Cloudflare vs. Azure Front Door

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.
$20
per month
Azure Front Door
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Azure Front Door is a cloud content delivery network (CDN) service that helps users deliver high performance, scalability, and a secure user experiences for content and applications. It includes a customizable rules engine for advanced routing capabilities. It boasts instant scalability with global HTTP load balancing and failover.
$35
per month
Pricing
CloudflareAzure Front Door
Editions & Modules
Pro
$20
per month
Business
$200
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Standard
$35
per month
Premium
$330
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CloudflareAzure Front Door
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details—Base fees (Billed hourly and only for number of hours used)​
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CloudflareAzure Front Door
Considered Both Products
Cloudflare
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare's product offering is more mature and has demonstrated success in preventing some of the largest DDoS attacks observed. Cloudflare also continues to reinvest in their core product offering to ensure they maintain a position as leader in the cybersecurity space.
Azure Front Door
Chose Azure Front Door
It's generally hard to compare CDNs, each has its features, POP locations, latency, and availability. We have used many other CDNs, including Akamai, Verizon, and Cloudflare. They are all great, but each has its own advantages/disadvantages. From our perspective, all other …
Best Alternatives
CloudflareAzure Front Door
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Internet Services
IBM Cloud Internet Services
Score 8.8 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.1 out of 10
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Score 7.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CloudflareAzure Front Door
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(175 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.3
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.6
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.9
(142 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CloudflareAzure Front Door
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudflare
Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.
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Microsoft
Azure Front Door is very easy and fast to set up and implement, if you are looking for an easy solution that is secure and reliable, Front Door does all that and can be configured in a few hours. AFD is a CDN with WAF, accordingly, it is well suited for any CDN Scenario, other providers such as Akamai or Verizon have a more expensive base price and are harder to manage/configure, Front Door is simple, easy, and provides what's needed when it comes to Web App Security. If you have multiple data centers, have apps in different regions, or targeting a global audience, AFD is an excellent option to get up to speed quickly. If you are looking for more features and capabilities, or planning a very complex setup, Front Door might be sufficient, but other specialized provides such as Imperva, Cloudflare or Akamai are generally a bit more advanced (but harder to set up and maintain). It always depends on the scenario, but for us, Front Door was an excellent option and served us very well with no issues.
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Pros
Cloudflare
  • The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
  • Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
  • One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.
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Microsoft
  • Content delivery across all continents
  • Web & media acceleration
  • Web application firewall
  • Backend geo-availability
  • Reporting & access metrics
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Cons
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.
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Microsoft
  • Better control over origin caching
  • Hierarchal Management UI instead of distributed management
  • TLS & Cipher Control
  • Faster publishing or change updates
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Likelihood to Renew
Cloudflare
lower cost
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Usability
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.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Cloudflare
In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Performance
Cloudflare
Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Cloudflare
Excellent product, Cloudflare is a true pioneer of the modern Internet, providing tools, services, and expertise that vastly improve the performance and security of web services. Any issues are resolved quickly with detailed RCA and follow-ups published publicly. I'm thankful to Cloudflare and use their services both at work and at home.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Cloudflare
Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Cloudflare
They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.
They have very good reputation.
They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.
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Microsoft
It's generally hard to compare CDNs, each has its features, POP locations, latency, and availability. We have used many other CDNs, including Akamai, Verizon, and Cloudflare. They are all great, but each has its own advantages/disadvantages. From our perspective, all other providers were much harder to configure and maintain and their overall cost was higher than AFD. For example, Verizon was great, performance was excellent, but reporting/logging was not up to our expectations, and we had many issues with its Rules Engine. AFD is great for delivering your web apps globally quickly and easily, the cost is reasonable and comes with very little operational overhead, the logging and reporting capabilities are very good, additionally, its integration with Azure Cloud Services gives it an advantage over other competitors.
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Scalability
Cloudflare
They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Cloudflare
  • Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
  • WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
  • CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
  • DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.
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Microsoft
  • AFD implementation was approx. 80% cheaper than other providers, from initiation to operation.
  • It allowed us to minimize backend resources size/processing power, taking all the load from client requests, cutting tens of thousands of dollars monthly on compute, memory, and network bandwidth.
  • Overall, the ROI of AFD is very quick, it is not an expensive solution, therefore, its ROI goals are easy to calculate and achieve, our overall ROI exceeded 300%.
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