Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon CloudFront Comparison
Compare Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon CloudFront features, pricing, and more.
Last updated: November 2026
Alibaba Cloud
6.6/10
Alibaba Group's public cloud platform, offering pay-as-you-go compute, storage, databases, CDN, security and AI services to businesses, with an especially strong presence in Asia.
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.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | | A Amazon CloudFront |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 6.6/10 | 7.9/10 |
| Integration | 6/10 | 9/10 |
| Support | 4/10 | 6/10 |
| Cost | 7/10 | 6/10 |
| Customization | 8/10 | 9/10 |
| Security | 7/10 | 9/10 |
| Reliability | 7/10 | 9/10 |
| Ease of Use | 5/10 | 5/10 |
| Analytics | 7/10 | 7/10 |
| Scalability | 8/10 | 10/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Cheapest paid plan | Contact for pricing | $15/mo Pro (flat-rate) |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Contact for pricing | Free Free (flat-rate) |
| Features | ||
| API and CLI | ||
| Content Delivery Network | ||
| DDoS Protection | ||
| Multiple Regions | ||
| Cloud Compute | Not listed | |
| Dedicated Servers | Not listed | |
| Free SSL Certificates | Not listed | |
| Managed Databases | Not listed | |
| Managed Kubernetes | Not listed | |
| Managed WordPress | Not listed | |
| Object Storage | Not listed | |
| Serverless Functions | Not listed | |
| Shared Hosting | Not listed | |
| Uptime SLA | Not listed | |
Alibaba Cloud vs Amazon CloudFront cost by team size
| Team size | Alibaba Cloud | Amazon CloudFront |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | Contact for pricing | FreeFree (flat-rate) |
| 5 users | Contact for pricing | FreeFree (flat-rate) |
| 10 users | Contact for pricing | FreeFree (flat-rate) |
| 25 users | Contact for pricing | FreeFree (flat-rate) |
| 50 users | Contact for pricing | FreeFree (flat-rate) |
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?
Why choose Alibaba Cloud
- Higher Cost score (7/10 vs 6/10)
AWhy choose Amazon CloudFront
- Has a free plan (Alibaba Cloud does not)
- Higher Integration score (9/10 vs 6/10)
- Higher Support score (6/10 vs 4/10)
- Better fit for developers (9/10 vs 7/10)
Pros & Cons
Alibaba Cloud
Pros
- Low hosting costs in Asia, according to PeerSpot reviewers
- Very broad catalogue that covers compute, storage, databases, CDN, security and AI
- Dense region coverage in China and Asia-Pacific, with 106 zones across 31 regions
- Scaling up or down is straightforward, and redundant or mirror setups are supported
Cons
- Support is often described as slow and hard to reach
- Accurate pricing is hard to find for some services, such as RDS and MongoDB
- SDK and API quality is uneven across services
- The console is more complex for newcomers than some rival clouds'
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.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon CloudFront scores higher on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria: 7.9/10 against 6.6/10 for Alibaba Cloud. The largest gap is in Integration: 6/10 for Alibaba Cloud and 9/10 for Amazon CloudFront.
Amazon CloudFront has a free plan; Alibaba Cloud does not list one.
Amazon CloudFront is the better fit for developers: we rate it 9/10 for them, against 7/10 for Alibaba Cloud.
