Amazon CloudFront vs SearchStax (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict
Amazon CloudFront is our pick, scoring 7.9/10 against 7.1/10 for SearchStax on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria. Its biggest advantage: higher Integration score (9/10 vs 7/10). Only Amazon CloudFront has a free plan.
Last updated: November 2026
A
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.
SearchStax
7.1/10
SearchStax provides AI-assisted website search for marketing and digital teams, plus a managed Apache Solr hosting service for developers.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | A Amazon CloudFront | |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 7.9/10 | 7.1/10 |
| Integration | 9/10 | 7/10 |
| Support | 6/10 | 8/10 |
| Cost | 6/10 | 4/10 |
| Customization | 9/10 | 7/10 |
| Security | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Reliability | 9/10 | Not listed |
| Ease of Use | 5/10 | 7/10 |
| Analytics | 7/10 | 8/10 |
| Scalability | 10/10 | 8/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | Yes | No |
| Cheapest paid plan | $15/mo Pro (flat-rate) | Contact for pricing |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Free Free (flat-rate) | Contact for pricing |
| Features | ||
| API and CLI | Not listed | |
| Content Delivery Network | Not listed | |
| DDoS Protection | Not listed | |
| Dedicated Servers | Not listed | |
| Free SSL Certificates | Not listed | |
| Managed WordPress | Not listed | |
| Multiple Regions | Not listed | |
| Serverless Functions | Not listed | |
| Shared Hosting | Not listed | |
| Uptime SLA | Not listed | |
| More features | ||
| Private Deployment | Not listed | |
| Knowledge Base Search | Not listed | |
| API Access | Not listed | |
| Text Generation | Not listed | |
| Enterprise Controls | Not listed | |
Amazon CloudFront vs SearchStax cost by team size
| Team size | Amazon CloudFront | SearchStax |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | FreeFree (flat-rate) | Contact for pricing |
| 5 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | Contact for pricing |
| 10 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | Contact for pricing |
| 25 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | Contact for pricing |
| 50 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | Contact for pricing |
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.
Who Amazon CloudFront and SearchStax suit
Amazon CloudFront fits developers and small business better than SearchStax.
| Audience | Amazon CloudFront | SearchStax |
|---|---|---|
| Developers | 9/10It offers a full API, works with CloudFormation and the SDKs, and runs code at the edge, which suits engineers who want deep control. | 6/10Managed Solr hosting and UI kits serve developers, although the product is not built API-first. |
| Small Business | 5/10Reviewers cite configuration complexity and costs as hurdles for smaller teams that are not technical. | 3/10Quote-only pricing and reviewer complaints about cost make it a poor fit for small sites. |
| Enterprise | 8/10It holds PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC and FedRAMP Moderate compliance, offers custom pricing, and runs on a very large edge network. | 7/10Multi-site Custom plans, a 99.95% SLA, SSO, and ISO 27001 suit large organizations. |
| Education | Not rated | 7/10Program, event, and people search plus multi-site management fit large university websites. |
| Healthcare | Not rated | 7/10HIPAA support and location-based search suit healthcare provider sites. |
| Marketing Teams | Not rated | 8/10The vendor positions Site Search for marketers, with no-code relevance tuning, content promotion, and analytics. |
| SaaS Companies | 8/10It integrates natively with AWS origins and supports blue/green continuous deployment, a good fit for SaaS products hosted on AWS. | Not rated |
| Startups | 7/10The always-free tier and the $15 Pro flat-rate plan keep early costs low. | Not rated |
Which One Should You Choose?
AWhy choose Amazon CloudFront
- Has a free plan (SearchStax does not)
- Higher Integration score (9/10 vs 7/10)
- Higher Cost score (6/10 vs 4/10)
- Better fit for developers (9/10 vs 6/10)
- Better fit for small business (5/10 vs 3/10)
Why choose SearchStax
- Higher Support score (8/10 vs 6/10)
- Higher Ease of Use score (7/10 vs 5/10)
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.
SearchStax
Pros
- Marketers can tune synonyms, boosting, and promotions without developer help.
- G2 reviewers most often praise customer support, and the overall rating is about 4.8 out of 5.
- Smart Answers draws only on the site's own indexed content, and the vendor says that content is not used to train external models.
- The compliance list is broad: SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, and WCAG 2.2 readiness.
- Managed Search gives Solr users high availability, disaster recovery, and private cloud hosting.
Cons
- Site Search pricing is quote-only, so budgeting is hard.
- Smart Answers and Smart Ranking are only on the Premium tier.
- Smart Answers does not support multi-turn conversational search, according to a competitor's comparison.
- Some G2 reviewers mention high cost, overage charges, and steep renewal increases.
- Advanced customization often needs a developer.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon CloudFront scores higher on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria: 7.9/10 against 7.1/10 for SearchStax. The largest gap is in Cost: 6/10 for Amazon CloudFront and 4/10 for SearchStax.
Amazon CloudFront has a free plan; SearchStax does not list one.
Amazon CloudFront is the better fit for developers: we rate it 9/10 for them, against 6/10 for SearchStax.
