Amazon CloudFront vs. NGINX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon CloudFront
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
CloudFront is the content delivery network (CDN) from Amazon Web Services.
$0.02
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
Pricing
Amazon CloudFrontNGINX
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudFrontNGINX
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon CloudFrontNGINX
Considered Both Products
Amazon CloudFront

No answer on this topic

NGINX
Chose NGINX
Nginx works on basic operating system principles and what I like the most about it is that even after being feature-rich and easily customizable it uses minimum resources.
Features
Amazon CloudFrontNGINX
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Amazon CloudFront
-
Ratings
NGINX
8.8
43 Ratings
10% above category average
IDE support00 Ratings8.127 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.638 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.939 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings9.139 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.140 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings9.037 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon CloudFrontNGINX
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Azure CDN
Azure CDN
Score 7.6 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon CloudFrontNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(17 ratings)
9.3
(72 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.3
(25 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(4 ratings)
8.0
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon CloudFrontNGINX
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
F5
Nginx is well-suited for any web server scenarios, such as web applications, backend or reverse proxy for both application and HTTP requests, and distribution. It is less appropriate for Windows-based applications that run directly on a Windows Server host. In any case, it is very easy to manage, through separate conf files for each application or site you want to host with it.
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
F5
  • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
  • Great at serving static content.
  • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
  • Open-Source (no cost)!
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
F5
  • Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
  • I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
  • It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
  • It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
  • I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
F5
Great value for the product
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
F5
This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers
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
F5
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
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
F5
I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives
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
F5
  • By using Nginx, we can host multiple web services on a single server, keeping our infrastructure costs lower.
  • Nginx maintains our HTTPS connections, allowing us to keep our promise to our customers that their data is safe in transit.
  • Due to Nginx's extremely low failure rate, our web addresses always return something meaningful, even when individual services go down. In sense, this means we are "always online" and allows us to maintain brand and support our customers even in the face of catastrophe.
Read full review
ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration