Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs. Cloudflare

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Elastic Load Balancing
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Amazon's Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones. Elastic Load Balancing offers three types of load balancers with the vendor states all feature the high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to make…
$0.01
Partial Hour
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, provides DDoS and bot mitigation security for business domains, as well as a content delivery network (CDN) and web application firewall (WAF).
$20
per month
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingCloudflare
Editions & Modules
Gateway
$0.0125
Partial Hour
Application
$0.0225
Partial Hour
Network
$0.025
Partial Hour
Pro
$20
per month
Business
$200
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Elastic Load BalancingCloudflare
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 Elastic Load BalancingCloudflare
Considered Both Products
Elastic Load Balancing
Chose Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
We have not used any other solution out there in the market but our dev-ops team did deep research and AWS provided us the solution we needed to be cost-effective. Also, the decision to keep working with Amazon was strategic. We were already using other AWS features and [Amazon …
Cloudflare
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare is the best option for my business for my use cases aligns exactly with what Cloudflare provides. Fastly only offers 1 month of free trial while AWS Route 53 is heavily integrated with AWS cloud. I want the flexibility to launch my own VPS and have a CDN, DDoS …
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare is notably simpler and cheaper as compared to CloudFront. If we also consider the corresponding edge compute mechanism, CloudFront has more complexity in maintaining it. For instance, in order to maintain our A/B test stack on CloudFront, we need to maintain three …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingCloudflare
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
BIG-IP
BIG-IP
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
BIG-IP
BIG-IP
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingCloudflare
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(4 ratings)
8.6
(159 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(4 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(1 ratings)
8.5
(8 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(1 ratings)
8.4
(128 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(2 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingCloudflare
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
We use Amazon Elastic Load Balancers to serve mobile applications and websites. It works really well. We have not had any problems until now. Last year we integrated the AWS ELB with the EC2 Auto Scaling and now we have a fully working elastic solution. We increase/decrease EC2s instances based on traffic over our load balancers.
Read full review
Cloudflare
It is easy to set up, and within 10 minutes it is up and running. You can add many domains in one dashboard. So no need for a separate Cloudflare account. I can access all my domain DNS, and customize/add it further. For example by adding the Google Webmaster DNS key or my email provider.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Most obviously it works great for routing traffic between components hosted on Amazon web services
  • The ability to dynamically spin up connections is fantastic.
  • In general the ease of use and configuration is a selling point.
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • Registrar and DNS services are impeccable, with registrations done at cost and without ADs. DNS services setting standards for speed of resolution.
  • DDOS protection. With their content distribution network to back them they have the bandwidth and tools to be both proactive and reactive to bad actors.
  • WAF - Their Web Application Firewall helps mitigate common site vulnerabilities and has active zero-day protection running for breaking exploits
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Occasionally we have a huge number of users using our network at once, and Amazon ELB isn't quite fast enough to scale effectively when that occurs. But this doesn't happen very often as our usage is usually quite stable
  • If we want to add another application to our learning suite, we would have to add another load balancer, which would incur additional cost
  • The setup was not easy and could really only be handled by one person on our team with the technical background to do so
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
  • Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
  • While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
lower cost
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
AWS Elastic Load Balancing has this trick. First, you need to know how it works. ELB is not the only piece here. ELB has a very close relation with AWS Target Groups. You create or select a target group every time you create a Load balancer. Target groups allow you to connect the load balancer to EC2 autoscaling groups, Lambda functions, or even a single EC2 instance. While this sounds complex, it becomes easy, once you know his tricks. Thanks to the user interface, managing a ELB is an easy task. The rules editor is really useful, although it will need a bit of improvement to some interface items
Read full review
Cloudflare
Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
Read full review
Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
Read full review
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
AWS gives you several support plans. On the free plan, you basicaly need to google for help, but the good news is that AWS Elastic Load Balancing works. We has more than 15 load balancers and we never run into a problem that require support. But you mght consider a support plan if you are going to do something more complex or critical
Read full review
Cloudflare
We really like to talk to a person on the phone or using chat. But the system is very slow and sending to much email to get the issue solve. Something we don't like to spend time writing on the community forum our issue because we don't want to share detail information of our POC.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
We have not used any other solution out there in the market but our dev-ops team did deep research and AWS provided us the solution we needed to be cost-effective. Also, the decision to keep working with Amazon was strategic. We were already using other AWS features and [Amazon Elastic Load Balancing] integrates great with those.
Read full review
Cloudflare
Firebase can be a good starter for basic projects but as I scaled up, I found it lacking the maturity Cloudflare has. Naturaly, I opted for Cloudflare for bigger projects. I still use Firebase, but for small scale hobby projects only.
Read full review
Scalability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Currently it is too soon to say for sure what kind of impact this will have.
  • The ideal goal is that this will be cheaper than having to host our own routing on site.
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • A lot of requests are cached and so egress costs from downstream providers are mitigated.
  • DDoS protection has also managed to keep our site up and our cloud computing bill down.
  • Setting up a proxy with a worker made putting various Google Cloud Functions running behind a single URL very easy and performant. Plus they offer API Shield on top of this.
Read full review
ScreenShots