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Azure DNS vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.8
Azure DNS offers an 8% ROI with cost efficiency, reduced OpEx, pay-as-you-go pricing, and reliable functionality.
Sentiment score
6.7
Businesses see financial benefits from Cloudflare through improved uptime, security, and performance, enhancing returns despite measurement challenges.
The ROI is always high because Azure DNS setup is essential and does not incur high charges.
You would only lose money if you had an attack and you need to calculate the cost against the risks.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
We have had ROI with the tool's use since it never gave us downtime and made us lose millions.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.8
Azure DNS support is generally positive, with varying response times and quality based on the support plan and region.
Sentiment score
7.1
Customer service is highly rated, especially for Enterprise plans, but response times could improve for complex issues.
Technical support is minimally required for DNS-related tasks if you have previous experience.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
We'd like a dedicated account manager.
You can get a support engineer with the best qualifications.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
Azure DNS is praised for its scalability, ease of setup, and reliability, making it ideal for diverse business needs.
Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare is highly regarded for its scalability, smoothly accommodating various user needs and handling significant traffic across business sizes.
It can scale approximately 10 percent, it is limited only by how much money you want to spend on the increase.
I rate the scalability of Cloudflare DNS a ten out of ten.
I would rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten since I didn't encounter any issues with it.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Azure DNS is praised for its stability and robust performance, with minor installation challenges noted by fewer users.
Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudflare is generally praised for stability and reliability, despite occasional issues and past outages, requiring proper configuration for best performance.
I rate the stability of Cloudflare DNS a ten out of ten.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Azure DNS needs improvements in registration, support, security, scalability, pricing clarity, documentation, integration, performance, and multi-cloud functionality.
Users suggest Cloudflare improve analytics, CDN errors, support, DNS, APIs, pricing, server access, DDoS features, and documentation.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
Compared to other vendors and Cloudflare, there will be more downtime.
 

Setup Cost

Azure DNS offers cost-effective, usage-based pricing with seamless Azure integration, including free query allowances and charges for extra usage.
Cloudflare provides free and paid plans from $20, with straightforward pricing catering to small, medium, and enterprise businesses.
Azure DNS charges based on the number of zones enabled, offering some free queries monthly, which keeps costs low.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
The price of the solution is expensive.
When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable.
 

Valuable Features

Azure DNS provides easy installation, security, integration, robust performance, and flexible domain management with a user-friendly interface.
Cloudflare provides speed enhancement, security, and ease of use with CDN, DDoS protection, SSL, and traffic analytics for website optimization.
Azure DNS provides end-to-end P2P connectivity and enhances security, making it more secure and reliable.
The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security.
Our scenario consisted of two web servers in different allocations to control access demands, and the load balancer did the job as expected, bringing security and stability to access points.
For me, the valuable feature is DDoS protection.
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure DNS
Ranking in Managed DNS
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cloudflare
Ranking in Managed DNS
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

Tushar-Patil - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers good performance and helps its users with disaster recovery
Azure DNS has improved our company's domain management and resolution reliability since it provides most of the solutions, especially whatever is required in our organization. My experience of integrating Azure DNS into our company's existing cloud services was easy. For the security and privacy aspect, my company mostly relies on Microsoft. I don't have the expertise to comment on whether Azure DNS has influenced our company's operations from a security and privacy perspective. Azure DNS is a really good product when it comes to scalability and performance for our company's workload. Azure DNS has helped my company with the disaster recovery phase. The product uses cloud features, and since my company has separate regions, we have a backup tool or a backup deduplication technology. The implementation of Azure DNS in our environment benefits the entire organization, but four to five people have access to the solution. I rate the overall product a nine to ten out of ten.
Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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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
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Azure DNS or Amazon Route 53?
Azure DNS is a hosting service of DNS domains. It has excellent operating time and performance, resulting in fast resolution. We like the ability to view everything in the Azure portal - this makes...
What do you like most about Azure DNS?
The tool is easy to manage and use.
What needs improvement with Azure DNS?
I did not see any improvements required. It functions as a standard DNS, which is very important, and it does not need separate improvements.
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.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about Azure DNS vs. Cloudflare and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.