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Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
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)
Amazon CloudFront
Ranking in CDN
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fastly
Ranking in CDN
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.2%, up from 20.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 9.6%, down from 12.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 3.5%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

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.
XYX ABC - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Nick Wilsdon - PeerSpot reviewer
An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support
The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The UI is good."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the availability of the websites."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to deliver content to users nearby."
"The best feature of Amazon CloudFront is its simplified process and easy integration."
"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."
"If you're using AWS entirely, it's smooth sailing."
"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 solution has good security features."
"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."
"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's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
 

Cons

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."
"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."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"Amazon CloudFront can improve by accurately determining the latency of a non-defined URL that the solution encounters."
"The product should be more intuitive."
"A lot of caching features must be added to the solution."
"One of the biggest challenges with Amazon CloudFront is their pricing policy"
"There are some solutions needed for integration that are not free."
"I have utilized certain characteristics and invested effort in reading the documentation, which proved to be challenging."
"There is a bit of a workaround required for custom domain management on CloudFront."
"Improvements are needed as per customer requirements."
"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 solution's pricing could be better."
"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."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"Support is not that great."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I give the price a five out of ten."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"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."
"The product has a mid-range pricing."
"The product could improve its price."
"The tool is affordable."
"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."
"Its price is really on the high side. It should be cheaper in general."
"The policies and prices keep on changing frequently with AWS solutions"
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"It is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 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.
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 do you like most about Amazon CloudFront?
The solution has good security features.
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...
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 ...
 

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: December 2024.
823,875 professionals have used our research since 2012.