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Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly comparison

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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
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
Amazon CloudFront
Ranking in CDN
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fastly
Ranking in CDN
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (9th)
 

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 Amazon CloudFront is 8.1%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 4.0%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Parth Buch - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamlessly manages security and dynamic content hosting in diverse applications
Hosting static content or with engineering dynamic content is beneficial. CloudFront provides a common access point, manages routing to different methods, and serves as an access point plus API routing. With AWS, maintenance is not required as it's a service offered by AWS which maintains itself. Security concerns are manageable through AWS's security mechanisms, with additional security enhancement possible through options like WAF and NACL.
Nick Wilsdon - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The technical support is good."
"Easier http to https redirect using page 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."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"The solution has good security features."
"Amazon CloudFront provides valuable security by ensuring secure file access when accessing files from S3."
"The most beneficial feature is capturing the static data, which is crucial for our operations."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the availability of the websites."
"The support team is knowledgeable."
"The most valuable feature is the number of servers they can put your content in while being reliable."
"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."
"The solution improves performance by reducing latency and cost."
"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."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
 

Cons

"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"They could be expanding the number of locations available. It will help users easily access content."
"Amazon CloudFront's setup is a bit difficult, and we would love it if they made it easier."
"AWS is redesigning its user interface and user experience for CloudFront, and there is room for improvement in certificate management."
"The only issues we've faced were when AWS itself had problems, and that's very rare. I can only recall one instance when they had issues, but they managed to resolve it quickly."
"The lack of seamless integration made the setup process more complex and required additional research to manage all the services properly."
"There is room for improvement in customer service and support."
"During the setup phase, there were some hiccups in terms of security, the user role, and the permissions."
"The product could support any network load balancer. At present, we can use only Amazon’s load balancer application."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"Support is not that great."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"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."
"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."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"We are using the free version."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"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."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"Its price is really on the high side. It should be cheaper in general."
"I rate Amazon CloudFront's pricing a five out of ten."
"The policies and prices keep on changing frequently with AWS solutions"
"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 is an expensive solution."
"Compared to competitors like Azure and Google, we find AWS pricing to be advantageous."
"We do not have many options to optimize costs."
"The solution’s price is reasonable."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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...
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 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.
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 do you like most about Amazon CloudFront?
The solution has good security features.
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 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...
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 ...
 

Comparisons

 

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
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudFront vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.