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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
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
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
7.6
Number of Reviews
14
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

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"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 very good at mitigating threats."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"Azure Front Door provides DDoS protection and features related to WAF."
"It inspects the traffic at the network level before it comes into Azure. We can do SSL offloading, and it can detect abnormalities before the traffic comes into the application. It can be used globally and is easy to set up. It is also quite stable and scalable."
"The tool is easy to use for beginners."
"I particularly appreciate its load-balancing capabilities as it allows us to manage multiple instances and support a global presence effectively."
"The price is one of the most important aspects of the product. It's quite affordable."
"I am impressed with the tool's integrations."
"The web application firewall is a great feature."
"The most valuable feature is that I can have CDN and load-balancing capabilities in a single service instead of managing two separate tools."
"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."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
 

Cons

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"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 integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"The user interface needs improvement as it is difficult to create the mapping to link the problem with your private address sources."
"The product needs to improve its latency."
"This is a relatively expensive solution."
"There could be improvements regarding its pricing for large-scale projects."
"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."
"I'm responsible for the governance and cost control of Azure. I'm not a specialist in any products and therefore I couldn't really speak effectively to features that are lacking or missing."
"There is room for improvement and they're working on it."
"In the tool, there needs to be a good amount of monitoring in the area of health probes to capture in front of what is happening."
"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."
"Support is not that great."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"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."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"It is on a pay-as-you-go basis."
"The transition to the premium tier has led to increased costs, making it more expensive than the classic tier."
"The product is expensive."
"The pricing of the solution is good."
"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 solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"It is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
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?
Azure Front Door is cheaper for small projects, companies, or applications compared to using separate tools.
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.
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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: February 2025.
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