AWS CloudFront vs Cloudflare R2
A detailed comparison to help you choose between AWS CloudFront and Cloudflare R2.
Quick Verdict
3.9/5
AWS CloudFront
0 reviews
4.4/5
Cloudflare R2
0 reviews
Cloudflare R2 is rated higher (4.4 vs 3.9). CloudFront is AWS's global CDN with 750+ PoPs and 15 regional edge caches Cloudflare R2 is S3-compatible object storage with zero egress fees — ever. $0.015/GB/month storage, no data transfer costs. Tightly integrated with Cloudflare Workers and CDN.
 AWS CloudFront AWS CDN with Lambda@Edge for programmable delivery | Cloudflare R2 Zero egress S3 storage on Cloudflare's network | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.9 (0 reviews) | 4.4 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium (pay-as-you-go + flat-rate monthly plans since the pricing redesign) | freemium (free tier plus usage-based pricing) |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | AWS-invested teams needing a CDN deeply integrated with S3, ALB, WAF and Lambda, with a genuine zero-cost tier for small-to-medium traffic | Teams serving media, assets, downloads or backups where egress dominates their current object storage bill — especially those already building on Workers or Pages. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | Global edge network (price classes 100/200/All) | Global — Cloudflare network |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accesseu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter | free tiers3 compatibleeu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi access |
| Visit AWS CloudFront → | Visit Cloudflare R2 → | |
AWS CloudFront
Pros
- + Always Free Tier (1 TB transfer, 10M requests, 2M function invocations monthly) covers small sites at zero cost
- + 750+ edge PoPs with 15 regional edge caches — one of the largest delivery networks available
- + Programmable edge: CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge with a KeyValueStore for config
- + Native WAF, Shield Standard DDoS protection, free ACM certificates and tight S3/ALB integration
Cons
- - SLA is 99.9% — weaker than AWS's load balancer SLA — and flat-rate Free/Pro plans carry no uptime commitment
- - Two pricing models (pay-as-you-go tiers vs flat-rate plans) with features gated to Business ($200/month) and above
- - Deep configuration surface: cache behavior ordering, TTL semantics and invalidation costs at scale
- - Edge compute and access-control bindings are AWS-specific — hard to migrate to another CDN
Cloudflare R2
Pros
- + Zero egress fees on all storage classes — no data transfer bill at all
- + Standing free tier: 10 GB-month storage, 1M Class A and 10M Class B ops monthly
- + S3-compatible API works with existing SDKs and migration tooling
- + Published durability (11 nines) and a 99.9% monthly uptime SLA with credits
- + Binds directly to Workers, Pages and public buckets with no cross-product egress
Cons
- - S3 feature surface is thinner — no replication topology, simpler lifecycle tooling
- - Class A operations at $4.50/million make write-heavy workloads pricier than storage-only math
- - Infrequent Access has a 30-day minimum storage duration and retrieval fees
- - Real lock-in sits in Workers-based processing around buckets, not the storage itself
- - Not suited to analytics-style scans or small-object high-churn data
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