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Cloudflare vs Quad9 comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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 Managed DNS
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (5th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (8th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (15th)
Quad9
Ranking in Managed DNS
5th
Average Rating
6.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 23.1%, down from 33.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quad9 is 21.5%, down from 31.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare23.1%
Quad921.5%
Other55.4%
Managed DNS
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
Louis Geoffroy - PeerSpot reviewer
President at IDEBUG
It's easy to use and set up, but I've faced performance problems
I have experience with Quad9 and most other filtering solutions. Quad9 was working well initially, but it started slowing, so I switched to OpenDNS. I recently checked Tom's Hardware, an IT review site, and read a review of seven DNS filters. Open DNS was ranked the fastest, and Quad9 was second. Google was on there too, but they said it didn't filter enough.

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 a great fit for customers who want unlimited bandwidth."
"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"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."
"Cloudflare has made management of my website much easier by combining various functions in one platform without compromising quality."
"It's a reasonably priced solution that meets customers' needs and it's not too difficult to deploy."
"If you don't want to spend too much time hosting your own DNS server or managing the domain, Cloudflare is a great way to rapidly get websites and services online."
"The initial setup is extremely easy but will require access to your Domain Name Servers."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"Setting up Quad9 is straightforward if you know what you're doing, and it's easy to use overall."
"The most valuable feature of Quad9 is that it is a free solution."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"We had to do a lot of digging and back-and-forth with technical support for specific use cases, and it might be helpful to have more screencasts or screenshots for common situations."
"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."
"Technical support is not well developed. While there are good engineers, Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"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."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"It used to work fine for all the devices, but it started to slow and become non-responsive. I would have to reload the page two or three times before all the pages loaded. With OpenDNS, I only need to load the page once."
"Quad9 could improve by having more free features, such as custom DNS filtering."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"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 product's pricing is cheap."
"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."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The price of Quad9 is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
27%
Computer Software Company
8%
Hospitality Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
No data available
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
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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.
CISCO, Netlab, proofpoint
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Quad9 and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.