Fastly vs Windows Azure CDN comparison

Fastly and Microsoft are both solutions in the CDN category. Fastly is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5, while Microsoft is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.4. Fastly holds a 4.0% mindshare in CDN, compared to Microsoft’s 3.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Fastly users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Windows Azure CDN and Fastly are competing products in the content delivery network space. Based on data comparisons, Fastly often holds the upper hand due to its advanced features and performance despite Azure CDN's competitive pricing and reliable support.

Features: Windows Azure CDN's valuable features include scalability, global reach, and integration with Microsoft services. Fastly offers real-time analytics, instant configuration updates, and edge computing capabilities, appealing to tech buyers seeking high performance and dynamic capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Windows Azure CDN could improve its flexibility for users needing more tailored options, enhance its real-time analytics capabilities, and refine its interaction features to compete with advanced competitors. Fastly could enhance its user documentation for better onboarding, improve integration with non-technical environments, and potentially offer more competitive pricing models for wider accessibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Windows Azure CDN benefits from smooth integration with Microsoft environments, providing a straightforward deployment experience. It offers reliable support channels but may lack flexibility for some users. Fastly's developer-friendly approach enables rapid deployment with robust API support and personalized technical assistance, noted for its adaptability and responsive customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Windows Azure CDN is known for its competitive pricing structure and predictable costs, providing a strong ROI for organizations heavily invested in Microsoft ecosystems. Fastly, while potentially more expensive, offers compelling ROI for businesses demanding high-speed performance and customization due to its billing model based on performance and features.

To learn more, read our detailed Fastly vs. Windows Azure CDN Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Windows Azure CDN

April 2025

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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 May 2025, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.3%, up from 21.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 4.0%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Windows Azure CDN is 3.0%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

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.

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Muhammad ZaheerNazir

Team Lead and Solutions Architect at Systems Arabia

Helps to handle edge cases and has purge features

I believe Windows Azure CDN can improve monitoring and measuring overall end-user performance. Providing monitoring tools or agents that can be integrated into our pages would be highly beneficial. Setting up a custom domain with Windows Azure CDN involves proving domain ownership, which can take some time. The process is relatively straightforward if your DNS or domain registrar is already integrated with Microsoft. However, the verification process may be more time-consuming if you use a different service provider.

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

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

"The technical support is good."

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

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

More Cloudflare pros

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

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

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

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

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

"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."

"One of the most valuable aspects is the capability to store extensive datasets and objects in the cloud, enabling their download through shared access signatures."

"The geolocation feature is very important because many colleagues travel worldwide and need to access information from anywhere. The product has improved security."

"The fact that it just delivers what it is supposed to do is its most valuable feature...The initial setup is very straightforward."

"The most valuable feature of Windows Azure CDN is its effectiveness."

"The UI is very intuitive."

"One of the tool's best features is its ability to handle edge cases. For instance, we encountered a situation where we needed to remove certain files from public access. The solution offered a purge feature that allowed us to remove these files. This feature ensured that the files were deleted from all edge servers. Subsequently, we were able to upload new versions of the files."

"We use the product for faster content delivery with low latency."

"It is a stable solution."

More Windows Azure CDN pros

Cons

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."

"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."

"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 documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

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

"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"The solution's pricing could be better."

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

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

"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."

"Support is not that great."

"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."

"They should include configuration for cache rules."

"The solution’s pricing could be improved."

"There were a few bugs that were very disappointing. So, that is a part of the reason why we started using Fastly."

"The response time of the support team must be improved."

"Exploring shared access solutions with cloud accounts would be a beneficial choice."

"I aim to enhance the reporting."

"Windows Azure CDN should lower its prices."

"We have experienced issues with switch connectivity."

More Windows Azure CDN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"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

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

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

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

"The pricing has been very competitive."

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

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"It is an expensive solution."

"The solution's price depends on how much traffic you have. So, it was okay for us. Payments are to be made on a monthly basis since one has to pay for what they used."

"I rate the price of Windows Azure CDN a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is high."

"The pricing of the solution depends on usage and varies based on the company's needs. If you want additional features like advanced logging, it will be pricier. However, it could be cheaper if you don't need those features. It all depends on the resources and requirements."

"The tool's pricing is cheap."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten."

"It comes at a relatively affordable cost."

"The pricing is extremely high, almost 9 out of 10."

"The solution's price is above the medium range."

More Windows Azure CDN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

18%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

34%

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

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 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?

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Windows Azure CDN?

One of the tool's best features is its ability to handle edge cases. For instance, we encountered a situation where w...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Windows Azure CDN?

The pricing of the solution depends on usage and varies based on the company's needs. If you want additional features...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Windows Azure CDN?

Windows Azure CDN should lower its prices.

See all answers

Comparisons

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

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 20% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Fastly

Compared 4% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Akamai vs Windows Azure CDN

Compared 28% of the time

Edgio vs Windows Azure CDN

Compared 21% of the time

Amazon CloudFront vs Windows Azure CDN

Compared 15% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Windows Azure CDN

Compared 4% of the time

More Windows Azure CDN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

April 2025

Download Fastly product report

Buyer's Guide

CDN

April 2025

Download Windows Azure CDN 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

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

Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches static web content at strategically placed locations to provide maximum throughput for delivering content to users. The CDN offers developers a global solution for delivering high-bandwidth content by caching the content at physical nodes across the world.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

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

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

NORAD, Agreeya Mobility

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Windows Azure CDN

April 2025

Free Report: Fastly vs. Windows Azure CDN

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