StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. CDN
  4. CDN
  5. Amazon CloudFront vs CloudFlare vs Fastly

Amazon CloudFront vs CloudFlare vs Fastly

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Stacks21.4K
Followers10.8K
Votes935
CloudFlare
CloudFlare
Stacks77.2K
Followers23.1K
Votes1.8K
Fastly
Fastly
Stacks1.1K
Followers507
Votes153

Amazon CloudFront vs CloudFlare vs Fastly: What are the differences?

Introduction

When it comes to content delivery networks (CDNs), Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare, and Fastly are three popular options. Each service offers unique features and strengths that cater to various needs of businesses and websites.

  1. Network Size and Reach: Amazon CloudFront boasts a massive global network with numerous edge locations worldwide, making it suitable for reaching a vast audience quickly. CloudFlare also has an extensive network with a strong emphasis on security features, while Fastly focuses on high-performance and low latency, often preferred by large enterprises with specific performance requirements.

  2. Security Features: CloudFlare is renowned for its robust security capabilities, offering protection against DDoS attacks, web application firewall (WAF), and other security threats. While Amazon CloudFront offers basic security features, CloudFlare provides more advanced protection options. Fastly focuses more on content delivery performance than on security, although it does offer some security features.

  3. Ease of Use and Configuration: Amazon CloudFront is known for its integration with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) products, making it a seamless choice for those already utilizing AWS services. CloudFlare, on the other hand, is praised for its user-friendly interface and straightforward setup process, suitable for both beginners and advanced users. Fastly is more geared towards developers and provides powerful tools for customization and fine-tuning of CDN configurations.

  4. Pricing Structure: Amazon CloudFront operates on a pay-as-you-go model, where users pay for the resources they consume. CloudFlare offers a free tier with additional paid plans that include more advanced features. Fastly's pricing is based on usage, with a focus on serving high-traffic websites efficiently, which may be cost-effective for businesses with specific performance needs.

  5. Cache Invalidation: CloudFlare and Fastly provide more advanced cache invalidation options compared to Amazon CloudFront. CloudFlare allows users to purge cache instantly on a specific URL or the entire cache, while Fastly offers real-time control over how content is cached and purged, giving users more flexibility in managing their CDN content.

  6. Real-Time Analytics and Monitoring: Fastly stands out for its real-time analytics and monitoring capabilities, providing detailed insights into traffic patterns, performance metrics, and audience behavior. Amazon CloudFront and CloudFlare also offer analytics tools, but Fastly's focus on real-time data can be beneficial for businesses that require immediate insights to optimize content delivery strategies.

In Summary, Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare, and Fastly each offer unique strengths in terms of network reach, security features, ease of use, pricing, cache invalidation, and analytics capabilities, catering to different needs and preferences of businesses and websites.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare, Fastly

Francesco
Francesco

CTO at ORDR.menu

Dec 1, 2021

Decided

I don't think I have registered a domain in the last 10 years that hasn't been linked to CloudFlare within the first 2 hours from registration.

The benefits you get from even the free version of CloudFlare are amazing. From day 0:

  • 30/80% of bandwidth savings thanks to their CDN
  • Origin IP address protection
  • Managed SSL
53k views53k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
CloudFlare
CloudFlare
Fastly
Fastly

Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.

Fastly's real-time content delivery network gives you total control over your content, unprecedented access to performance analytics, and the ability to instantly update content in 150 milliseconds.

