

Valuable Features

No sentiment score available

Sentiment score

8.3

Cloudflare provides speed enhancement, security, and ease of use with CDN, DDoS protection, SSL, and traffic analytics for website optimization.

No quotes available

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The aggressive caching and DDOS mitigation are the most valuable features offered by Cloudflare.

it_user241758

Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

DDoS protection is what CloudFlare is known for.

it_user506838

System Administrator at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Web optimization features such as ‘Automatic Content Caching’, ‘Rocket Loader’, and ‘AutoMinify’, which help to minimize the website loading time and increase the website response.

Aum e Hani

Manager - Web Development at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Room For Improvement

No sentiment score available

Sentiment score

5.3

Users suggest Cloudflare improve analytics, CDN errors, support, DNS, APIs, pricing, server access, DDoS features, and documentation.

No quotes available

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In CloudFlare's case, I need to get an external server, set up the redirection there using Apache or NGINX and put my own SSL certificates there.

it_user298149

Linux/Cisco/Microsoft Infraestructure Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The feature shows a cached version of your live site if your host is offline.

it_user508683

Systems and New Media Manager at a leisure / travel company with 51-200 employees

Hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud.

reviewer1527936

Competence Center Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

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Stability Issues

No sentiment score available

Sentiment score

8.0

Cloudflare is generally praised for stability and reliability, despite occasional issues and past outages, requiring proper configuration for best performance.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon CloudFront report

There were a few times when some of their CDN nodes would fail, creating serious speed issues with the site without any warning or notification from their side.

it_user253797

IT Consultant, Business Owner, Lecturer at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

Once the webserver is installed with CloudFlare, it should work like a charm.

it_user276009

Co Founder at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Since we switched to the business plan, we encounter no problems.

it_user92823

Online Marketing & Development Manager at a engineering company with 501-1,000 employees

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Scalability Issues

No sentiment score available

Sentiment score

8.4

Cloudflare is highly regarded for its scalability, smoothly accommodating various user needs and handling significant traffic across business sizes.

No quotes available

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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.

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

Scalability is not a problem for CloudFlare since they are a cloud based solution.

it_user276009

Co Founder at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

They're expanding and have enough resources worldwide.

reviewer1245303

Senior Consultant CDN at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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Customer Service

No sentiment score available

Sentiment score

7.9

Customer service is highly rated, especially for Enterprise plans, but response times could improve for complex issues.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon CloudFront report

The representatives are knowledgeable and online documentation is great.

it_user241758

Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Enterprise support is amazing. It's 10 out of 10.

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.

M.A. Faisal

General Manager at .bKash Limited

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Setup Cost

No sentiment score available

Sentiment score

6.3

Cloudflare provides free and paid plans from $20, with straightforward pricing catering to small, medium, and enterprise businesses.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon CloudFront report

currently we are using the $20 a month plan

it_user241758

Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The monthly cost is around $30 for three sites using the Business Cloudflare plan.

it_user253797

IT Consultant, Business Owner, Lecturer at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level.

reviewer1245303

Senior Consultant CDN at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudFront

Ranking in CDN

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Cloudflare

Ranking in CDN

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 10.0%, down from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 21.8%, up from 20.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN

Featured Reviews

XYX ABC

Product manager at Infozion

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.

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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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Comparison Review

it_user68487

Security Expert with 51-200 employees

Nov 6, 2013

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

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.

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

CloudFront is relatively cheap and worth the money.

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.

Azure Front Door vs Amazon CloudFront

Comparisons

Compared 62% of the time

Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 11% of the time

Windows Azure CDN vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 6% of the time

AWS Global Accelerator vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 3% of the time

Fastly vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon CloudFront Competitors

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Product Reports

Download Amazon CloudFront product report

Amazon CloudFront

November 2024

Download Cloudflare product report

November 2024

Also Known As

No data available

Cloudflare DNS

Learn More

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Overview

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.

Cloudflare offers DDoS protection, security, DNS management, and CDN services to enhance website performance and security. Users benefit from improved load balancing and comprehensive security features, making it a reliable choice for managing web traffic and protecting against cyber threats.

Cloudflare is widely recognized for its comprehensive features that cater to web security and performance. Users frequently take advantage of its DDoS protection, flexible SSL options, and content optimization tools. The platform's strength in DNS management and caching ensures reduced server load and faster response times. While its user-friendly interface and resource optimization significantly enhance website performance and security, there is potential for improvement in analytics, CDN speed, and technical support.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN: Efficiently delivers content globally, reducing latency and enhancing speed.
DDoS Protection: Shields websites from attacks, ensuring uninterrupted service.
DNS Management: Simplifies the process with reliable functionality.
Caching: Minimizes server load, accelerating content delivery.
WAF: Protects against a range of threats, bolstering site security.
Zero Trust: Offers advanced security measures to protect data and access.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Performance Improvement: Significant webpage speed enhancement through optimization.
Security Features: Robust mechanisms that guard against cyber threats.
User-Friendly Interface: Facilitates ease of use and management.
Global Resource Optimization: Efficient distribution of content and resources.

Industries ranging from e-commerce to the financial sector implement Cloudflare to safeguard online assets and streamline traffic management. These industries leverage its CDN and security capabilities to provide fast, secure user experiences, crucial for their demanding environments. Educational institutions utilize its robust DNS management to efficiently handle high volumes of traffic while maintaining security and performance across their networks.

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.