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Cloudflare vs Fortinet FortiDDoS 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Fortinet FortiDDoS
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
13th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.9%, down from 19.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiDDoS is 3.0%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

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.
Yazan Omar - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"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."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"It's very user-friendly."
"Among its key features: Detects and mitigates DDoS attacks at L3 to L7; negligible to zero false-positives; Generates and sends reports without the need for an expensive third-party solution."
"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 solution is very user-friendly and very easy to use."
"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."
"Packet inspection has been effective for mitigating DDoS attacks."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"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."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"Alerts and reporting features must be improved."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"The challenge lies within the customer environment, particularly in Brazil, where companies have stringent security requirements for implementing solutions."
"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 main improvement would be to change the firewall model, however, currently, everything is fixed and working well."
"All the thresholds that need to be configured should be included in the default so that user will not forget or misconfigure."
"The primary area for improvement is the on-premises capacity limit, currently fixed at 10 GB."
"The solution can be a little more user-friendly and it can be more affordable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The price is reasonable."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"It's quite pricey."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
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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
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
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.
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 prefer Arbor.
What do you like most about Fortinet FortiDDoS?
The product's initial setup phase was really easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiDDoS?
The pricing is correct and includes the equipment. I find the price to be very reasonable.
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Fortinet DDoS, FortiDDos
 

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.
Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,466 professionals have used our research since 2012.