Cloudflare and Amazon Route 53 are leaders in DNS management solutions, with Cloudflare focusing on security and performance enhancements, while Amazon Route 53 boasts seamless integration within the AWS ecosystem. Cloudflare generally has the upper hand due to its robust security features and competitive pricing, appealing to a broad range of users.
Features: Cloudflare offers aggressive caching, DDoS mitigation, and CDN capabilities, catering to performance and security needs. It provides easy DNS management and supports free and paid tiers, making it budget-friendly. Amazon Route 53 provides excellent integration with AWS services, reliable global DNS resolution, and supports complex routing scenarios, which is beneficial for users already within the AWS environment.
Room for Improvement: Cloudflare could enhance support responsiveness and analytics insights to avoid network errors and improve communication during downtime. Amazon Route 53 might work on simplifying its pricing and providing better integration with on-premise solutions. Clarifying setup instructions and pricing documentation could also be beneficial.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudflare offers an easy setup in both public and hybrid clouds, supported by extensive documentation. However, users sometimes report slow support responses. Amazon Route 53 delivers smooth deployment within AWS, valued for integration and scalability, though its support aligns with AWS's comprehensive, yet sometimes complex system.
Pricing and ROI: Cloudflare's tiered plans offer predictable costs, with substantial ROI from its free and paid options. It excels in value for security-focused clients. Amazon Route 53's pay-per-use model allows scalability but can become costly for extensive operations. Despite the complexity, its pricing remains competitive within the AWS ecosystem.
The main factors are time-saving and security, even if the cost is slightly higher.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
Amazon services are very stable, and there are few problems.
Amazon's customer support is very good with a quick response time.
They provide a normal developer level of support, and within twenty-four hours for non-critical issues, which is acceptable for us.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
The key factor is the language in which the support is offered, which, in this case, is in Thai.
We haven't faced any scalability issues, thanks to its integration with AWS services.
The scalability is maintained by AKS, and Route 53's scalability part is primarily involved with load balancing.
Amazon Route 53 is scalable as I use automation with YML files to handle scalability needs, and it works well.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
We use auto-scaling groups to manage load.
The solution is stable.
I have not experienced any outages or downtime.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
There could be improvements in the configuration process, particularly in the options provided during setup, such as subdomain configurations and certificate management.
They need to ensure that the threats reported on are actual threats.
There is room for improvement in restricting access through one website from S3 buckets.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
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.
Route 53 is more expensive.
The pricing of Route 53 is slightly higher compared to other services, however, it is justified by its high availability and reliability.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
I find it to be cheap.
I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high.
I find Amazon Route 53 valuable for its ability to manage DNS records and efficiently route traffic with features like failover routing and geolocation routing.
They do not alert on non-actionable items, making their alerts reliable and focused on concerns that matter.
Amazon Route 53 is beneficial for managing traffic and domain names, offering features like latency-based routing and multi-deployment options.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 34.0% |
| Amazon Route 53 | 6.9% |
| Other | 59.1% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 16 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 9 |
| Large Enterprise | 12 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 45 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 25 |
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.
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
We monitor all Managed DNS reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