Fast- Using a network of edge locations around the world, Amazon CloudFront caches copies of your static content close to viewers, lowering latency when they download your objects and giving you the high, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver large popular objects to end users at scale.;Simple- A single API call lets you get started distributing content from your Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon EC2 instance or other origin server through the Amazon CloudFront network.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services Amazon CloudFront is designed for use with other Amazon Web Services, including Amazon S3, where you can durably store the definitive versions of your static files, and Amazon EC2, where you can run your application server for dynamically generated content.;Cost-Effective- Amazon CloudFront passes on the benefits of Amazon’s scale to you. You pay only for the content that you deliver through the network, without minimum commitments or up-front fees.;Elastic- With Amazon CloudFront, you don’t need to worry about maintaining expensive web-server capacity to meet the demand from potential traffic spikes for your content. The service automatically responds as demand increases or decreases without any intervention from you.;Reliable- Amazon CloudFront is built using Amazon’s highly reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of edge locations used by Amazon CloudFront automatically routes end users to the closest available location as required by network conditions.;Global- Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of edge locations, located near your end users in the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America.
CDN;WAF (Web Application Firewall);DDOS Protection;
static content delivery; event-driven content delivery; Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA); API caching; Instant Purge; Soft Purge; surrogate keys; streaming and VOD; Real-time Analytics; instant configuration; instant deploys; built on Varnish; Custom VCL upload; on-demand DDoS mitigation; Transport Layer Security; PCI compliance and compliance services; Origin Shield; real-time streaming logs; Historical Stats; Edge Dictionaries; Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator; Configuration Control Panel; stale-if-error; stale-while-revalidate; Edge Side Includes (ESI); GeoIP/geography detection; mobile device detection; edge authorization/paywalls; shopper prioritization
Statistics
Stacks
21.4K
Stacks
77.2K
Stacks
1.1K
Followers
10.8K
Followers
23.1K
Followers
507
Votes
935
Votes
1.8K
Votes
153
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 245
    Fast
  • 166
    Cdn
  • 157
    Compatible with other aws services
  • 125
    Simple
  • 108
    Global
Cons
  • 3
    UI could use some work
  • 1
    Invalidations take so long
Pros
  • 426
    Easy setup, great cdn
  • 278
    Free ssl
  • 200
    Easy setup
  • 191
    Security
  • 181
    Ssl
Cons
  • 2
    Expensive when you exceed their fair usage limits
  • 2
    No support for SSHFP records
Pros
  • 28
    Real-time updates
  • 26
    Fastest CDN
  • 22
    Powerful API
  • 20
    Great support
  • 14
    Great customer support
Cons
  • 1
    Minimum $50/mo spend
Integrations
No integrations available
CodeGuard
CodeGuard
Google Analytics
Google Analytics
GoSquared
GoSquared
Clicky
Clicky
UserVoice
UserVoice
SnapEngage
SnapEngage
Blitz
Blitz
Pingdom
Pingdom
Heroku
Heroku
WordPress
WordPress
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Magento
Magento
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
Zencoder
Zencoder
Rackspace Cloud Files
Rackspace Cloud Files
OpenStack
OpenStack
Datadog
Datadog
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare, Fastly?

KeyCDN

KeyCDN

KeyCDN offers super fast and secure content delivery for minimal loading time. In addition to the CDN, it also offers advanced image processing and many other features such as live logs and Let's Encrypt SSL.

MaxCDN

MaxCDN

The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them.

jsDelivr

jsDelivr

jsDelivr is a free CDN for open source developers, with advanced features for javascript projects with access to NPM and Github It uses multiple CDN providers, resulting in the best possible uptime and performance.

Moovweb XDN

Moovweb XDN

All-in-one platform to develop, deploy, preview, experiment on, monitor, and run your frontend.

Limelight CDN

Limelight CDN

Whether it’s your website, mobile applications, videos, music, software, games, or APIs, your content needs to reach customers quickly, reliably, and securely. It provides the capacity, coverage, and performance to cost-effectively deliver a better experience for you and your customers.

cdnjs

cdnjs

Everyone loves the Google CDN? Even Microsoft runs their own CDN. The problem is, they only host the most popular libraries. We host it all - JavaScript, CSS, SWF, images, etc! Powered by CloudFlare.

Statically

Statically

A free, fast, & modern CDN for open source projects, WordPress, images, and any static assets.

Incapsula

Incapsula

Through an application-aware, global content delivery network (CDN), Incapsula provides any website and web application with best-of-breed security, DDoS protection, load balancing and failover solutions.

Cloudflare CDN

Cloudflare CDN

A CDN is a distributed network of servers that provides several advantages for a web site: Cached content: By caching web site content, It helps improve page load speeds, reduce bandwidth usage, and reduce CPU usage on the server.

CDNify

CDNify

We help you accelerate your content and supercharge your apps and website.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase