Amazon CloudFront vs Cloudflare vs Fastly comparison

Read 76 Cloudflare reviews

45,170 Views
6,776 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Read 8 Fastly reviews

2,050 Views
1,189 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon CloudFront

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare, and Fastly based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in CDN.

To learn more, read our detailed CDN Report (Updated: August 2025).

CDN

Download the complete report

Helped 865,384 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 7.8%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.2%, up from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 4.7%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN

Featured Reviews

Parth Buch

Infrastructure Architecture at Capgemini

Seamlessly manages security and dynamic content hosting in diverse applications

Hosting static content or with engineering dynamic content is beneficial. CloudFront provides a common access point, manages routing to different methods, and serves as an access point plus API routing. With AWS, maintenance is not required as it's a service offered by AWS which maintains itself. Security concerns are manageable through AWS's security mechanisms, with additional security enhancement possible through options like WAF and NACL.

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch

Engineer at SITMEXICO

Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients

It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

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.

More Amazon CloudFront pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The AWS environment was very helpful in terms of integration."

"The solution makes our platform fully accessible and available globally, helping us to ensure that our customers can rely on it being up and running."

"The most beneficial aspect of Amazon CloudFront is its capacity to automatically arrange resources depending on user needs, eliminating the need for on-premises management."

"The support team is knowledgeable."

"The product is very well interconnected with other Amazon services."

"The solution improves performance by reducing latency and cost."

"The solution has good security features."

"Amazon CloudFront is a stable solution."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"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."

"What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

More Cloudflare pros

"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."

"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."

"Its initial setup process 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."

Cons

"There is a bit of a workaround required for custom domain management on CloudFront."

"Amazon CloudFront is harder to understand compared to Azure."

"They should have more Edge locations so that CloudFront can be used much more. If they can make it a little bit cheaper and better than other networks, we will be able to use it more."

"The support must be improved."

"The lack of seamless integration made the setup process more complex and required additional research to manage all the services properly."

"Amazon CloudFront could improve by making it easier to integrate with components from different cloud providers."

"Support needs to be enhanced."

"They could be expanding the number of locations available. It will help users easily access content."

More Amazon CloudFront cons

"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."

"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."

"Support response time could be improved."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

More Cloudflare cons

"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 product should provide improved bot detection and management."

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

"Support is not that great."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"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 solution's pricing could be better."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon CloudFront costs less than third-party services."

"Compared to competitors like Azure and Google, we find AWS pricing to be advantageous."

"I rate Amazon CloudFront's pricing a five out of ten."

"The product could improve its price."

"The tool is affordable."

"Amazon CloudFront is an expensive solution."

"I used to work with AWS and Azure, and we provided cost comparisons for customers to help them choose the right services. Azure tends to be more user-friendly and easier to understand, while AWS may take more time."

"For CloudFront, I'm quite satisfied with the pricing. Initially, it doesn't require many resources for this specific solution."

More Amazon CloudFront pricing and cost advice

"We are using the free version."

"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 pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"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."

"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."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It is an expensive solution."

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

"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."

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

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which CDN solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user68487

Security Expert with 51-200 employees

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…

How do I choose between AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Global Accelerator or Amazon CloudFro...

What do you like most about Amazon CloudFront?

The solution has good security features.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudFront?

I find Amazon's pricing good, rating it eight out of ten and considering it affordable and rightly placed, not expens...

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 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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

What needs improvement with Fastly?

Fastly has POPs with huge servers across the world, so it works effectively everywhere except the mainland China regi...

Azure Front Door vs Amazon CloudFront

Comparisons

Compared 51% of the time

Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 13% of the time

Windows Azure CDN vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 5% of the time

AWS Global Accelerator vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 4% of the time

AWS WAF vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon CloudFront Competitors

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 22% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 7% of the time

Uplynk vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Windows Azure CDN vs Fastly

Compared 3% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Product Reports

Amazon CloudFront

Download Amazon CloudFront product report

Download Cloudflare product report

Download Fastly product report

Also Known As

No data available

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Overview

Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates delivery of your websites, APIs, video content or other web assets. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services products to give developers and businesses an easy way to accelerate content to end users with no minimum usage commitments. Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront is optimized to work with other Amazon Web Services, like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Route 53. Amazon CloudFront also works seamlessly with any non-AWS origin server, which stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services products, there are no long-term contracts or minimum monthly usage commitments for using Amazon CloudFront – you pay only for as much or as little content as you actually deliver through the content delivery service.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“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.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

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.