AWS Shield vs Fastly comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Fastly are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.7, while Fastly is ranked #11 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.4% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Fastly’s 2.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Fastly and AWS Shield compete in the web security market, with Fastly having an advantage in CDN capabilities and AWS Shield excelling in DDoS protection, making the choice dependent on security needs versus content delivery efficiency.

Features: Fastly offers real-time logging, customizable edge computing, and a robust network with numerous Points of Presence. AWS Shield provides integrated DDoS protection, seamless integration with other AWS services, and high availability.

Room for Improvement: Fastly could enhance its zero-trust security features, improve tools for hybrid reseller environments, and explore additional integrations beyond its current offerings. AWS Shield might lower the technical knowledge required for full utilization, expand beyond AWS ecosystem restrictions, and offer better cost transparency for advanced features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly ensures straightforward deployment with a well-documented setup process and responsive customer support, making it ideal for quick implementation. AWS Shield's integration within the AWS ecosystem makes it convenient for existing AWS users but may require advanced technical knowledge.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly's pay-as-you-go pricing model offers flexibility and potentially lower upfront costs, with users noting efficient content delivery. AWS Shield, while potentially incurring higher initial costs due to comprehensive security offerings, offers significant ROI for security-focused businesses.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Shield vs. Fastly Report (Updated: November 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. Fastly

November 2025

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Helped 873,808 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:

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.3%, up from 17.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 5.4%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 2.6%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cloudflare	18.3%
AWS Shield	5.4%
Fastly	2.6%
Other	73.69999999999999%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

Herb Angle

Owner at Hga consulting

Has helped manage client domains with streamlined access control and threat visibility

I don't know what areas could be improved with Cloudflare WAF; Cloudflare is constantly improving and adding features to their feature set. They're doing a good job, and as far as DNS and support for any domains that I create or my clients create, it's mandatory for me to make sure that they have Cloudflare as their DNS provider. The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service. It doesn't pay to try to host your own website.

Read full review

PranavTelang

Lead Architect at Orange España

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.

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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

"Cloudflare has many features."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."

"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

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

"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."

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

More Cloudflare pros

"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."

"AWS Shield offers numerous protection features that are crucial at the application layer, safeguarding users from distributed denial of service attacks, man-in-the-middle assaults, and hacker orchestrations."

"I recommend AWS Shield because it has proven helpful in tracking DDoS attacks within both my past and present environments, and without AWS Shield, a business could face potential losses, as this tool helps in identifying and mitigating fake traffic that disrupts applications, ultimately supporting business continuity."

"The product is easy to use."

"It is quite scalable, and we have not faced any issues with its scalability."

"I am impressed with the product's multiple features like security."

"It is integrated with AWS. So, it gives you a good first step."

"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, which is crucial for us. It's easy to use and set up and stops attacks on our servers. We haven't encountered any attack problems because the solution stops them in real-time. AWS Shield specifically focuses on defending against denial-of-service attacks, making it a great solution for that type of threat."

More AWS Shield pros

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

"Fastly combines both the CDN side and the Signal Sciences next-generation WAF, which is closely integrated with the CDN, allowing us to use both products seamlessly."

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

"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."

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

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

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

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

More Fastly pros

Cons

"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."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

"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 solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

More Cloudflare cons

"The product is expensive."

"AWS Shield has limited coverage as it only protects against common and high-volume network and transport layer attacks, such as SYN floods."

"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."

"The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced."

"We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need."

"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced."

"The network has been experiencing frustrating performance issues today, which is not typical for Nigeria."

"AWS Shield Standard requires improvement, particularly regarding its dashboard since it currently provides limited coverage against comprehensive DDoS attacks."

More AWS Shield 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."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"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 solution's pricing could be better."

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

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

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"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 product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The cost depends on traffic each month, so on average, it costs us between US$200 and US$300 per month."

"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 tool is cheap."

"The tool's pricing is good."

"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."

"It is an expensive solution."

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

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	25

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	5

Questions from the Community

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...

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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...

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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.

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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 de...

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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 Adva...

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What needs improvement with AWS Shield?

Services always benefit from improvements, including AWS Shield. With respect to the Web Application Firewall, curren...

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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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 53% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

DataDome vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Azure DDoS Protection vs AWS Shield

Compared 21% of the time

Cloudflare One vs AWS Shield

Compared 18% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs AWS Shield

Compared 5% of the time

Prolexic vs AWS Shield

Compared 5% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs AWS Shield

Compared 5% of the time

More AWS Shield Competitors

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 21% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

November 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield

November 2025

Download AWS Shield product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

November 2025

Download Fastly product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Overview

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

Cloudflare

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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.

Fastly

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. Fastly

November 2025

Free Report: AWS Shield vs. Fastly

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Shield vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: November 2025.

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