TrustRadius Insights for Cloudflare are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
DNS Management: Users have consistently found Cloudflare's DNS management to be extremely user-friendly, describing it as effortless to set up and quick to propagate across their networks. This feature has significantly streamlined their processes and increased operational efficiency.
Web Application Firewall: Many reviewers have praised the effectiveness of Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall in safeguarding their websites against common web attacks. They appreciate the proactive protection it offers, including active defense mechanisms that enhance overall security measures.
Integration with AI Frameworks: Customers highly value Cloudflare's integration with popular AI frameworks and APIs for simplifying AI development tasks. By facilitating the creation of fast, private, and scalable AI applications in the cloud, this feature has proven instrumental in driving innovation and streamlining workflows.
We use Cloudflare Warp and Cloudflare Access/Zero trust for authentication into our internal services and private cloud.
Pros
Blog
Documentation
UI
Cons
Cloudflare Warp - the client is very frustrating to use; it breaks all the time and is difficult to debug
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudflare Zero Trust is a great product and was fairly easy to setup for our use case. The biggest complaint I have about Cloudflare is the Warp product - the VPN client breaks all the time and I need to spend a non-trivial amount of my day debugging it when it breaks.
Alternatives
Cisco AnyConnect and AWS VPN
Cloudflare is much easier to configure compared to these services.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 1001-5000 employees)
Cloudflare is one of the primary products that is used (and recommended) to our customers for Zero Trust based remote access. Through their product called Cloudflare Access, customer are able to stand up application based tunnels for their end user connectivity requirements.
Pros
Remote Access
Email Security
Web Security
Cons
Network Outage/Platform Outage Control
Dashboard Integration
Likelihood to Recommend
Email, Web Security and Secure Network Access are the main areas where Cloudflare is well suited. The distributed technology that is behind the Cloudflare infrastructure allows it to be a disruptive product in the space.
Alternatives
Zscaler Private Access
ZScaler Private Access and Cloudflare Access are very similar product sets that trade blows when it comes to features and capabilities. In my experience Cloudflare unified dashboard and distributed infrastructure has the upper hand when compared to ZScaler.
As a Home Lab enthusiast, the acessability of Cloudflare access (free tier) is a massive win when looking to evaluate a solution .
VU
Verified User
Employee in Engineering (Information Technology & Services company, 501-1000 employees)
Cloudflare helps me to make my websites and my Open-Source projects more secure and with no extra cost. It provide me a free SSL for each domain, and it protects me against bots that use my hosting bandwidth. With Cloudflare I have an overview of all my domains in one page. I can analyze daily the report of bad users and I can immediately take action on those IP address ranges. Also, I use the Cloudflare cache to speed up my website with the use of a Content delivery network.
Pros
FREE SSL
Content delivery network
Bot blocker
Cons
Support better by livechat
Decrease Price for Pro
Make some Pro features available for the free users
Likelihood to Recommend
It is easy to set up, and within 10 minutes it is up and running. You can add many domains in one dashboard. So no need for a separate Cloudflare account. I can access all my domain DNS, and customize/add it further. For example by adding the Google Webmaster DNS key or my email provider.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 1-10 employees)
In our organization, we leverage cloudflare to optimize the performance and fortify the security of our online strcuture. Like for example bots or injection. We also use CDN (Content delivery Network) to accelerates website loading times by caching content across its global network ensuring a seamless use experience. The robust DDos protection shields our POC servers from malicious attacks and preserving service continuly. We love the service that Cloud flare provide use. And we still using it to protect our POC's.
Pros
Handeling fast CDN
Protection of bots
Detail analytics and reporting
Easy to manage DNS management
Cons
Make support faster
Cheaper prices
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudflare is great robust set of service and is exceptionally well-suited for building proof of concepts (POCs) on the web. One key advantage is Cloudflare's global content delivery network (CDN) which ensure fast and reliable content delivery to users around the world. The ease of setting up cloudflare services allows our developers to quickly deploy and test their POC without bogged down complex configuration.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Engineering (Financial Services company, 10,001+ employees)
Since integrating Cloudflare for image optimization and storage, we've seen remarkable improvements in our website's performance. Cloudflare's resizing, compression, and automatic format conversion capabilities have significantly enhanced page load times while maintaining image quality. This has not only improved our user experience but also reduced our bandwidth and storage costs.
Pros
A key benefit has been Cloudflare's scalability, allowing us to manage traffic spikes efficiently without major infrastructure investments. Additionally, its security features have fortified our site against DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare's resizing, compression, and automatic format conversion capabilities have significantly enhanced page load times while maintaining image quality.
Cons
We are not able to completly replace AWS or GCP with Cloudflare, some services are missing. But they seem to be adding more services frequently.
Likelihood to Recommend
Since implementing Cloudflare, we've observed a 40% improvement in site loading times and a 30% reduction in bandwidth usage.The feedback from users has been overwhelmingly positive, noting faster access and improved reliability.
Alternatives
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
R2 is just a cheaper and faster version of S3. Same developer API.
We use Cloudflare as a CDN to cache and deliver our site's static resources quickly. We also use it for public DNS, SSL acceleration, WAF and DDoS/bot protection, and fast network routing. Cloudflare helps us stay fast, redundant, and protected. We also use Cloudflare logging for analytics.
Pros
DNS - easy to manage, simple to maintain
CDN - image and static content caching
DDoS protection
Cons
It's been challenging to understand how different products can be leveraged together to achieve a specific goal.
