Amazon CloudFront vs Northflank Comparison
Compare Amazon CloudFront vs Northflank features, pricing, and more.
Last updated: November 2026
Amazon CloudFront
7.9/10
Amazon CloudFront is the AWS content delivery network. It caches and serves websites, APIs and media from more than 750 edge locations, and includes DDoS protection, WAF and edge compute.
Northflank
7.2/10
Northflank is a Kubernetes-based developer platform for deploying services, jobs, databases and GPU workloads on its managed cloud or on customers' own cloud accounts.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | A Amazon CloudFront | |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 7.9/10 | 7.2/10 |
| Integration | 9/10 | 7/10 |
| Support | 6/10 | 7/10 |
| Cost | 6/10 | 7/10 |
| Customization | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Security | 9/10 | 7/10 |
| Reliability | 9/10 | 7/10 |
| Ease of Use | 5/10 | 8/10 |
| Analytics | 7/10 | 6/10 |
| Scalability | 10/10 | 8/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Cheapest paid plan | $15/mo Pro (flat-rate) | Contact for pricing |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Free Free (flat-rate) | Free Sandbox |
| Features | ||
| API and CLI | ||
| DDoS Protection | ||
| Free SSL Certificates | ||
| Multiple Regions | ||
| Uptime SLA | ||
| Automatic Backups | Not listed | |
| Cloud Compute | Not listed | |
| Content Delivery Network | Not listed | |
| Dedicated Servers | Not listed | |
| Git Deployments | Not listed | |
| Managed Databases | Not listed | |
| Managed Kubernetes | Not listed | |
| Managed WordPress | Not listed | |
| Serverless Functions | Not listed | |
| Shared Hosting | Not listed | |
Amazon CloudFront vs Northflank cost by team size
Amazon CloudFront and Northflank cost the same at every team size we checked.
| Team size | Amazon CloudFront | Northflank |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | FreeFree (flat-rate) | FreeSandbox |
| 5 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | FreeSandbox |
| 10 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | FreeSandbox |
| 25 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | FreeSandbox |
| 50 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | FreeSandbox |
The plan that fits each team size, billed monthly, before add-ons and usage charges. Each cost opens that tool's pricing calculator for the team size.
Which One Should You Choose?
AWhy choose Amazon CloudFront
- Higher Integration score (9/10 vs 7/10)
- Higher Security score (9/10 vs 7/10)
Why choose Northflank
- Higher Ease of Use score (8/10 vs 5/10)
- Higher Support score (7/10 vs 6/10)
Pros & Cons
AAmazon CloudFront
Pros
- The network is very large, with more than 750 PoPs plus over 1,140 PoPs embedded inside ISP networks.
- Data transfer from AWS origins such as S3 and EC2 to CloudFront costs nothing, which lowers costs for workloads hosted on AWS.
- Flat-rate plans start at $15 a month with no overage charges, which makes bills predictable.
- It has strong compliance coverage, including PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, SOC, ISO and FedRAMP Moderate.
- Two tiers of edge compute are available: CloudFront Functions at $0.10 per million invocations and Lambda@Edge for heavier code.
Cons
- G2 and Capterra reviewers report complex configuration and a steep learning curve for people new to AWS.
- Capterra-network reviewers rate customer support poorly, around 3.4 out of 5.
- Flat-rate plans lack some features, such as real-time logs, dedicated IP SSL and continuous deployment, and going over the allowance reduces performance.
- Dedicated IP SSL at $600 a month and Anycast Static IPs at $3,000 a month are expensive extras.
- Users on AWS re:Post and GitHub report cache invalidations that occasionally hang for hours or time out during deploys.
Northflank
Pros
- Per-second usage billing with no seat or workspace fees. Northflank's own comparison prices a 2 vCPU, 4 GB service at $48 a month, against $85 at Render.
- The same platform can run workloads in your own AWS, GCP, Azure or Civo account, or on imported Kubernetes clusters, so moving off the managed cloud does not mean switching tools.
- G2 reviewers praise fast support from engineers who know the product.
- Builds from GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket are built in, and preview environments are created for each pull request.
- GPU options run from L4 to B200, so AI workloads can sit next to ordinary services.
Cons
- SLAs, SSO, SCIM, audit logs and the WAF are only available on Enterprise.
- G2 reviewers mention a limited choice of regions and slow builds because local Docker caching is missing.
- Some Trustpilot reviewers report slow support, and the review base is small overall.
- The vendor's pricing and features pages carry a notice about a security incident and ask users to rotate their credentials.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon CloudFront scores higher on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria: 7.9/10 against 7.2/10 for Northflank. The largest gap is in Ease of Use: 5/10 for Amazon CloudFront and 8/10 for Northflank.
Both are free for 10 users.
Yes, both Amazon CloudFront and Northflank have a free plan.
