AWS Shield vs Fastly comparison

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AWS Shield

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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: February 2026).

AWS Shield vs. Fastly

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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

AWS Shield

Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

5th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Fastly

Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

10th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

CDN (8th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (20th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of AWS Shield is 4.4%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 2.9%, 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 (%)
AWS Shield	4.4%
Fastly	2.9%
Other	92.7%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

PranavTelang

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.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"The solution's ease of use is the most valuable feature."

"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."

"The automatic detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks in the product operates in real-time and provides satisfactory results."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More AWS Shield pros

"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."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

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

"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."

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

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

More Fastly pros

Cons

"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."

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

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

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

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

"The product is expensive."

"There is an area for improvement regarding health checks. AWS Shield does not come with its own health check functionality."

"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a situation is normal or abnormal."

More AWS Shield cons

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

"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."

"Support is not that great."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

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

"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."

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The tool is cheap."

"The tool's pricing is good."

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

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

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"It is an expensive solution."

"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."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

See which vendors are best for you

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881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Comms Service Provider

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Insurance Company

Comms Service Provider

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

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 ...

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 help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

What needs improvement with Fastly?

Azure DDoS Protection vs AWS Shield

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Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fastly

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Uplynk vs Fastly

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

AWS Shield

Download AWS Shield product report

Download Fastly product report

Overview

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.

Sample Customers

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

AWS Shield vs. Fastly