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

Amazon CloudFront vs CloudFlare

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Stacks21.4K
Followers10.8K
Votes935
CloudFlare
CloudFlare
Stacks77.2K
Followers23.1K
Votes1.8K

Amazon CloudFront vs CloudFlare: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon CloudFront and CloudFlare are two popular content delivery networks (CDNs) that help improve website performance by caching content closer to end-users. While they share similarities in functionality, there are key differences that set them apart.

  1. Pricing and Plans: Amazon CloudFront provides a pay-as-you-go pricing model, allowing users to only pay for the resources they consume. It offers various pricing tiers for data transfer, HTTP/HTTPS requests, and edge location usage. In contrast, CloudFlare offers both free and paid plans, with different features and performance levels. Their paid plans come with advanced security features and additional performance optimizations.

  2. Network Size and Coverage: Amazon CloudFront has a larger network size with more edge locations spread across the globe. This extensive network coverage ensures low latency and high availability for serving content. CloudFlare, on the other hand, operates a global network of data centers but has fewer edge locations compared to CloudFront.

  3. CDN Features: Both CloudFront and CloudFlare offer similar CDN features such as content caching, SSL/TLS support, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3. However, CloudFlare has an additional layer of security features that can protect websites from DDoS attacks, bot threats, and other malicious activities. They also offer a web application firewall (WAF) as part of their CDN service.

  4. Ease of Integration: Amazon CloudFront is seamlessly integrated with other AWS services, making it a suitable choice for users who have their infrastructure on the AWS platform. It can easily integrate with Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, and other AWS products. CloudFlare, on the other hand, offers integration with various third-party platforms and content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.

  5. Analytics and Reporting: CloudFlare provides detailed analytics and reporting tools, allowing users to monitor website traffic, bandwidth usage, and security threats in real-time. Their analytics dashboard provides insights into visitor demographics, top referring sites, and other key metrics. Although Amazon CloudFront also offers some analytics features, its reporting capabilities are more focused on CDN usage rather than in-depth website analytics.

  6. Customer Support: CloudFlare offers 24/7 customer support to both free and paid users. Their support channels include email, live chat, and a community forum. In comparison, Amazon CloudFront provides support through the AWS Support Center, with various levels of support plans based on the user's subscription. Higher-tier support plans offer faster response times and additional support resources.

In summary, Amazon CloudFront and CloudFlare differ in pricing and plans, network size and coverage, CDN features, ease of integration, analytics and reporting capabilities, and customer support. These differences make each CDN suitable for different use cases and preferences.

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Advice on Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare

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

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.

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;
Statistics
Stacks
21.4K
Stacks
77.2K
Followers
10.8K
Followers
23.1K
Votes
935
Votes
1.8K
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
Integrations
No integrations available
CodeGuard
CodeGuard
Google Analytics
Google Analytics
GoSquared
GoSquared
Clicky
Clicky
UserVoice
UserVoice
SnapEngage
SnapEngage
Blitz
Blitz
Pingdom
Pingdom

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare?

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.

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.

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