Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly comparison

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Amazon CloudFront

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon CloudFront and Fastly based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two CDN solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

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

Amazon CloudFront vs. Fastly

October 2024

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Helped 815,854 peers since 2012

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

Fastly

Ranking in CDN

6th

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection (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 Fastly is 3.5%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN

Featured Reviews

XYX ABC

Product manager at Infozion

Dec 27, 2023

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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Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

Jun 29, 2023

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

I use the product mostly for its Compute@Edge capabilities. Fastly is a content delivery network with various functions inside CDN. It has a functionality around security. It also has a content delivery functionality, which is a more standard function within CDN. If you are accessing a website…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"We can personalize a lot of things inside CDN."

"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to deliver content to users nearby."

"The solution improves performance by reducing latency and cost."

"The product provides reduced latency and quicker site refreshes."

"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."

"It is stable."

"The image loading process is easy and cost-effective too."

More Amazon CloudFront pros

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

Cons

"The tool must provide regional control."

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

"The product could support any network load balancer. At present, we can use only Amazon’s load balancer application."

"The solution could be more simplified for new users. It could be more user-friendly."

"A lot of caching features must be added to the solution."

"The support must be improved."

"The only issues we've faced were when AWS itself had problems, and that's very rare. I can only recall one instance when they had issues, but they managed to resolve it quickly."

"Amazon CloudFront can improve by accurately determining the latency of a non-defined URL that the solution encounters."

More Amazon CloudFront cons

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"Support is not that great."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"The solution’s price is reasonable."

"For CloudFront, I'm quite satisfied with the pricing. Initially, it doesn't require many resources for this specific solution."

"The tool is affordable."

"I rate Amazon CloudFront's pricing a five out of ten."

"Compared to competitors like Azure and Google, we find AWS pricing to be advantageous."

More Amazon CloudFront pricing and cost advice

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"It is an expensive solution."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which CDN solutions are best for your needs.

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815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

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.

What do you like most about Fastly?

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

What needs improvement with Fastly?

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a customer who is international and has deployments in different regions, it is ve...

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Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

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Azure Front Door vs Fastly

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Product Reports

Download Amazon CloudFront product report

Amazon CloudFront

November 2024

Download Fastly product report

November 2024

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.

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Sample Customers

Unilever, Spotify, Pinterest, MLB Advanced Media, Foursquare, PBS, Airbnb, Netflix, WIX, Comcast, Automobili Lamborghini, Rovio, Discovery Communications

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase