AWS Shield vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS Shield
Ranking in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
5
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
57
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2024, in the Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection category, the mindshare of AWS Shield is 8.9%, up from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 15.5%, down from 19.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
Unique Categories:
No other categories found
CDN
23.5%
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
2.4%
 

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…
XA
Dec 27, 2023
Mitigates DDoS attacks and other security threats, especially beneficial for WordPress websites but support could be better
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. Many small businesses lack the budget for solutions like AWS and rely on GoDaddy, hosting, or even Versal plans for their initial setup. At that level, Cloudflare is the best option, even though it's not as powerful as Amazon CloudFront or Akamai. Those are built for different services, while Cloudflare caters specifically to smaller teams that eventually scale up. For smaller businesses, they're the absolute best, so I'd give Cloudflare a nine out of ten. For larger businesses, it depends on the budget. Even for them, I'd rate it a seven out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."
"I am impressed with the product's multiple features like security."
"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."
"The solution's ease of use is the most valuable feature."
"It is integrated with AWS. So, it gives you a good first step."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"It's very user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"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."
 

Cons

"We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need."
"The product needs to improve its logs and reports to make it read better."
"The product should give users more flexibility to customize their security policies according to their requirements."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."
"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"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 needs to improve its automation."
"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is good."
"We pay $3000 per month for the solution."
"The cost depends on traffic each month, so on average, it costs us between US$200 and US$300 per month."
"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."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"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."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"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 give the price a five out of ten."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
report
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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
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Educational Organization
38%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
4%
 

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 product needs to improve its logs and reports to make it read better.
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 ...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?
The tool's pricing is moderate. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
 

Comparisons

 

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: June 2024.
787,817 professionals have used our research since 2012.