Cloudflare One vs Fortinet FortiDDoS comparison

Cloudflare and Fortinet are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Cloudflare is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.7, while Fortinet is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.0. Cloudflare holds a 4.1% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Fortinet’s 3.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cloudflare users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Fortinet users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 16, 2025

Fortinet FortiDDoS and Cloudflare One compete in the cybersecurity domain, focusing on network protection. Fortinet FortiDDoS has the upper hand with its hardware-based, powerful DDoS mitigation while Cloudflare One offers an edge in scalability and broad network performance capabilities.

Features: Fortinet FortiDDoS delivers robust DDoS protection with behavior-based threat detection, purpose-built ASICs for high-performance mitigation, and zero-day attack protection. Cloudflare One provides comprehensive network security, integrating zero trust security, secure web gateways, and WAN optimization.

Room for Improvement: Fortinet FortiDDoS could enhance its cloud integration, ease of use for non-experts, and reduce hardware dependency. Cloudflare One could improve offline capabilities for on-premise scenarios, enhance support for complex configurations, and offer better insights without additional tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortinet FortiDDoS requires complex hardware setup but offers strong customer support. Cloudflare One’s cloud-based nature ensures easier deployment and scalability, with straightforward setup facilitated by its architecture.

Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiDDoS involves high upfront costs due to hardware but offers a solid ROI with dedicated DDoS protection. Cloudflare One's subscription-based model provides cost-effectiveness, avoiding initial hardware investments and leveraging scalable security benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloudflare One vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare One vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.4%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare One is 4.1%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiDDoS is 3.0%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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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Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch

Engineer at SITMEXICO

The solution enables seamless security management and fosters a learning environment

Feedback could be enhanced. While I work efficiently with Clover as a partner in Mexico City, sometimes the information and requests are easier to manage with more concrete solutions. For the solution stopping us for e-learning, I appreciate the concept yet need more resources or courses in Mexico, preferably in Spanish. Certifications are easy, however, I require more real-world environments and instructors.

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Yazan Omar

Systems Engineer at aic²

An easy-to-use tool with great GUI

The product's initial setup phase was really easy. There is a lot of time involved in the testing phase and other processes related to the area of deployment, so it may take up to two weeks to deploy the solution. The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. One person is enough to take care of the deployment phase of the product. The person involved in the deployment phase needs to better understand topologies when dealing with Fortinet.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."

"The technical support is good."

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

More Cloudflare pros

"Cloudflare DDoS is better than its competitors for its security, deployment, and scalability."

"Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform removes the risk of exposing the applications to the public."

"This solution is easy to understand and easy to configure."

"The blocking feature is very good."

"Enables me to work from two locations."

"The simplicity of the solution is its valuable features as almost no effort was needed to learn the configurations. It is also one of the cheapest firewalls available in this category."

"For Cloudflare Access, I am using the free plan...The most valuable feature is their protection."

"The best feature is rate limiting. If I'm expecting 500 visits per hour, Cloudflare will limit the requests if I suddenly get 50,000."

More Cloudflare One pros

"We have researched them all, and it's a good solution all around."

"This solution can protect Layer 3, Layer 4 and Layer 7 attacks of applications for us."

"It allows me to see all the traffic on my network."

"The product's initial setup phase was really easy."

"The product allows the users to adjust the thresholds."

"The most valuable feature is the cloud DDoS scrubbing capability."

"The protection resources and the support are valuable features of the solution."

"The solution is very user-friendly and very easy to use."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS pros

Cons

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"The pricing could be improved."

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"The tool should provide on-premise versions. Currently, all versions are cloud-based."

"The initial onboarding was causing us some confusion."

"Our customers no longer use Cloudflare because its service is subpar."

"The free plan has limitations. For example, I can only set up three rules, and the application firewall is unavailable."

"They don't have a person to provide support for customers using the solution under their free plan."

"Feedback could be enhanced. While I work efficiently with Clover as a partner in Mexico City, sometimes the information and requests are easier to manage with more concrete solutions."

