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Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.1
Amazon Route 53 provides ROI through downtime prevention, efficiency improvements, security enhancements, and justifies its cost with quality.
Sentiment score
6.7
Businesses see financial benefits from Cloudflare through improved uptime, security, and performance, enhancing returns despite measurement challenges.
The main factors are time-saving and security, even if the cost is slightly higher.
You would only lose money if you had an attack and you need to calculate the cost against the risks.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
We have had ROI with the tool's use since it never gave us downtime and made us lose millions.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon Route 53 offers effective support, but premium plans improve experiences; basic plans might limit engagement and satisfaction.
Sentiment score
7.1
Customer service is highly rated, especially for Enterprise plans, but response times could improve for complex issues.
Amazon services are very stable, and there are few problems.
Amazon's customer support is very good with a quick response time.
They provide a normal developer level of support, and within twenty-four hours for non-critical issues, which is acceptable for us.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
We'd like a dedicated account manager.
You can get a support engineer with the best qualifications.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Amazon Route 53 is highly rated for its scalability, reliability, and efficient integration, though some find it costlier.
Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare is highly regarded for its scalability, smoothly accommodating various user needs and handling significant traffic across business sizes.
We haven't faced any scalability issues, thanks to its integration with AWS services.
The scalability is maintained by AKS, and Route 53's scalability part is primarily involved with load balancing.
Amazon Route 53 is scalable as I use automation with YML files to handle scalability needs, and it works well.
It can scale approximately 10 percent, it is limited only by how much money you want to spend on the increase.
I rate the scalability of Cloudflare DNS a ten out of ten.
I would rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten since I didn't encounter any issues with it.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Amazon Route 53 is highly reliable, rated 99.99% stability, with rare downtime, enhanced by advanced routing features.
Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudflare is generally praised for stability and reliability, despite occasional issues and past outages, requiring proper configuration for best performance.
We use auto-scaling groups to manage load.
The solution is stable.
I have not experienced any outages or downtime.
I rate the stability of Cloudflare DNS a ten out of ten.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek improvements in handling requests, logging, UI, security, pricing, support, configuration, integration, automation, and domain support in Route 53.
Users suggest Cloudflare improve analytics, CDN errors, support, DNS, APIs, pricing, server access, DDoS features, and documentation.
There could be improvements in the configuration process, particularly in the options provided during setup, such as subdomain configurations and certificate management.
There is room for improvement in restricting access through one website from S3 buckets.
Error tracing could be made more intuitive.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
Compared to other vendors and Cloudflare, there will be more downtime.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Route 53 offers scalable, usage-based pricing; considered reasonable for reliability but complex for high-demand sites.
Cloudflare provides free and paid plans from $20, with straightforward pricing catering to small, medium, and enterprise businesses.
Route 53 is more expensive.
The pricing of Route 53 is slightly higher compared to other services, however, it is justified by its high availability and reliability.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
The price of the solution is expensive.
When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Route 53 excels in scalable DNS management, traffic routing, AWS integration, security, cost-effectiveness, and global domain management.
Cloudflare provides speed enhancement, security, and ease of use with CDN, DDoS protection, SSL, and traffic analytics for website optimization.
I find Amazon Route 53 valuable for its ability to manage DNS records and efficiently route traffic with features like failover routing and geolocation routing.
Amazon Route 53 is beneficial for managing traffic and domain names, offering features like latency-based routing and multi-deployment options.
One of the best advantages is managed security.
The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security.
Our scenario consisted of two web servers in different allocations to control access demands, and the load balancer did the job as expected, bringing security and stability to access points.
For me, the valuable feature is DDoS protection.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Route 53
Ranking in Managed DNS
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cloudflare
Ranking in Managed DNS
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Amazon Route 53 is 6.9%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 35.7%, up from 33.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS
 

Featured Reviews

Jithin Scaria - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides clear documentation, easy to understand, simplifies management and efficiently handles our domain-related configurations and DNS records
For initial setup, we generally use provisioning tools for these kinds of DNS records. The choice often depends on the cloud provider and the Infrastructure as Code (IAC) tools the client prefers. We adapt our approach accordingly rather than focusing on a single method within Route 53. The documentation is very user-friendly. Even someone with no prior experience can easily understand it. It provides step-by-step instructions and explains things in a clear and concise way. You can find everything you need to know about Route 53 and its features in the documentation, including white papers. In addition to manual configuration, you can also use third-party tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or AWS CloudFormation templates to manage your Route 53 configurations.
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Managed DNS solutions are best for your needs.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 6, 2013
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
22%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Azure DNS or Amazon Route 53?
Azure DNS is a hosting service of DNS domains. It has excellent operating time and performance, resulting in fast resolution. We like the ability to view everything in the Azure portal - this makes...
What do you like most about Amazon Route 53?
The most valuable features of the solution are the DNS, routing, and traffic features.
What needs improvement with Amazon Route 53?
There is a need for technical knowledge to use Amazon Route 53 effectively. If a person without much technical background could use it, I would have rated it a ten out of ten.
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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
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.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Route 53
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack
Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Route 53 vs. Cloudflare and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.