CloudFlare

What is CloudFlare?

Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service and network security solution.

Cloudflare is a successful combination of network security and performance solution that increases websites or networks speed and provides protection of websites, mobile applications, APIs, and SaaS services. It is one of the leading Content Delivery Network on the market.

This CDN service speeds up and enhances the performance of networks, websites, apps, and APIs. It operates as a network of proxy servers and data centers (more than 100) that are located around the world, powering over 10 trillion requests per month. The service can manage 10Tbps in bandwidth for their users.

When it comes to security, the key security elements include protection against SQL injection, which attacks the code of the website. It also protects from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which is on the rise by exploitation of insecure Internet-of-Things devices. These downtimes can make the average hourly cost as high as $100,000 per hour.



CloudFlare Awards


CloudFlare currently scores 93/100 (Top 3 in Content Delivery Network (CDN)) in the Content Delivery Network (CDN) category. This is based on user satisfaction (92/100), press buzz (87/100), recent user trends (rising), and other relevant information on CloudFlare gathered from around the web.

The score for this software has improved over the past month. What is this?
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CloudFlare Review

Editors' Review by the Content Delivery Network (CDN) Software Review Team

Cloudflare is one of the leading providers of web performance and security platforms. It can help businesses of all sizes in speeding up and protecting their website, SaaS services, APIs and other resources related to the internet. This software solution combines web security and performance enhancement into your content delivery network.

With Cloudflare, you get to benefit from the following: free DDoS protection and business-grade DNS and CDN services. You’re also provided with multiple products and features to optimize your website speed and security.

These products range from stream delivery and magic transit to bot management and analytics.

Not only does Cloudflare increase the speed of your websites but it also blocks threats that are designed to compromise websites, waste bandwidth and deplete server resources.

Its security features help protect against spamming, DDoS attacks and SQL injections. Overall, with the help of Cloudflare, you can rest easy while enjoying faster internet speed and powerful security benefits.

Cloudflare Features

Cloudflare has many features that can help businesses, including:

Performance And Reliability

This category is Cloudflare’s top priority. You’ll find several features under this category such as CDN and DNS services, Argo Smart Routing, Load Balancing, AMP Real URL and web optimizations. These tools are designed to ensure optimal performance.

Many industries can benefit from this solution such as freelancers with personal websites, small businesses selling their products through an online shop and large enterprises with SaaS solutions.

Video Streaming and Delivery

Under this category, you get to use Cloudflare Stream and Stream Delivery in providing better video streaming options for your websites. This gives you shorter video startup and buffering times. This ensures an increase in customer engagement and bandwidth savings as Cloudflare’s network ensures reduced requests to an origin server.

Advanced Security

Cloudflare offers multiple security options to ensure malicious threats and suspicious activity are blocked. Examples are Magic Transit, WAF, bot management, SSL / TLS certificates and Argo Tunnel. With these tools, you don’t have to worry about bots or threats crawling through your websites, DDoS attacks, cross-site scripting, comment spamming and SQL injections. 

In-depth Insights

While Cloudflare focuses primarily on security and performance optimization, it also has tools focused on gathering data-driven insights. With Cloudflare Analytics, you benefit from deep insights and intelligence that you can use to further the state of your internet property.

You can also view trends, optimize configuration, create custom analytics dashboards and monitor the health of your origin server.

Cloudflare Homepage

Cloudflare Benefits

There are also many benefits of using Cloudflare, including:

Better Security

When it comes to running a website, you need to ensure top security measures have been made to protect your data. You can experience many different breaches and data threats such as DDoS attacks, malicious bots and hackers trying to compromise sensitive customer data. 

When you use public APIs or switch clouds and connect to more third-party integrations, you become at risk from more attacks. To counter these said risks, Cloudflare hosts a 200-city Anycast network that fights off volumetric attacks. It does this by learning from attacks sent on 20,000,000 internet properties.

Greater Performance

The more your business thrives, the more you’re expected to reach higher standards and cater to demands from your customers. You need a platform that focuses on capturing more prospects, capturing more leads and improving engagements from your audience.

Cloudflare offers features to accelerate both internet applications and mobile experiences and ensure your applications can be accessed by the general public. Having more people check out your website can lead to unsustainable traffic and unavailable infrastructure.

To stop this from happening, Cloudflare identifies what the best resource is to use from your server by monitoring network latency and server health.