"For the topic of improvement, providing some training material is one of my suggestions."

"Our subscription plan for the solution has a limitation of bot signatures."

More Cloudflare One cons

"There aren't really any aspects of the solution we are unhappy with. It's been a positive experience overall."

"All the thresholds that need to be configured should be included in the default so that user will not forget or misconfigure."

"I find that there have been issues in the past year with the solution hanging. It freezes often."

"The only thing they need to do is to automate it. Today, you must create tools that do not require the use of an expert or anyone with special skills."

"The primary area for improvement is the on-premises capacity limit, currently fixed at 10 GB."

"The challenge lies within the customer environment, particularly in Brazil, where companies have stringent security requirements for implementing solutions."

"The web interface could be much better."

"The tool needs to focus more on the area of application traffic management, where it currently has some shortcomings."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"The price is reasonable."

"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."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform's pricing is good."

"My company has to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the solution. There are no hidden charges apart from the licensing costs of the solution."

"The solution's pricing lacks transparency."

"The pricing is somewhere in the middle. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten."

"The solution is not that expensive."

"The price tag is no longer $200,000, but rather $300,000 to $400,000. It's twice."

"The pricing of the solution is cheap. The licensing cost is also very low. I rate the cost and pricing a three out of ten."

"The prices are slightly expensive."

"The product’s pricing needs improvement."

"It's quite pricey."

"The solution is reasonably priced."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

19%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 GR...

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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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudflare Access?

The tool also offers good scalability, and the dashboard, along with real-time analytics, is very good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Access?

The price of Cloudflare Access is the same as compared to Akamai, but I get better performance from Cloudflare. My co...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Access?

Cloudflare Access has strong integration with Microsoft, among other platforms. However, when it comes to Kaspersky, ...

See all answers

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Arbor would be the best bid, apart from Arbor, Palo Alto and Fortinet have good solutions. As this is an ISP, I would...

See all answers

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiDDoS?

The product's initial setup phase was really easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiDDoS?

Fortinet FortiDDoS offers lower costs compared to other solutions. The licensing costs are annually renewed.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Twingate vs Cloudflare One

Compared 10% of the time

AWS Shield vs Cloudflare One

Compared 8% of the time

Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks vs Cloudflare One

Compared 7% of the time

Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs Cloudflare One

Compared 7% of the time

Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform vs Cloudflare One

Compared 5% of the time

More Cloudflare One Competitors

Arbor DDoS vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 27% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 12% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 11% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 7% of the time

AWS Shield vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 7% of the time

More Fortinet FortiDDoS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare One

April 2025

Download Cloudflare One product report

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

March 2025

Download Fortinet FortiDDoS product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security, Cloudflare Bot Management, Cloudflare Gateway, Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform, Cloudflare DDoS, Cloudflare SASE & SSE Platform

Fortinet DDoS, FortiDDos

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Cloudflare One is a single-vendor Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform that enables Zero Trust security and any-to-any connectivity across enterprise applications, users, devices, and networks. Cloudflare One helps organizations simplify, modernize, and consolidate their IT architecture by converging security and networking services on our single global network and control plane.

Many organizations start by adopting our Security Service Edge (SSE) services — like ZTNA, SWG, CASB, and DLP — to reduce their attack surface, stop threats like phishing and ransomware, protect data, and apply identity-based Zero Trust verification across web, SaaS, and private app environments. Others prioritize simplifying network connectivity across offices, data centers, and cloud environments with our WANaaS.

Every service is available for customers to run in every location across Cloudflare’s global network, which today spans 330+ cities in 120+ countries, so you can scale connectivity with fast, consistent protections everywhere.

Cloudflare

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are ever-evolving and use a variety of technologies. To successfully combat these attacks, you need a dynamic, multi-layered security solution. FortiDDoS protects from both known and zero day attacks with very low latency. It’s easy to deploy and manage, and includes comprehensive reporting and analysis tools.

Fortinet

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

23andMe

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare One vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

April 2025

Free Report: Cloudflare One vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare One vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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