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AWS Shield vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 29, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS Shield
Ranking in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cloudflare
Ranking in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection category, the mindshare of AWS Shield is 5.8%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.8%, down from 20.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

SteveNg - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 23, 2023
The solution automatically scales according to traffic, only takes minutes to deploy, and is maintenance-free
The primary use case of the solution is firewall protection. Having a firewall is important for protecting our website from DDoS attacks. Just in case our services are running and we do get attacked, having a firewall can help keep our website alive The solution gives us a better sense of…
Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 1, 2022
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't degrade the performance of our solution. Additionally, it's easy to configure, which is crucial for us. It's easy to use and set up and stops attacks on our servers. We haven't encountered any attack problems because the solution stops them in real-time. AWS Shield specifically focuses on defending against denial-of-service attacks, making it a great solution for that type of threat."
"I am impressed with the product's multiple features like security."
"The product is easy to use."
"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."
"The solution's ease of use is the most valuable feature."
"It is integrated with AWS. So, it gives you a good first step."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"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 tool is user-friendly."
 

Cons

"The product needs to improve its logs and reports to make it read better."
"The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced."
"The management of it is a bit hard. If you don't engineer it on the front side, it is hard to go back in and change it. It could be improved in terms of architecture requirements and then ongoing support requirements as a secondary component to it. People tend to set up things like this, and they just expect it to work without the care and feeding that needs to go back into it either from an application team or a network environment team."
"We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need."
"The product is expensive."
"The product should give users more flexibility to customize their security policies according to their requirements."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"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."
"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is cheap."
"It depends on your subscription level and the volume that you're spending with AWS. So, it is very relative to the consumption alignment in your subscription level. It is a well-constructed, scalable pricing option, but it is relative to how much you're spending on AWS. Because the more you spend, typically, the more you get off on services like this. I find it to be comparable to other solutions."
"The cost depends on traffic each month, so on average, it costs us between US$200 and US$300 per month."
"The tool's pricing is good."
"We pay $3000 per month for the solution."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"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."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
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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
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Insurance Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS Shield?
We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't degrade the performance of our solution. Additionally, it's easy to configure, whi...
What needs improvement with AWS Shield?
The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced. The tool has a few parameters based on which it tries to understand anomalies. It would be better if the anomalies were identified quickly.
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

No data available
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code
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 AWS Shield vs. Cloudflare and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.