Amazon CloudFront vs. AWS WAF

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon CloudFront
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
CloudFront is the content delivery network (CDN) from Amazon Web Services.
$0.02
AWS WAF
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Web Services offers AWS WAF (web application firewall) to protect web applications from malicious behavior that might impede the applications functioning and performance, with customizable rules to prevent known harmful behaviors and an API for creating and deploying web security rules.
$0.60
per 1 million requests
Pricing
Amazon CloudFrontAWS WAF
Editions & Modules
Over 5PB
$0.02
Next 524TB
$0.03
Next 4PB
$0.03
Next 350TB
$0.04
Next 100TB
$0.06
Next 40TB
$0.08
First 10TB
$0.09
Resource Type - Request
$0.60
per 1 million requests
Resource Type - Rule
$1.00
per month (prorated hourly)
Resource Type - Web ACL
$5.00
per month (prorated hourly)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudFrontAWS WAF
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon CloudFrontAWS WAF
Considered Both Products
Amazon CloudFront
Chose Amazon CloudFront
If you are using other AWS services, then no other CDN can compete with AWS CloudFront. Its integration with WAF, Route53, ACM allow it to provide a whole ecosystem for building websites and using a CDN. It gives developers access to inexpensive, pay-as-you-go pricing. …
AWS WAF
Chose AWS WAF
When it comes to integration with AWS resources, we found that AWS WAF can easily integrate with CloudFront, API gateway, ALB, etc. When we analyzed other products, we found that the integration can be a little more difficult than just a click of a button. However, the pricing …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Amazon CloudFrontAWS WAF
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.5 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.5 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Azure CDN
Azure CDN
Score 7.7 out of 10
F5 Advanced WAF
F5 Advanced WAF
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon CloudFrontAWS WAF
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(17 ratings)
8.8
(9 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(4 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon CloudFrontAWS WAF
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Amazon CloudFront is the perfect solution for any type of company. If a company is small or medium size, CloudFront offers 1 TB monthly free bandwidth which is more than for any small and medium size companies. If we compare the speed of CloudFront with other CDN, CloudFront is way ahead of their competitors and with 1 TB free bandwidth. If someone is ready to invest time in CloudFront documentation then he/she definitely go for it.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
Well Suited: 1. To prevent DDOS attacks: AWS WAF has a lot of managed rules to prevent DDOS attacks based on traffic origination from a particular IP or IP reputation etc. 2. To rate-limit requests: Well it sounds familiar like preventing DDOS attacks, but it can also be used to rate-limit requests originating from the same IP address. We have used this feature so that we can test multiple failure scenarios for our application. 3. To prevent Data crawling: The BOT control feature allows us to prevent BOTs from crawling data on our websites. Not Suited: 1. To integrate applications outside of AWS Cloud: As I mentioned in my previous comments, this type of integration requires a custom implementation of another AWS resource.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • if a website’s static data are based in New York City, people in Boston will get the content faster than people in San Francisco or Tokyo. The farther away customers are from a company’s data center, the slower the website or application loads. This problem can be fixed with a content delivery network like Amazon CloudFront
  • When a visitor requests a file from your website, Amazon CloudFront automatically sends the request to a copy of the file at the nearest edge location. This results in faster download times.
  • You may have great hosting but it doesn’t have the capacity or scalability offered by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. The better CDNs like Amazon CloudFront offer higher availability, lower network latency and lower packet loss.
  • Amazon CloudFront provides 24/7 email and phone support
  • Amazon CloudFront Free Tier allows you to free up to 50 GB of data transfer and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS requests / month for one year.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • Protect any application against the most common attacks.
  • Provides better visibility of web traffic.
  • It allows us to control the traffic in different ways in which it is enabled or blocked through the implementation of security rules developed personally according to our needs.
  • It is able to block common attacks such as SQL code injection.
  • It allows defining specific rules for applications, thus increasing web security as they are developed.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Kinda of costlier when compared to rivals providing the same service
  • The setup of Distribution is kinda little complicated, need good exposure before setting up the service
  • Sometimes we can go with S3 Delivery service rather than Cloudfront if the website is providing static content and its way cheaper
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • AWS WAF is a bit costly if used for single applications.
  • they should provide attack-wise protection, like if my certain type of application is vulnerable to DDOS then I should be able to buy WAF, especially for that attack.
  • CLI tool to test in offline mode if possible.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
We have been using AWS WAF for the past 3 years in front of our websites. We find it useful in preventing data crawling, DDOS attacks, etc on our websites, and hence we are going to use it in the future as well. AWS WAF is one of the best Firewalls in business.
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
Easy way to integrate a CDN within the AWS infrastructure. It allows further customization based on company needs.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
The product is highly scalable. It is easy to configure the rules and thereby helps us to mitigate many vulnerabilities. The interface and programming of the firewall provisions were easy to setup. Amazon clearly spent a lot of time figuring this out and perfecting it. It allows users to do customized configurations based on their needs. It provides protection against a number of security issues like XSS, SQL injection, etc. I would definitely recommend this for protecting your infra as you scale, since this basically protects and filters all requests hitting your application server.
Read full review
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
CloudFront is a good CDN solution. It can be a bit complicated to implement depending on your needs, but AWS tech support is great. You get to avoid a ton of upfront costs by going with CloudFront. It works best in conjunction with other AWS services in your infrastructure. Once you set it up, you won't need to do much to maintain it. It just works.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
If you're intending to use AWS WAF, I would say that you absolutely should sign up for support. AWS Support is excellent and they can help you in a really good way to solve your issues.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Amazon has always been creative and leading, and I have been using its services for years. They are very reassuring and have fast and responsive support--you can call them from any time zone to respond quickly. High security on servers, open hands on changes, and increasing and decreasing server resources and features.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
Easy of use. Setup and configuration is fairly quick. There are the usual advantages of it being a cloud solution where you can buy into the solution, configure it and set it up and get it up and running. If you are already a subscriber to AWS, having a native service has its advantages.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • RoI for using CloudFront is immense. You can use it for all your certificate management and static asset management of your websites using CloudFront.
  • It is as good or better than any other CDN provider with multi-region support across the world using AWS regions.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • Implementing this AWS service has been really favorable because when creating custom rules we give more specific protection to our applications against vulnerabilities that cause them to be consuming other resources or running with errors.
  • It allows us to control the traffic of our business applications, which is really favorable, given that in this way we can decide that you can access them and not.
  • It is extremely advantageous that we can establish rules in a centralized way since it saves time, as well as it allows us to protect several applications at the same time by reusing the rules established above.
  • It allows you to save time and money because we only pay for what is used.
Read full review
ScreenShots