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Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 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
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fastly
Ranking in CDN
8th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 6.9%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 5.3%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon CloudFront6.9%
Fastly5.3%
Other87.8%
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

Nicolas Forgues - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data & Content at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
Improved web performance has boosted content customization and currently delivers faster user experiences
From my perspective, I see some weaknesses in Amazon CloudFront; I would rate the product something around nine out of ten, but there are disadvantages compared to its competitors. Talking specifically about Amazon CloudFront, I think they could have some additional features in the future, and I believe they may lack certain functionalities.
PP
Technical support engineer at Adobe
Optimized ecommerce performance and improved access control through image handling and IP filtering
I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP addresses instead of POP IPs. Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list. Additionally, a POP address should be there with a wide range of IP addresses provided, public static IP addresses, so customers can integrate egress IPs. Fastly should provide WebP image processing on the backend instead of on the fly. It would be a very useful feature to avoid unnecessary time for browser to browser and local cookies. I believe that Fastly service has a few gaps. We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers. There should be transparency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is very well interconnected with other Amazon services."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the speed of delivery."
"The speed and usability of the solution are valuable."
"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."
"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."
"We can personalize a lot of things inside CDN."
"Hosting static content or with engineering dynamic content is beneficial."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Fastly combines both the CDN side and the Signal Sciences next-generation WAF, which is closely integrated with the CDN, allowing us to use both products seamlessly."
"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."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."
 

Cons

"The lack of seamless integration made the setup process more complex and required additional research to manage all the services properly."
"Amazon CloudFront can improve by accurately determining the latency of a non-defined URL that the solution encounters."
"Improvements are needed as per customer requirements."
"Sometimes, the server goes down automatically."
"The support must be improved."
"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."
"There is a bit of a workaround required for custom domain management on CloudFront."
"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."
"Support is not that great."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"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."
"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"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."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We do not have many options to optimize costs."
"The policies and prices keep on changing frequently with AWS solutions"
"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."
"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 CloudFront is an expensive solution."
"I rate Amazon CloudFront's pricing a five out of ten."
"I rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten. The licensing follows a pay-as-you-go model."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Retailer
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise5
 

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?
I find Amazon's pricing good, rating it eight out of ten and considering it affordable and rightly placed, not expensive.
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 needs improvement with Fastly?
I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP ad...
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudFront vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
880,745 professionals have used our research since 2012.