Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Azure DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 29, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure DDoS Protection
Ranking in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Microsoft Security Suite (19th)
Cloudflare
Ranking in Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection category, the mindshare of Azure DDoS Protection is 4.4%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.8%, down from 20.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Raju Mallipudi - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 20, 2024
Acts as an additional layer of protection, provides endpoint security but not very easy to configure
It's not very easy to configure, in my view. We have to do some work behind the scenes. It's not very simple. We have to do it very carefully, and we need to monitor this enablement as well. But apart from that, I didn't see any kind of challenges. So, in my opinion, configuration is the main trouble for them. It is something that can be done to be better. Not just configuration. You need an expert who knows the ins and outs of these security solutions. In my experience, people struggle with configuration. While configuring, we get this error, we get that error, and then we try to fix those issues. I have seen those. It's not straightforward.
Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 1, 2022
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"DDoS Protection is simple to deploy and integrates seamlessly with the Azure environment. Ease of deployment is a crucial feature for us."
"Azure DDoS Protection offers superior protection against denial-of-service attacks."
"AI capabilities are very good. I would rate them an eight out of ten."
"The most important feature is that the solution continuously monitors traffic by inbuilt rules to identify preconfigured attacks."
"This solution is the best option for us because we use a lot of Microsoft products. So, it is easy for us to deploy or integrate any features or products."
"The most valuable feature of Azure DDoS Protection is that it performs well."
"I like the user interface, documentation, and support. Azure DDoS Protection is one of the most valuable solutions for any endpoint that is publicly reachable through the internet. It will automatically secure all your endpoints from third-party attacks, cyber attacks, or phishing attacks."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."
"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."
"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."
 

Cons

"The visibility could be better. We would like to have better metrics, so we could see all the information in a central place."
"Azure DDoS Protection could improve on the reporting."
"The UI needs to be improved."
"The implementation of Azure DDoS Protection results in a decrease in our bandwidth capacity and should be optimized to reduce resource consumption."
"The reporting aspect and dashboard management monitoring need improvement."
"Sometimes, it is hard for our staff to keep track of changes (in the GUI) between different projects, because there are constant changes. As a result, it is hard to manage, recall, and see all the features because they have been moved from one place to another."
"It's not very easy to configure, in my view."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is good but is not the best. It could be improved so that middle-sized organizations, such as startups, can benefit from it."
"It is an expensive solution."
"You can test it for a certain period of time free of charge. You can have a free account. You can test it to compare its pros and cons with other products that you are testing."
"The pricing is quite high. It is a monthly subscription that costs about $2,000 per month, depending on the user sizes."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The price is reasonable."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 6, 2013
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Azure DDoS Protection?
Azure DDoS Protection offers superior protection against denial-of-service attacks.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure DDoS Protection?
It is an expensive solution. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is a cheap solution and ten is an expensive one.
What needs improvement with Azure DDoS Protection?
It's not very easy to configure, in my view. We have to do some work behind the scenes. It's not very simple. We have to do it very carefully, and we need to monitor this enablement as well. But ap...
Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure DDoS Protection vs. Cloudflare and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.