Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs. Cloudflare

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Elastic Load Balancing
Score 6.6 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 8.7 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
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 Elastic Load Balancing
Again as noted we're still in the trial process seeing if we want to migrate over but the biggest benefit of elb is its interconnectivity with other Amazon web services hosted applications that our company is using and the in-house support from AWS. This is very attractive when …
Chose 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 …
Chose Elastic Load Balancing
In the past we use physical Load Balancers. That solution works, but it had several negative points. The first, it was not elastic. It requires a physical server setup in order to work. Also a technician works for one or more days to set up the solution. And then, we had the …
Cloudflare
Chose Cloudflare
A few years ago, GoDaddy started charging us to be their DNS provider, and Cloudflare didn't charge, so we moved to Cloudflare. Also, Cloudflare was known for security protection, for example DDOS protection, and we haven't had any issues since moving to Cloudflare.
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare is on another level compared to any other CDN provider out there.
One of the reasons is that encompasses all the tools into one big products instead of relying on many different products from many companies - DNS, CDN, WAF are all managed in one place and connected …
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare was better, because we do not have to host or purchase any additional hardware. This means reduced costs for us to have to buy the hardware. Then, hire people to run the hardwar, and support the hardware. And, it also means you need SME's for the tool that have used …
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare's cloud/geo-relative implementation is best-suited for publicly available web resources.
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.
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare knows what they're doing when Load Balancing and Redundancy meet the cloud. AWS is a partner, and we're exploring other solutions which are performing at the highest level.

Peak season is upon us, and we cannot suffer downtime. DDoS Protection is another interesting …
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare has much better interface and is easier to use on a daily basis
Chose Cloudflare
Amazon CloudFront is a highly scalable CDN service integrated with AWS. Couldflare provides us more other functions and services than Amazon CloudFront. Google Cloud CDN offers fast and reliable content delivery with integration into Google Cloud services. But we didn't deploy …
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare is complex to set up but is still better suited to our environment.
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare addresses Pipefy a well-defined cache system with several features to improve the performance of the applications. This is the main focus + excellent reliability and stability.
Chose Cloudflare
Overall we are using Cloudflare as well as AWS cloud across various domains in our organization. To some extent such as DNS management on Route53, CloudFront takes advantage of Cloudflare as it provides a straightforward UI for DNS management. But when it comes to traffic …
Chose Cloudflare
20% of the entire world traffic run through Cloudflare data centers
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare can't compare to the reliability and ease of setup configuration.
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare is much easier to configure compared to these services.
Chose Cloudflare
Low investment, easy setup, great product, and solid security features.
Chose Cloudflare
AWS Cloudfront is so poon in UI, features. Almost you cannot compare them because the scale is too large.
Chose Cloudflare
Better than other software in the same field as per price time to implement easy to learn and use, good simple easy to understand user interface and very few false positives plus our compliance with cyber insurance is right on the money we no longer have to jump extra hopes to …
Chose Cloudflare
It's much cheaper even has free version, easy to use and integrate with our current system, it has so many features in the dashboard that I need.
Chose Cloudflare
ZScaler Private Access and Cloudflare Access are very similar product sets that trade blows when it comes to features and capabilities. In my experience Cloudflare unified dashboard and distributed infrastructure has the upper hand when compared to ZScaler.

As a Home Lab …
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare has lower starting cost for backend Workers and good pricing model with steps.
Auto-scaling by default better than microservice/docker or EC2.
Security makes simpler.
Chose 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.
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingCloudflare
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
IBM Cloud Internet Services
IBM Cloud Internet Services
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingCloudflare
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingCloudflare
Likelihood to Recommend
It really is a straight-up situation. From my current experience if you have two or more services hosted on Amazon web services that need transactions between each other with a variable flow of traffic then elb is a fantastic method for routing that traffic and making sure that no one back and component gets overloaded with requests while other existing components are just standing there idle waiting for some traffic. As noted earlier in my review we are still doing a trial run with the service as not all of our components are hosted on AWS yet and we aren't having as great luck with transactions between hosted and non-hosted but that could also simply be a learning curve on our part.
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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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Pros
  • Good price for a complete load balancing solution
  • Very useful rules editor on listener
  • Working in conjuction with AWS WAF, is a good option to protect your applications
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  • 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
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Cons
  • There are not a lot of cons but we can mention the need to always check the quotas for the ELB
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  • 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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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
CF is a core piece of our cloud infra.
Read full review
Usability
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
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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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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
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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Performance
No answers on this topic
They are built to be fast and deliver very well on this. Performance has never been a problem.
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Support Rating
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
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I have only used their support a few times, and most times, they are responsive and able to resolve my issue with a minimal amount of time and effort. However, there was one instance where I simply asked about how to purchase some more resources (redirect rules), and I received some type of automated/AI response that was very unhelpful and gave me no opportunity to escalate to a person.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
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Alternatives Considered
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
Nothing like it. Organizations can utilize these Cloudflare products to enhance their online presence by improving security, performance, reliability, and developer efficiency. Cloudflare is an American company that delivers services such as DNS, a content delivery network (CDN), and various other additional services to make websites faster and more secure. Cloudflare is used by over 26 million sites, resulting in the processing of more than 1 billion IP addresses each day.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
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Return on Investment
  • Allows us to troubleshoot and address network issues, which improves our end user experience
  • Provides an integrated way to balance our network load without having to deal with other suites besides AWS, saving time and effort
  • Allows us to see the effects that different code changes have on our network performance, which means more efficient development on the back end
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  • We have seen reduced usage and downtimes after using Cloudflare for Caching. This has already yielded ROI as minimal downtime ensures consistent user traffic and increases revenue.
  • It can handle significant traffic spikes and shields the website from DDOS attacks. We have prevented a number of DDOS attacks after using Cloudflare and hence we are already seeing an ROI by using it.
  • Some of the integrations with Cloudflare are really painful and we have faced a lot of issues because of not having native integrations to certain 3rd party apps.
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