Not all CDNs are equal for Magento. Cache invalidation speed, support for Magento's X-Magento-Tags cache ban mechanism, and bot detection quality vary significantly between providers. After running Magento behind all three major CDNs in production, here's our comparison.
CloudFront (AWS)
Best choice if you're already on AWS. Native integration with WAF, Shield, and Lambda@Edge for custom logic. Cache invalidation takes 10-30 seconds — adequate for most Magento deployments. Cost scales linearly with traffic; no monthly minimum. Weakness: no native Magento X-Magento-Tags support for tag-based ban invalidation — requires Lambda@Edge workaround.
Fastly
The premium enterprise choice. Instant cache purge (sub-150ms globally) and native surrogate-key support maps perfectly to Magento's X-Magento-Tags cache tag mechanism. Fastly's VCL gives you Varnish-like cache control at the CDN level. Significantly more expensive than CloudFront — pricing scales with requests and bandwidth, starting at $50/month minimum.
Cloudflare
Best price-performance ratio. The Pro plan ($20/month) includes a WAF, bot management, and image optimization. Cache purge takes 1-5 seconds. Cloudflare Workers (similar to Lambda@Edge) enable custom cache logic at the edge. The integrated DDoS protection is excellent — Cloudflare absorbs attacks without exposing your origin. Best choice for SMB and mid-market stores.
Our Recommendation
SMB (under 100K daily visitors): Cloudflare Pro/Business. Mid-market (100K-1M daily visitors): Cloudflare Enterprise or AWS CloudFront. Enterprise (1M+ daily visitors or complex caching requirements): Fastly. The performance difference between CDNs is less important than correct cache rules and origin shielding — a well-configured cheaper CDN outperforms a poorly configured expensive one.
