Amazon Route 53 vs CloudFlare: What are the differences?

Developers describe Amazon Route 53 as "A highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service". Amazon Route 53 is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) – such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS. On the other hand, CloudFlare is detailed as "The Web Performance & Security Company". Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.

Amazon Route 53 and CloudFlare are primarily classified as "DNS Management" and "Content Delivery Network" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Amazon Route 53 are:

• Highly Available and Reliable – Route 53 is built using AWS’s highly available and reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of our DNS servers helps ensure a consistent ability to route your end users to your application. Route 53 is designed to provide the level of dependability required by important applications. Amazon Route 53 is backed by the Amazon Route 53 Service Level Agreement.
• Scalable – Route 53 is designed to automatically scale to handle very large query volumes without any intervention from you.
• Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Route 53 is designed to work well with other AWS features and offerings. You can use Route 53 to map domain names to your Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and other AWS resources. By using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service with Route 53, you get fine grained control over who can update your DNS data. You can use Route 53 to map your zone apex (example.com versus www.example.com) to your Elastic Load Balancing instance or Amazon S3 website bucket using a feature called Alias record.

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

• CDN
• WAF (Web Application Firewall)
• DDOS Protection

"High-availability", "Simple" and "Backed by amazon" are the key factors why developers consider Amazon Route 53; whereas "Easy setup, great cdn", "Free ssl" and "Easy setup" are the primary reasons why CloudFlare is favored.

Stack Exchange, Lyft, and Udemy are some of the popular companies that use CloudFlare, whereas Amazon Route 53 is used by Airbnb, Medium, and Pinterest. CloudFlare has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2328 company stacks & 727 developers stacks; compared to Amazon Route 53, which is listed in 1420 company stacks and 482 developer stacks.