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Amazon CloudFront vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 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

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

Featured Reviews

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.
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 most beneficial aspect of Amazon CloudFront is its capacity to automatically arrange resources depending on user needs, eliminating the need for on-premises management."
"The product is very well interconnected with other Amazon services."
"The distribution aspect of CloudFront and its ability to reduce latency are most beneficial."
"Its main advantage is that it offers something in this region that wasn't available before; previously, you had to go outside of the region to get the same level of service that you can now access right here in Bahrain. It's truly incredible. Building this IX has significantly changed how traffic is handled. The technical support is good. The initial setup is very straightforward. I rate the solution a perfect ten."
"The solution makes our platform fully accessible and available globally, helping us to ensure that our customers can rely on it being up and running."
"The image loading process is easy and cost-effective too."
"The solution has good security features."
"If you're using AWS entirely, it's smooth sailing."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
 

Cons

"CloudFront could improve in the areas of auto-scaling, reports, and insights. End clients desire more detailed reports to understand usage patterns better."
"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 is harder to understand compared to Azure."
"Support needs to be enhanced."
"The UI could be more user-friendly."
"I would like to see an increase in distribution regions in Africa. There are currently only a few regions available."
"Sometimes, the server goes down automatically."
"The product should be more intuitive."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"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."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is really on the high side. It should be cheaper in general."
"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."
"The solution’s price is reasonable."
"Compared to competitors like Azure and Google, we find AWS pricing to be advantageous."
"The product could improve its price."
"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."
"Amazon's pricing varies depending on the data transfer."
"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."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"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."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
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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
25%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
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: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.