Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Fastly are both solutions in the CDN category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.3, while Fastly is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 6.9% mindshare in CDN, compared to Fastly’s 5.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Amazon CloudFront and Fastly compete in the CDN market, each offering unique strengths. Amazon CloudFront is favored for its deep AWS integration, while Fastly's real-time capabilities provide a competitive advantage for those prioritizing speed.

Features: Amazon CloudFront offers robust DDoS protection, seamless AWS service integration, and latency reduction through its edge locations. Fastly is known for edge computing capabilities, impressive speed optimization, and its powerful VCL for configuration management.

Room for Improvement: Amazon CloudFront could benefit from faster configuration adjustments, enhanced support for non-AWS environments, and more transparent logging features. Fastly might improve by offering better zero-trust solutions, simplifying its user interface, and providing more comprehensive reporting tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon CloudFront's integration with AWS simplifies deployment and is supported by a knowledgeable team, enhancing user experience for AWS clients. Fastly offers flexibility and rapid deployment configurations but may require more technical expertise, with a responsive support system aiding this process.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon CloudFront provides a predictable pricing structure suitable for AWS-integrated businesses looking for cost transparency. Fastly’s pricing is flexible and can be economically favorable for scalable solutions, appealing to businesses that require performance adjustments despite potential cost variability.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudFront vs. Fastly Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudFront vs. Fastly

December 2025

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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:

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.1%, down from 21.8% compared to the previous year. 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
Product	Market Share (%)
Cloudflare	19.1%
Amazon CloudFront	6.9%
Fastly	5.3%
Other	68.7%

CDN

Featured Reviews

Herb Angle

Owner at Hga consulting

Has helped manage client domains with streamlined access control and threat visibility

I don't know what areas could be improved with Cloudflare WAF; Cloudflare is constantly improving and adding features to their feature set. They're doing a good job, and as far as DNS and support for any domains that I create or my clients create, it's mandatory for me to make sure that they have Cloudflare as their DNS provider. The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service. It doesn't pay to try to host your own website.

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Nicolas Forgues

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.

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Patel Parth

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.

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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

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

More Cloudflare pros

"The speed and usability of the solution are valuable."

"The product is very well interconnected with other Amazon services."

"The most beneficial feature is capturing the static data, which is crucial for our operations."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the speed of delivery."

"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."

"Scalability is 10 out of 10; there are no issues."

"Amazon CloudFront provides valuable security by ensuring secure file access when accessing files from S3."

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

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 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."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."

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

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

More Fastly pros

Cons

"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."

"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 integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

"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."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"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."

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

More Cloudflare cons

"Amazon CloudFront seems to have too many unnecessary products, which makes it cluttered."

"I have utilized certain characteristics and invested effort in reading the documentation, which proved to be challenging."

"The product should be more intuitive."

"Amazon CloudFront could improve by making it easier to integrate with components from different cloud providers."

"The solution can benefit from expanding its data center and server locations to multiple places for smoother content delivery with even lower latency. The latency we experience is sufficient for our needs, and we are doing well. However, if they expand their locations in the future, it could be a positive factor. Its competitors have multiple data and server locations."

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

"Sometimes, the server goes down automatically."

"The user interface could be improved."

More Amazon CloudFront cons

"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"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."

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

"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."

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"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."

"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."

"We are using the free version."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"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."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"Amazon CloudFront is an expensive solution."

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

"We do not have many options to optimize costs."

"The product has a mid-range pricing."

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

"Amazon's pricing varies depending on the data transfer."

"Amazon CloudFront costs less than third-party services."

"The tool is affordable."

More Amazon CloudFront pricing and cost advice

"It is an expensive solution."

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

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

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

"The pricing has been very competitive."

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

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	25

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	21
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	16

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	5

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

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What do you like most about Amazon CloudFront?

The solution has good security features.

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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...

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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 h...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 51% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

AWS Shield vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Azure Front Door vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 40% of the time

Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 11% of the time

Windows Azure CDN vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 5% of the time

AWS Global Accelerator vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon CloudFront Competitors

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 22% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Uplynk vs Fastly

Compared 4% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

January 2026

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudFront

January 2026

Download Amazon CloudFront product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

January 2026

Download Fastly product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Overview

Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

Cloudflare

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.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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.

Fastly

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudFront vs. Fastly

December 2025

Free Report: Amazon CloudFront vs. Fastly

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudFront vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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