Amazon CloudFront vs Cloudflare vs Fastly comparison

Read 78 Cloudflare reviews

37,981 Views
6,457 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Read 9 Fastly reviews

2,377 Views
1,593 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon CloudFront

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Imperva and others in CDN.

To learn more, read our detailed CDN Report (Updated: March 2026).

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Helped 885,444 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 April 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 6.3%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.7%, down from 22.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 5.7%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare	18.7%
Amazon CloudFront	6.3%
Fastly	5.7%
Other	69.3%

CDN

Featured Reviews

Nicolas Forgues

Head of Data & Content at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Improved web performance has boosted content customization and currently delivers faster user experiences

From my perspective, I see some weaknesses in Amazon CloudFront; I would rate the product something around nine out of ten, but there are disadvantages compared to its competitors. Talking specifically about Amazon CloudFront, I think they could have some additional features in the future, and I believe they may lack certain functionalities.

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M.A. Faisal

General Manager at bKash Limited

Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility

From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.

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Patel Parth

Technical support engineer at Adobe

Optimized ecommerce performance and improved access control through image handling and IP filtering

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP addresses instead of POP IPs. Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list. Additionally, a POP address should be there with a wide range of IP addresses provided, public static IP addresses, so customers can integrate egress IPs. Fastly should provide WebP image processing on the backend instead of on the fly. It would be a very useful feature to avoid unnecessary time for browser to browser and local cookies. I believe that Fastly service has a few gaps. We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers. There should be transparency.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon CloudFront provides valuable security by ensuring secure file access when accessing files from S3."

"The UI and the functionality in AWS for CloudFront is much better as compared to Azure and GCP."

"The solution has many features that are comprehensive."

"One of the most valuable features of CloudFront is the reduced latency due to its edge locations, which results in a very fast delivery of data."

"The distribution aspect of CloudFront and its ability to reduce latency are most beneficial."

"This scalability has positively reflected in my customer's web performance and user experience, allowing for better loading times."

"The product provides reduced latency and quicker site refreshes."

"The product’s most valuable feature is the availability of the websites."

More Amazon CloudFront pros

"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."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"This solution has improved the security of our organization."

"It's very user-friendly."

"The tool is user-friendly."

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

"The API gives us the ability to remote control our DNS settings."

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."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

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

"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."

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

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"In summary, this solution is easy to manage, quick to deploy, and all of my customers are happy."

More Fastly pros

Cons

"The support must be improved."

"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."

"Amazon CloudFront's setup is a bit difficult, and we would love it if they made it easier."

"Sometimes, the server goes down automatically."

"The tool must provide regional control."

"With a mixed stack, things become a problem. With GCP and Azure, the DNS setup gets tricky when using CloudFront."

"I have utilized certain characteristics and invested effort in reading the documentation, which proved to be challenging."

"Improvements are needed as per customer requirements."

More Amazon CloudFront cons

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."

"I rate technical support quite badly."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

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

"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."

"With CDN loads, sometimes we get an error that the host server is unavailable when the connection between CloudFlare and the server timed out."

"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."

"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."

More Cloudflare cons

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

"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Support is not that great."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"It's not easy to start with Fastly if you don't have VCL knowledge, so it appears very complex at the beginning."

"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."

More Fastly cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"We do not have many options to optimize costs."

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

"Its price is really on the high side. It should be cheaper in general."

"Amazon CloudFront is an expensive solution."

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

"The policies and prices keep on changing frequently with AWS solutions"

More Amazon CloudFront pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution is expensive."

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

"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."

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"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 product's pricing is cheap."

"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 depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"It is an expensive solution."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

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

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	21
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	16

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	26

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	5

Questions from the Community

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

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

What needs improvement with Fastly?

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are ...

What is your primary use case for Fastly?

I am using Fastly in the Adobe Commerce Cloud project. In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and ...

Azure Front Door vs Amazon CloudFront

Comparisons

Compared 27% of the time

Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 11% of the time

Windows Azure CDN vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 7% of the time

Lumen Content Delivery Network vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 6% of the time

Uplynk vs Amazon CloudFront

Compared 4% of the time

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Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 43% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 20% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fastly

Compared 8% of the time

Uplynk vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

CDN77 vs Fastly

Compared 4% of the time

AWS WAF 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 enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

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.