No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Amazon CloudFront vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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
Sponsored
Ranking in CDN
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (3rd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (18th)
Amazon CloudFront
Ranking in CDN
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Ranking in CDN
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (16th), API Security (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 16.4%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 5.7%, down from 7.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 2.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare16.4%
Amazon CloudFront5.7%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services2.4%
Other75.5%
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Nicolas Forgues - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management
F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"If it was not for CloudFlare, I would have to hire a dedicated resource to manage all this for me."
"Stability is great; I love their mechanisms, I love their GUI, I love their front end, I love their behind the scenes, algorithms and everything, it all makes sense."
"I didn’t have to pay anything for better website security and reduced server load."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"Cloudflare has positively impacted our organization by giving us flexibility to manage the DNS part, being quite fast, and allowing us to manage everything from a single dashboard, which is quite handy."
"It's very user-friendly."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"The tool is highly available and reliable. It helps to access server applications easily. Integrating Amazon CloudFront with other AWS services was very easy, I would rate it eight out of ten."
"The solution makes our platform fully accessible and available globally, helping us to ensure that our customers can rely on it being up and running."
"Hosting static content or with engineering dynamic content is beneficial."
"The speed and usability of the solution are valuable."
"The support team is knowledgeable."
"The solution has good security features."
"Scalability is 10 out of 10; there are no issues."
"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."
"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."
"Elastic environments are the most valuable features because I can pull these apps and migrate the on-premises environment to the Distributed Cloud environment, and this capability is very strong and the security regarding the apps is really very powerful."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."
"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."
 

Cons

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"We had to do a lot of digging and back-and-forth with technical support for specific use cases, and it might be helpful to have more screencasts or screenshots for common situations."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"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 reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"It might benefit from multi-region support to enhance performance."
"Improvements are needed as per customer requirements."
"A lot of caching features must be added to the solution."
"The tool must provide regional control."
"Amazon CloudFront is harder to understand compared to Azure."
"Amazon CloudFront could improve by making it easier to integrate with components from different cloud providers."
"The product could support any network load balancer. At present, we can use only Amazon’s load balancer application."
"There is room for improvement in customer service and support."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."
"The worst experience is that with so many solutions available, it is very complicated to know all of the solution modules, and the offers from F5 Distributed Cloud Services are vast."
"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"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."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"Its price is really on the high side. It should be cheaper in general."
"For CloudFront, I'm quite satisfied with the pricing. Initially, it doesn't require many resources for this specific solution."
"The product has a mid-range pricing."
"I rate Amazon CloudFront's pricing a five out of ten."
"Amazon's pricing varies depending on the data transfer."
"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."
"Amazon CloudFront costs less than third-party services."
"The policies and prices keep on changing frequently with AWS solutions"
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which CDN solutions are best for your needs.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
No data available
 

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...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?
The tool's pricing is moderate. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expens...
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 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...
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudFront?
Honestly, Amazon CloudFront does its job really well, but it doesn’t always feel easy to work with. The setup can be ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable. I think it is very affordable. I do not think it is expensive.
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I need to think about this for the future. F5 Distributed Cloud Services needs to create links with Amazon and Google...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I collect reviews for F5 Distributed Cloud Services and F5 Silverline Managed Services. I work with F5 Distributed Cl...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Unilever, Spotify, Pinterest, MLB Advanced Media, Foursquare, PBS, Airbnb, Netflix, WIX, Comcast, Automobili Lamborghini, Rovio, Discovery Communications
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudFront vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.