Load Balancing Compared: Cloudflare vs AWS ELB vs Azure Front Door vs Google Cloud Load Balancing

Yes. Cloudflare Load Balancing works with any HTTP/HTTPS origin regardless of where it is hosted — AWS, Azure, GCP, bare metal, on-premises, or any combination. This makes it a strong choice for multi-cloud or hybrid architectures where you need a single load balancer spanning multiple providers. The hyperscaler load balancers are primarily designed for their own infrastructure.

ALB (Application Load Balancer) operates at Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) and supports path-based routing, host-based routing, HTTP header matching, WebSockets, and gRPC. NLB (Network Load Balancer) operates at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP/TLS) with ultra-low latency and handles millions of requests per second. ALB is for web applications; NLB is for high-performance TCP workloads, game servers, IoT, or protocols other than HTTP.

Google Cloud offers two network service tiers. Premium tier routes traffic over Google's private backbone for lowest latency and supports global load balancing with a single anycast IP. Standard tier routes traffic over the public internet and provides only regional load balancing. Premium tier costs more per GB but delivers better performance and global reach. Most production workloads use premium tier.

Cloudflare Load Balancing starts at /month for 2 origins with 60-second health checks and 500K DNS queries. Additional origins cost /month each. Faster health check intervals (10-second) and higher DNS query volumes cost extra. Geo steering and session affinity are included. By comparison, AWS ALB has an hourly charge (~6/month minimum) plus per-LCU pricing that scales with traffic. For simple multi-origin failover, Cloudflare is often cheaper; for high-throughput single-region workloads, AWS ALB may be more cost-effective.

Cloudflare Load Balancing is primarily designed for HTTP/HTTPS traffic, operating through Cloudflare's reverse proxy. For TCP/UDP load balancing, Cloudflare offers Spectrum (Enterprise plan), which proxies arbitrary TCP/UDP traffic through Cloudflare's network. AWS NLB, Azure Load Balancer, and Google Network Load Balancer are purpose-built for L4 TCP/UDP workloads and are more capable for non-HTTP protocols.

Cloudflare checks from multiple global locations simultaneously, catching region-specific issues. AWS ALB/NLB health checks run from within the same region. Azure Front Door runs checks from multiple PoPs globally. Google health checks run from Google's probing systems. Cloudflare and Azure Front Door provide the best global health checking perspective, while AWS health checks are best at detecting issues within a specific region's infrastructure.

Azure Load Balancer is a regional L4 (TCP/UDP) load balancer within a single Azure region — similar to AWS NLB. Azure Front Door is a global L7 (HTTP/HTTPS) platform that combines load balancing, CDN, WAF, and DDoS protection — similar to Cloudflare's integrated approach. Azure also offers Application Gateway, a regional L7 load balancer with WAF. For global web traffic, use Front Door. For regional TCP/IP, use Azure Load Balancer.

All major L7 load balancers support WebSockets: Cloudflare (all plans), AWS ALB (native support), Azure Front Door (native support), and Google HTTP(S) LB (native support). For long-lived WebSocket connections with stateful requirements, Cloudflare's Durable Objects provide a unique advantage — each WebSocket connection can be associated with a Durable Object that maintains state, enabling real-time features like chat rooms, collaborative editing, and multiplayer games.

For many architectures, no. Cloudflare's proxy already provides load balancing-like behavior: it terminates SSL, caches content, and distributes traffic across your origins. Adding Cloudflare Load Balancing on top provides health-check-driven failover, weighted routing, and geo-steering. However, for backends on a single cloud provider, you may still want a regional load balancer (ALB, Azure App Gateway, etc.) between Cloudflare and your compute instances for fine-grained routing within the region.