Amazon S3 vs Cloud CDN (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict

A

Why choose Amazon S3

• Higher Integration score (10/10 vs 8/10)
• Higher Analytics score (8/10 vs 6/10)

C

Why choose Cloud CDN

Our data shows no clear advantage over Amazon S3.

A

Amazon S3

Pros

• Very high scale: about 500 trillion objects stored and around 200 million requests per second, according to Wikipedia.
• The S3 API is the industry standard, so a wide range of tools and competing storage providers support it.
• Strong data protection: versioning, MFA Delete, Object Lock in compliance mode, and cross-Region replication with a time-bound SLA.
• Many storage classes, from Express One Zone to Glacier Deep Archive at about $0.001 per GB-month, let teams match cost to how often data is accessed.
• Reviews are consistently positive: about 4.7 out of 5 from more than 1,100 Capterra reviews.

Cons

• Internet egress costs about $0.09 per GB after the first free 100 GB a month, and competitors widely criticise these fees.
• Request, retrieval and lifecycle-transition fees make monthly bills hard to predict.
• Reviewers on Capterra and TrustRadius call the console navigation and user interface complex.
• The SLA pays only service credits toward future bills, never refunds, and infrequent-access classes have a lower 99% uptime threshold.

C

Cloud CDN

Pros

• Connects directly to Google Cloud origins such as Cloud Storage buckets, GKE (including GKE Gateway since April 2026), Cloud Run, and Compute Engine, and it also accepts external origins.
• Cache egress falls to 0.02 USD per GiB above 1,000 TiB in North America and Europe, which makes it competitive at very large volumes.
• Cloud Armor edge security policies inspect all traffic before the cache lookup, so attack filtering and WAF rules sit in front of cached content.
• Invalidation has no per-request fee and supports cache tags, and each invalidation takes effect in about 10 seconds.
• You can automate everything through the REST API, gcloud CLI, and Terraform, and logs export to BigQuery or Cloud Storage.

Cons

• It is not a standalone CDN. You must configure the external Application Load Balancer's URL maps, backend services, and forwarding rules, and reviewers say this is hard for people new to CDNs.
• Billing has several layers (egress, cache fill, per-request lookups on every GET and HEAD, plus load balancer charges), so monthly costs are hard to forecast.
• The cache only fills when requests arrive, and there is no native way to pre-warm content across locations, which users have flagged.
• Reviewers say analytics are complex, and simple downloadable raw access logs are not offered the way some specialist CDNs provide them.
• Large-scale video and download delivery is steered to the separate Media CDN product, and Cloud CDN does not deliver RTMP or WebRTC.