Azure Front Door vs Fastly comparison

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Azure Front Door

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Fastly and Azure Front Door compete in the content delivery network space. Azure Front Door appears to have the upper hand due to its extensive features, making it desirable despite having a higher cost.

Features: Fastly offers real-time logging, instant purge, and edge computing capabilities. Azure Front Door provides global load balancing, application layer security, and integrated WAF options.

Room for Improvement: Fastly could improve its zero-trust solutions and enhance its CDN configurations. Its UI could also be refined for better user interaction. Azure Front Door may benefit from extending its pricing options to accommodate smaller enterprises and improving the user interface for less tech-savvy users. Enhancing integration capabilities with non-Microsoft services could also be beneficial.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly emphasizes a simpler deployment process with developer-friendly approaches. Azure Front Door integrates seamlessly with Microsoft's Azure platform, offering reliable deployment experiences due to its extensive documentation and support network.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly is acknowledged for competitive pricing and favorable ROI due to performance efficiency. Azure Front Door, while involving higher setup costs, justifies its pricing through a comprehensive feature set that supports long-term value, especially for security-focused applications.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Front Door vs. Fastly Report (Updated: May 2025).

Azure Front Door vs. Fastly

May 2025

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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

Azure Front Door

Ranking in CDN

2nd

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

13th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Microsoft Security Suite (18th)

Fastly

Ranking in CDN

7th

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

18th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Azure Front Door is 18.3%, down from 19.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 4.2%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN

Featured Reviews

SayedAbdelrhman

Cloud Solution Architect at MentorMate

Provide bot protection and has proficient documentation

During our discussion with the internal Microsoft team about assessing our environment, they confirmed that we have sufficient security measures, especially regarding edge protection. Internally, we believe we are now certified. In the future, we could consider adding layer four protection from the firewall. Front Door combines CDN and WAF protection, so further enhancing its features could benefit both the customer and us. We monitor the number of users attempting to access our IP or DNS servers. When designing the system, we initially needed to ensure our environment was protected with a WAF. However, WAF is currently too costly for us, so we created private links and connected them to Front Door. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The web application firewall is a great feature."

"Azure Front Door provides DDoS protection and features related to WAF."

"I am impressed with the tool's integrations."

"The most valuable feature is that I can have CDN and load-balancing capabilities in a single service instead of managing two separate tools."

"You can assign as many web application firewall policies as you want to the same instance of Front Door."

"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."

"Has a great application firewall and we like the security."

"I particularly appreciate its load-balancing capabilities as it allows us to manage multiple instances and support a global presence effectively."

More Azure Front Door pros

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"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."

Cons

"It lacks sufficient functionality."

"My suggestion for improvement would be to enhance the Data Export feature to include specific tables, particularly the Azure Diagnostics table."

"I dislike the URL set parameters."

"There could be improvements regarding its pricing for large-scale projects."

"We should be able to use Front Door defenders with multiple cloud vendors. Currently, they can be used only with the Azure cloud. Azure Front Door should also be able to do global load balancing and provide internal front door services. Microsoft should clearly define what Traffic Manager, Application Gateway, and Azure Front Door products do. These are similar products, and people get confused between these products."

"The user interface needs improvement as it is difficult to create the mapping to link the problem with your private address sources."

"There could be improvements regarding its pricing for large-scale projects."

"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."

More Azure Front Door cons

"Support is not that great."

"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."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"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 solution's pricing could be better."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."

"The pricing of the solution is good."

"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."

"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."

"It is an expensive solution."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 excellent support. Azure Front Door can quickly detect abnormalities before the...

What do you like most about Azure Front Door?

Rules Engine is a valuable feature.

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 help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

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 customer who is international and has deployments in different regions, it is ve...

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Product Reports

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Azure Front Door

June 2025

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June 2025

Also Known As

Azure Front-Door

No data available

Overview

Azure Front Door is employed for securing external traffic, global load balancing, integrating web application firewalls, enabling disaster recovery, and enhancing application accessibility.

Organizations leverage Azure Front Door to support data publishing, act as a CDN, and ensure low latency for global users. Clients use it to protect numerous internet-accessible applications, integrate with DNS, and implement custom routes. Favored for caching web content and securely, efficiently distributing traffic to backend services, Azure Front Door offers SSL offloading, traffic inspection, and global scalability. Users value its affordability, ease of implementation, and web application firewall. Azure Front Door provides rich security features, traffic management, and URL rewriting. Load-balancing capabilities enhance performance with additional content security policies and bot protection. Integrations, including with GitOps, along with combined CDN and load-balancing, are also highlighted.

What are the most important features?

SSL Offloading: Reduces the burden on backend services
Traffic Inspection: Enhances security by inspecting incoming traffic
Global Scalability: Ensures performance for users worldwide
Web Application Firewall: Provides in-depth security features
Load Balancing: Distributes traffic to improve performance
URL Rewriting: Customizes URL paths for better navigation
Bot Protection: Shields applications from automated threats
Integrations: Supports technologies like GitOps
Combined CDN and Load-Balancing: Streamlines content delivery and traffic management

What are the benefits or ROI of using this service?

Affordability: Provides cost-effective solutions for web traffic management
Ease of Implementation: Streamlines setup processes for quick deployment
Enhanced Security: Offers robust protection for web applications
Improved Performance: Optimizes traffic distribution and latency
Scalability: Supports growing application demands with global reach

Azure Front Door finds usage across multiple industries due to its versatile applications. E-commerce companies benefit from improved global accessibility and speed, while financial institutions leverage its security features for protecting sensitive data. Media and entertainment sectors use its CDN capabilities for seamless content delivery, and healthcare providers rely on its compliance and protection standards for patient data security.

Microsoft

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Sample Customers

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