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Azure Front Door vs Fastly comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 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

Azure Front Door
Ranking in CDN
4th
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
13th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Microsoft Security Suite (18th)
Fastly
Ranking in CDN
8th
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
20th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Azure Front Door is 10.3%, down from 19.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 5.5%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Azure Front Door10.3%
Fastly5.5%
Other84.2%
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2226693 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Optimizing global application performance with robust security measures and advanced traffic management
DDoS capabilities in Azure Front Door could certainly be improved. Although Microsoft states it comes with basic DDoS protections out of the box, I find it often ineffectual in mitigating thousands of requests from a single source in a short span of time. User then have to rely on the WAF module where users must configure rate-limiting rules, as it does not automatically sense malicious spikes in traffic. I believe Front Door should have an out-of-the-box premium DDoS protection that can automatically detect and block malicious traffic. I would appreciate improvements in the turnaround time for support, especially since issues with Azure Front Door are usually critical for businesses. If there is an issue, it often results in downtime for line of business applications. I have faced this situation multiple times as one of the largest financial institutions in India is hosted there, adhering to strict SLAs that require prompt responses.
PP
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is that I can have CDN and load-balancing capabilities in a single service instead of managing two separate tools."
"I particularly appreciate its load-balancing capabilities as it allows us to manage multiple instances and support a global presence effectively."
"You can assign as many web application firewall policies as you want to the same instance of Front Door."
"Azure Front Door provides DDoS protection and features related to WAF."
"I find the technical support excellent, and I rate it a ten."
"The web application firewall is a great feature."
"Azure Front Door's advanced routing rules for traffic management are highly effective, allowing you to configure HTTP tags, change different header or header response values, configure origin domains, and add security to your Layer 7 using these routing rules."
"It inspects the traffic at the network level before it comes into Azure. We can do SSL offloading, and it can detect abnormalities before the traffic comes into the application. It can be used globally and is easy to set up. It is also quite stable and scalable."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"It lacks sufficient functionality."
"My suggestion for improvement would be to enhance the Data Export feature to include specific tables, particularly the Azure Diagnostics table."
"There's a limitation on the amount of global rules we can add."
"There could be improvements regarding its pricing for large-scale projects."
"There is room for improvement and they're working on it."
"The product needs to improve its latency."
"The user interface needs improvement as it is difficult to create the mapping to link the problem with your private address sources."
"We should be able to use Front Door defenders with multiple cloud vendors. Currently, they can be used only with the Azure cloud. Azure Front Door should also be able to do global load balancing and provide internal front door services. Microsoft should clearly define what Traffic Manager, Application Gateway, and Azure Front Door products do. These are similar products, and people get confused between these products."
"Support is not that great."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Considering the standard licensing of the tool, even though we have not checked the billing as of now, it might not be very costly."
"It is on a pay-as-you-go basis."
"The pricing of the solution is good."
"The transition to the premium tier has led to increased costs, making it more expensive than the classic tier."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"The product is expensive."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"It is an expensive solution."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Retailer
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?
We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides excellent support. Azure Front Door can quickly detect abnormalities before the...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Front Door?
I am not sure about the pricing but believe Azure Front Door might require a higher cost due to its entry point nature.
What needs improvement with Azure Front Door?
DDoS capabilities in Azure Front Door could certainly be improved. Although Microsoft states it comes with basic DDoS protections out of the box, I find it often ineffectual in mitigating thousands...
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 needs improvement with Fastly?
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 ad...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Azure Front-Door
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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 Azure Front Door vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.