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Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly comparison

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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

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in CDN
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th)
Amazon CloudFront
Ranking in CDN
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fastly
Ranking in CDN
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (21st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 15.8%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 5.4%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 5.5%, up from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare15.8%
Amazon CloudFront5.4%
Fastly5.5%
Other73.3%
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
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.
Pranay Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior software developer at Simplifyvms
Edge caching has transformed response times and delivers faster candidate data globally
Fastly can be improved in certain areas such as VCL, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve for normal users. A more user-friendly, UI-based configuration could simplify the experience, alongside better templates for common use cases and dashboard improvements, as the current dashboard feels complex for beginners, and pricing can be hard to predict for smaller companies. I chose 8 out of 10 because it has excellent performance and low latency delivery, making it suitable for larger applications, with strong Edge Caching and instant purging capabilities. However, VCL complexity and pricing predictability, especially for smaller companies, along with a user-friendly dashboard are areas impacting my score.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have not had a DDOS attack since, or at least not become unavailable due to DDOS which means my ROI is pretty good."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The aggressive caching and DDOS mitigation are the most valuable features offered by Cloudflare."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"Cloudflare makes it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple users and multiple clients, and basically go in and access their account, make the changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."
"The solution is a great fit for customers who want unlimited bandwidth."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the availability of the websites."
"The speed and usability of the solution are valuable."
"Amazon CloudFront provides valuable security by ensuring secure file access when accessing files from S3."
"The solution improves performance by reducing latency and cost."
"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."
"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 tool is highly available and reliable. It helps to access server applications easily. Integrating Amazon CloudFront with other AWS services was very easy, I would rate it eight out of ten."
"Amazon CloudFront is a stable solution."
"Its initial setup process 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."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"In summary, this solution is easy to manage, quick to deploy, and all of my customers are happy."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."
 

Cons

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"The installation was complex until I learned what I had to learn."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
"More insight into analytics and threats would be a good place to start improving Cloudflare."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"I rate technical support quite badly."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"At the end, it is worth than giving your house keys to the NSA."
"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."
"The tool must provide regional control."
"Amazon CloudFront's setup is a bit difficult, and we would love it if they made it easier."
"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."
"The product could support any network load balancer. At present, we can use only Amazon’s load balancer application."
"It might benefit from multi-region support to enhance performance."
"The product should be more intuitive."
"Amazon CloudFront is harder to understand compared to Azure."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"It's not easy to start with Fastly if you don't have VCL knowledge, so it appears very complex at the beginning."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"Support is not that great."
"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."
"Fastly can be improved in certain areas such as VCL, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve for normal users."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We don't have any issues with the price."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"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."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"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."
"For CloudFront, I'm quite satisfied with the pricing. Initially, it doesn't require many resources for this specific solution."
"We do not have many options to optimize costs."
"Amazon CloudFront costs less than third-party services."
"The product could improve its price."
"The tool is affordable."
"Amazon CloudFront is an expensive solution."
"The product has a mid-range pricing."
"The policies and prices keep on changing frequently with AWS solutions"
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"It is an expensive solution."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

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 GR...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?
The tool's pricing is moderate. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expens...
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 CloudFro...
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 expens...
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudFront?
Honestly, Amazon CloudFront does its job really well, but it doesn’t always feel easy to work with. The setup can be ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?
The pricing of Fastly can be hard to predict because it is primarily usage-based with minimal setup costs and flexibl...
What needs improvement with Fastly?
Fastly can be improved in certain areas such as VCL, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve for normal user...
What is your primary use case for Fastly?
Fastly serves as an Edge Cloud platform and CDN that we use for real-time Edge Caching and instant caching purging, a...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
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: April 2026.
896,692 professionals have used our research since 2012.