More Reliability

With its DNS service and predictable bandwidth costs, Cloudflare lets you rely on thousands of machines across the globe to run your website. This ensures your applications stay running and also protects your internet properties from malicious requests.

Cloudflare Features

Cloudflare Pricing

For those who want to try out Cloudflare’s system, you can choose between four pricing packages. These packages are catered to different industries and offer varying levels of functionalities. Cloudflare claims that in their pricing bundles, performance and security are top priorities.

Free

This package is suitable for individuals who are running personal websites and who want to check out Cloudflare’s features and functionalities. You don’t have to pay to benefit from the following features: shared SSL certificates, global content delivery network and unmetered mitigation of DDoS attacks.

It’s a good place to start if you want to increase security measures and the overall speed of your networks.

Pro

Priced at $20.00 per month, the second plan offers faster internet speed and additional features to add to the existing ones found in the previous version. This is catered primarily for people who are looking to enhance their security and performance in their professional websites, portfolios or blogs.

With tools such as web application firewalls, image and mobile optimization and HTTP/2 prioritization, users are given more control over advanced features all designed to ensure your websites are working faster and in a more secure manner.

Business

The third plan is priced at $200 per month. It’s suitable for websites and businesses that require enhanced performance, advanced security and prioritized support. With this bundle, you get to benefit from the following: 100% uptime SLA, the existing name server and 24/7, 365 chat support.

It has all the features found in the Pro plan with additional options including custom WAF rules, 100k image resizing requests and more customization options.

Enterprise

Lastly, the Enterprise plan is designed for large enterprises and enterprises that require enterprise-grade security, emergency support and improved performance. It’s customizable for maximum performance which means it doesn’t have a fixed price. You need to contact the sales team to request for a quotation. In this package, you benefit from 2500% SLA, 24/7 enterprise-grade, email, phone and chat support.

Not only do you get to use the features found in the previous plans, you also get to use advanced web application firewalls with unlimited custom rulesets, role-based account access, multiple custom SSL certificate uploads, access to raw logs  and up to 10M image resizing requests.

Conclusion

As one of the top leading web performance and security platforms, Cloudflare is designed to build better internet and enhance security options for many websites and internet properties.

With powerful features to improve your CDN and DNS, high-quality video streaming options, advanced security tools and data-driven insights, it’s optimized to make your websites run faster and more efficiently.

Overall, Cloudflare is a viable option to have if you want to optimize your loading pages without paying for more than you can afford and compromising your website security. 

CloudFlare Product Overview

  • Fast, Global Content Delivery Network

  • Fast, Powerful, And Secure DNS

  • Load Balancing

  • Argo Smart Routing

  • Web Optimizations

  • Local Storage Caching

  • AutoMinify

  • Rocket Loader

  • Browser Optimization

  • Server Push


Languages Supported: English, Portuguese, French, Spanish

CloudFlare Features

  • 2-Factor Authentication
  • Analytics
  • Anti-Virus
  • API
  • Batch Permissions & Access
  • Dashboard
  • Data Export
  • Data Import
  • Data Visualization
  • External Integrations
  • File Sharing
  • File Transfer
  • Firewall
  • Multi-User
  • Notifications
  • Password & Access Management
  • Scheduling
  • Third-Party Plugins/Add-Ons
  • Database
  • Malware Protection
  • Bug Tracking
  • Network Traffic Monitoring
  • Network Visualization
  • Network Device Performance Monitoring
  • DDoS Protection
  • Media Streaming
  • Custom Domains
  • Geo-filtering
  • Real-time Alerts
CloudFlare Pricing

CloudFlare Pricing Plans

Free

Free
  • For personal websites, blogs, and anyone who wants to explore Cloudflare.
  • Unmetered Mitigation of DDoS
  • Global CDN
  • Shared SSL Certificate
  • I'm Under Attack™ Mode
  • Access to Cloudflare Apps
  • Access to Account Audit Logs
  • 3 Page Rules Included

Pro

$20.00
Monthly Per Domain
  • For professional websites, blogs, and portfolios requiring basic security and performance.
  • Web Application Firewall (WAF) with Cloudflare Rulesets
  • Image Optimizations with Polish™
  • Mobile Optimizations with Mirage™
  • Access to Account Audit Logs
  • 20 Page Rules Included

Business

$200.00
Monthly Per Domain
  • For small eCommerce websites and businesses requiring advanced security and performance.
  • Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 25 Custom Rulesets
  • Custom SSL Certificate Upload
  • Bypass Cache on Cookie
  • PCI Compliance thanks to Modern TLS Only Mode and WAF
  • Accelerate delivery of dynamic content with Railgun™
  • Prioritized Email Support
  • Access to Account Audit Logs
  • 50 Page Rules Included

Plans starting from: $20.00/month Credit card required: No

CloudFlare FAQs

Does CloudFlare offer guides, tutorials and or customer support?

