Fastly vs AWS CloudFront
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Fastly and AWS CloudFront.
Quick Verdict
3.7/5
Fastly
0 reviews
3.9/5
AWS CloudFront
0 reviews
AWS CloudFront is rated higher (3.9 vs 3.7). Fastly is a high-performance programmable CDN used by GitHub, Spotify, and the New York Times. Compute@Edge for serverless. Real-time log streaming, advanced VCL configuration, and instant cache purge. CloudFront is AWS's global CDN with 750+ PoPs and 15 regional edge caches
 Fastly Programmable CDN used by GitHub, New York Times |  AWS CloudFront AWS CDN with Lambda@Edge for programmable delivery | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.7 (0 reviews) | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium (pay-as-you-go + flat-rate monthly plans since the pricing redesign) |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Engineering-led content, media, e-commerce and API platforms that need programmable caching, instant purge and real-time logs on a global edge network | 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 |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | 100+ city-level PoPs across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia/NZ | Global edge network (price classes 100/200/All) |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accesseu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter | free tierapi accesseu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter |
| Visit Fastly → | Visit AWS CloudFront → | |
Fastly
Pros
- + Instant Purge with mean global purge under 150 ms and real-time log streaming into your own observability stack
- + Deep programmability: VCL plus Fastly Compute on the same edge network
- + Real free tier: 100 GB bandwidth, 500,000 requests and five TLS domains free every month
- + Large, high-density PoP footprint (100+ cities, 622 Tbps) with strong coverage in Europe and India
- + Unlimited layer 3/4 DDoS mitigation included, HTTP/3 and QUIC, full IPv6 dual-stack support
Cons
- - VCL and cache architecture have a real learning curve — overkill for simple caching needs
- - Regional bandwidth skew: $0.28/GB in Africa, India and South Korea versus $0.12/GB in NA/EU
- - Request pricing table and reviewer-quoted rates disagree; WAF pricing is unpublished
- - Free tier requires a credit card; first Compute deploy starts a limited trial
- - Legacy pre-November-2025 accounts sit on different ($50/month) terms than new sign-ups
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
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