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Azure Front Door vs Fastly comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 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
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Azure Front Door
Ranking in CDN
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (8th), Microsoft Security Suite (12th)
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) (17th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.7%, up from 21.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure Front Door is 19.5%, up from 19.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 3.8%, up from 3.1% 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.
Thomas Zebar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides great security with a good application firewall
The initial setup is straightforward. If you want to use the portal, CLI, or PowerShare, or you want to use automation data for one month, it's straightforward. Even when it comes to operational maintenance, it's pretty easy and straightforward. Microsoft has done a great job on that front. Maintenance generally requires someone who is a cloud administrator or similar to maintain services in general, with Front Door a small piece of a larger maintenance requirement. There's not a lot to manage, the configuration is simple. I encourage people to document the configuration and infrastructure as well as disaster recovery in case anything happens.
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 DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"The technical support is good."
"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"I find the technical support excellent, and I rate it a ten."
"The price is one of the most important aspects of the product. It's quite affordable."
"You can assign as many web application firewall policies as you want to the same instance of Front Door."
"Azure Front Door provides DDoS protection and features related to WAF."
"The most valuable feature is that you can implement resources globally. It does not depend on location and ability or something like that. This is to connect clients around the world."
"The solution is good."
"I am impressed with the tool's integrations."
"Rules Engine is a valuable feature."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"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."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
 

Cons

"The product needs to improve its automation."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"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."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"Technical support is lacking."
"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."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"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."
"The tool should improve its cost."
"It lacks sufficient functionality."
"I dislike the URL set parameters."
"The product's features are limited compared to Cloudflare. The tool also doesn't work well in a hybrid environment. I would like to see a way to add personalized APIs in the system."
"The user interface needs improvement as it is difficult to create the mapping to link the problem with your private address sources."
"This is a relatively expensive solution."
"The product needs to improve its latency."
"There could be improvements regarding its pricing for large-scale projects."
"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's customer service area needs improvement."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."
"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."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The price is reasonable."
"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."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The transition to the premium tier has led to increased costs, making it more expensive than the classic tier."
"Considering the standard licensing of the tool, even though we have not checked the billing as of now, it might not be very costly."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"The product is expensive."
"The pricing of the solution is good."
"It is on a pay-as-you-go basis."
"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 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."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
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.
What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?
We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Front Door?
I am not sure about the pricing but believe Azure Front Door might require a higher cost due to its entry point nature.
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
Azure Front-Door
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.
Information Not Available
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 Azure Front Door vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.