Support: 24/7/365 enterprise-grade phone, email, and chat support; FAQs.

Does CloudFlare offer an API?

Yes, it offers APIs.

Does CloudFlare offer multi-user capability (e.g. teams)?

Yes.

What is CloudFlare generally used for?

It is generally used as a Content Delivery Network or CDN service.

What are some applications CloudFlare is commonly used in tandem with?

It is mostly used in tandem with content management systems, control panels, cloud providers, and eCommerce platforms.

Does CloudFlare integrate with any other apps?

Integrations: Wordpress, Google Cloud, Magento, Acquia, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes.

Who are the main user groups of CloudFlare?

Users of CloudFlare range from small, local blogs to international, Fortune 500 companies.

CloudFlare Competitors CloudFlare Alternatives

CloudFlare Alternatives & Competitors

Akamai
Akamai
  37 86/100
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Fastly
Fastly
  66 95/100
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CDN77
CDN77
  71 93/100
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Varnish
Varnish
  97 91/100
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
ArvanCloud CDN
ArvanCloud CDN
  7 85/100
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CacheFly
CacheFly
  24 87/100
Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CloudFlare User Reviews

Average User Rating:
4.6/5 based on 476 user ratings.
Your Rating:

Sentiment Scale
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User Sentiment Map

The sentiment map shows a snapshot of how Crozdesk users have rated CloudFlare over time. It shows how existing users see CloudFlare with regards to its usefulness, ease of use, value for money and customer service.

Overall
9.5/10
Arrow Left Recent Older Arrow Left
Usefulness
9.3/10
Ease of use
10.0/10
Value for money
9.3/10
Customer service
9.3/10
User profile picture

"Powerful solution to protect websites and improve their performance."


What do you like about CloudFlare?

CloudFlare is a software that has great accessibility, everything has been centralized so that even any user without technical knowledge can be able to handle it, it provides a quick and very simple installation, it is able to act as a protection layer against the website so any DDOS attacks, spam and even wrong IP addresses will be blocked, all of this makes it possible to have a well performing website, as it makes changing DNS records much faster and easier.

What do you dislike about CloudFlare?

Its free plan does not offer access logs so to access many more functions it is necessary to go to a paid service plan, so if the protected web page is personal, it can work under the free plan, otherwise the best is to go to more powerful functions.

What have you been using it for and what problems did CloudFlare solve?

Having this software has allowed a great improvement in the speed, accessibility and reliability of our website and this is thanks to the fact that it faces DDoS attacks and other threats, thus also reducing downtime.

4/5
Usefulness
5/5
Ease of use
4/5
Value for money
4/5
Customer service
User profile picture

"Great CDN and firewall"

// Designer Web at Amazon

What do you like about CloudFlare?

I use Cloudflare for it;s amazing capabilities, you can just update your name servers and protect your server ip from being published and attacked over the internet.
I use it for it's amazing caching speed and delivering great website pages at great speeds for anyone in the world.
You can put your own custom page rules.
You have an option for disabling any caching rules, so you can modify your website live.

What do you dislike about CloudFlare?

It is a great software, i would want more servers located in europe, so it could improve the speed the website is loading.

What have you been using it for and what problems did CloudFlare solve?

Firewall and great speeds for my websites.

5/5
Usefulness
5/5
Ease of use
5/5
Value for money
5/5
Customer service
User profile picture

"A must have for any website"

// Web Developer at Airbus

What do you like about CloudFlare?

You must have cloudflare on your new or old website. It has a ton of amazing tools from server ip hiding to CDN, it has great performances for new or old websites and it's free. What an amazing tool

What do you dislike about CloudFlare?

There are complex settings that you don't fully understand can harm your site perfomances. Also if you want to change things like theme or styling turn off caching, it may be a nerve wrecking experience if you don't

What have you been using it for and what problems did CloudFlare solve?

DDos atacks on my website, some russian servers were bombarding us with data, our local hosting company could not handle all those requests and we get the free plan, after this we extended to paid finding all those futures.

5/5
Usefulness
5/5
Ease of use
5/5
Value for money
5/5
Customer service
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