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AWS Shield vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

AWS Shield
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cloudflare
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of AWS Shield is 3.5%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 14.9%, down from 18.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare14.9%
AWS Shield3.5%
Other81.6%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2767527 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Has enabled multi-layered threat mitigation but still lacks deeper visibility for advanced application attacks
AWS Shield has limited coverage as it only protects against common and high-volume network and transport layer attacks, such as SYN floods. It does not provide inherent protection against more sophisticated layer 7 attacks such as HTTP floods. In such cases, integration with WAF is necessary, which results in additional costs for customers. To protect layer 7, layer 4, and layer 3, customers must implement both solutions. The service also has difficulties with static detection thresholds, which may not be sensitive enough to detect smaller application-specific attacks. While AWS Shield is a key security service, AWS should enhance their expert support with 24/7 response for complex attacks, which is currently limited.
M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution operates smoothly at its baseline level, and we do not encounter any issues at that level."
"The product is easy to use."
"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."
"It is integrated with AWS. So, it gives you a good first step."
"It is quite scalable, and we have not faced any issues with its scalability."
"If most of your internet presence from your application side is in AWS, AWS Shield is a great option."
"AWS Shield is aligned with the web application firewall (WAF), and they work seamlessly together, primarily working with Elastic Load Balancer, CloudFront, and Route 53 for CDN and DNS services protection."
"The solution's ease of use is the most valuable feature."
"Cloudflare's DNS services deliver the best performance in terms of speed and reliability."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"From a technical point of view, Cloudflare is the best CDN."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is a great fit for customers who want unlimited bandwidth."
"Cloudflare improves performance on my websites and is a great partner for cloud infrastructure for anyone who wants to use the security service and other features."
 

Cons

"AWS Shield Standard requires improvement, particularly regarding its dashboard since it currently provides limited coverage against comprehensive DDoS attacks."
"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced."
"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."
"AWS Shield has limited coverage as it only protects against common and high-volume network and transport layer attacks, such as SYN floods."
"We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need."
"The product is expensive."
"The product needs to improve its logs and reports to make it read better."
"There is an area for improvement regarding health checks. AWS Shield does not come with its own health check functionality."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"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 good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"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 solution could be more user-friendly."
"Access to the solution's dashboards is not intended for a service company. You are practically blind, and to validate a problem, you must view the customer's screen."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is cheap."
"The cost depends on traffic each month, so on average, it costs us between US$200 and US$300 per month."
"The tool's pricing is good."
"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."
"We pay $3000 per month for the solution."
"The price is reasonable."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"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."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise26
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Shield?
The pricing structure for AWS Shield is fair, yet it depends on the specific protections chosen. Enabling Shield Advanced on multiple services such as CloudFront, network load balancer, or Route 53...
What needs improvement with AWS Shield?
Services always benefit from improvements, including AWS Shield. With respect to the Web Application Firewall, current rule-based setups may not be adequately defined or classified. Enhancement of ...
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 ...
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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
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.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Cloudflare DNS
 

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: April 2026.
886,468 professionals have used our research since 2012.