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Cloudflare vs Fastly comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 6, 2024

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
Ranking in CDN
1st
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Fastly
Ranking in CDN
6th
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.6%, up from 21.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 3.4%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Nick Wilsdon - PeerSpot reviewer
An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support
The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"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."
"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 overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"It's very user-friendly."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
 

Cons

"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"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."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"Technical support is lacking."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"DNS Management."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"Support is not that great."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"We are using the free version."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which CDN solutions are best for your needs.
838,713 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
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 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.
What do you like most about Fastly?
Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly.
What needs improvement with Fastly?
What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a customer who is international and has deployments in different regions, it is ve...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.