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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. CDN
  4. CDN
  5. Amazon CloudFront vs Zencoder

Amazon CloudFront vs Zencoder

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Stacks21.4K
Followers10.8K
Votes935
Zencoder
Zencoder
Stacks29
Followers37
Votes11

Amazon CloudFront vs Zencoder: What are the differences?

What is Amazon CloudFront? Content delivery with low latency and high data transfer speeds. 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.

What is Zencoder? Cloud-based video and audio encoding product suite. Zencoder downloads the video and converts it to as many formats as you need. Every output is encoded concurrently, with virtually no waiting—whether you do one or one hundred. Zencoder then uploads the resulting videos to a server, CDN, an S3 bucket, or wherever you dictate in your API call.

Amazon CloudFront can be classified as a tool in the "Content Delivery Network" category, while Zencoder is grouped under "Media Transcoding".

Some of the features offered by Amazon CloudFront are:

  • 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.

On the other hand, Zencoder provides the following key features:

  • Fastest Encoding Speeds- Zencoder consistently delivers the fastest encoding times in the cloud. Even HD Quality video is encoded faster than realtime.
  • Easy API Integration- Integrate in an afternoon with Zencoder's well documented API, easy-to-use API Request Builder, integration libraries, and dedicated support.
  • Any Video. Any Device.- Zencoder has an industry leading 99.9% encoding success rate and supports outputs for nearly every device on the market.

"Fast" is the top reason why over 245 developers like Amazon CloudFront, while over 5 developers mention "Easy setup" as the leading cause for choosing Zencoder.

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Detailed Comparison

Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Zencoder
Zencoder

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.

Zencoder downloads the video and converts it to as many formats as you need. Every output is encoded concurrently, with virtually no waiting—whether you do one or one hundred. Zencoder then uploads the resulting videos to a server, CDN, an S3 bucket, or wherever you dictate in your API call.

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.
Fastest Encoding Speeds- Zencoder consistently delivers the fastest encoding times in the cloud. Even HD Quality video is encoded faster than realtime.;Easy API Integration- Integrate in an afternoon with Zencoder's well documented API, easy-to-use API Request Builder, integration libraries, and dedicated support.;Any Video. Any Device.- Zencoder has an industry leading 99.9% encoding success rate and supports outputs for nearly every device on the market.;Unlimited Scalability- Zencoder is the largest encoding service provider by volume. Our cloud infrastructure scales instantly for you, giving you the power of large encoding clusters without ever paying for idle server time.;Apple HTTP Live Streaming- Streaming to iPad or iPhone? Zencoder supports Apple’s HLS standards guaranteeing beautiful video on all iOS devices.;99.9% Uptime Guaranteed- We’ll always be here for you. Zencoder’s Service Level Agreement guarantees 99.9% uptime for all plans.
Statistics
Stacks
21.4K
Stacks
29
Followers
10.8K
Followers
37
Votes
935
Votes
11
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
  • 7
    Easy setup
  • 3
    Flexible S3 integration
  • 1
    Good customer support
Integrations
No integrations available
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudFront, Zencoder?

CloudFlare

CloudFlare

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

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.

Fastly

Fastly

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.

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.

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