Their documentation is good at explaining *how* a particular feature works, but understanding *why* we might want/need to use it or in what circumstances it would be useful is often unclear.
It's occasionally hard to get useful support. Not always.
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudflare has a huge range of features. The CDN and DNS services are great, fast, easy-to-use, and reliable. The security features are broad and deep, and they work very well. However, it takes a bit of investment to understand your traffic and decide what tools and configurations will work for you. There are many features that would work well for a new project being built from scratch (Workers, Zero-trust security) but are harder to for already established sites to start using. Overall, Cloudflare's services are world-class.
Alternatives
Akamai and Edgio Delivery
Cloudflare is less expensive and has more features than Akamai. It has many more points of presence and is faster and more robust than Limelight/Edgio. It was the clear winner when we selected them six years ago, and maintains its leadership in this space.
VU
Verified User
Vice-President in Engineering (Retail company, 11-50 employees)
We use Cloudflare DNS to manage many sites with page rules for redirects, caching static content before it reaches our backend, Bot/DDoS mitigation, web analytics, and most recently as a proxy for our web app's API. Analytics are non-intrusive and tend not to be blocked by clients whereas Google Analytics are mostly blocked by our audience. We are exploring Pages and Workers for deploying a web app created in SvelteKit.
Pros
DNS is quick to set up and seems to propagate quicker than other DNS name servers. Page rules are very convenient for quickly setting up redirects with wildcards.
Setting up a proxy with Cloudflare Workers for my API, which runs on Google Cloud Functions was much simpler than any solution I came across using Google Cloud Platform itself. It also doesn't cost us a lot of money for this use case.
Web Analytics are privacy-focused, so it is nice to get insights into our application without worrying about the data being sold. The interface is very clean. I like being able to query page views by bot score, to see how many bots are viewing pages compared to actual users. Querying this data is also very quick and simple when compared to Google Analytics API.
Cons
I wish Analytics had a larger window to query for historical data. At the moment we have to store the data in our own database to retain historical records. I also wish the web UI had the ability to filter on "likely human" traffic, at the moment, I need to use the GraphQL API to include this filter.
I would like to see a performant way to do "rewrites" where traffic from another domain we operate is served up without changing the URL. To be fair, part of the problem with this is related to how the pages are served.
Managing users is a little awkward. You invite users to manage your account via email like the copy on the site says "Invite Members to join user@domain.com's account. Invite Members to access your account and edit configurations." which is confusing because it seems like people are using my email to log in. However, this is just the wording they chose, it does work as expected. Once you get passed that, the access controls are fine-grained and intuitive.
I wish I could set up a cache based on the body of the request, to use an ID within the payload as a key to cache each type of request.
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudflare is very fast and offers a lot of tools to manage your site traffic, caching, bot mitigation, web analytics, HTTPS certificates with auto-renewal, cloud workers for all sorts of purposes, a key-value store, image storage and optimization, pages for static content, a SQLite database is even on the way. Everything is offered at a great price too. Their free tier for services makes me reach for Cloudflare for every site I make public. I really can't think of much I wouldn't use it for, save for their Workers not being a true node.js environment and so you will still want to run functions with another service.
Alternatives
Namecheap, Google Domains and GoDaddy
I just tried using their basic DNS, but it was surprisingly flaky. Sometimes pages just wouldn't load due to timeouts. Once I moved my name servers over that problem went away. Google domains and GoDaddy just don't offer all the other things you would want to do with your site after DNS is set up. Cloudflare has so many tools to help your site load fast and secure. With very competitive prices on top of that.
VU
Verified User
Vice-President in Engineering (Publishing company, 11-50 employees)
Cloudflare is a complex product offering, but for us it primarily addresses a whole bunch of security issues (WAF, DDoS protection, bot protection, endpoint protection etc) as well as web asset delivery (CDN) and the ability to knit together complicated systems, often with legacy components.
Pros
DNS
WAF
DDoS protection
CDN
HTTP traffic transmogrification on the fly
Cons
Their UI is notable for simplicity but has room for improvement indeed, both in UX and especially for cohesiveness across feature sets
It would be nice to have better linkage between some of the more complex things in the UI and the documentation
Documentation can always be improved
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudflare seems to be a no-brainer if you need DDoS protection and/or WAF. The rest depends on your needs, requirements and constraints. It is tempting to consolidate DNS, CDN and possibly domain registration functionality, if you feel confident it won't harm your risk/redundancy profile. If you have a heterogeneous or hybrid network architecture, they might be handy in knitting it all together. Their SASE and ZTNA solutions also look really promising, but these are complicated enough that a very thorough examination is required before considering application.
Pipefy is a SaaS that runs on AWS + Kubernetes but relies on Cloudflare for Proxy, CDN, WAF, rate limiter, advanced security features and others.
Cloudflare addresses Pipefy a well-defined cache system with several features to improve the performance of the applications. This is the main focus + excellent reliability and stability.
Pros
CDN to cache static content
WAF for specific application and network rules
Global Network to improve availability.
Cons
Improve integration and features for AWS and other Clouds
Cloudflare is an out of the box easy to plug in solution for a lot of problems companies faces. For instance it easily adds web protection to your websites and improve performance over web traffic and DNS. It is pretty easy to use for average users, but there are lots of cool configurations for advanced users. They offer an AMAZING free tier that enables smalls/startup companies to really take advantage and grow with them. If you need a security vendor for modern architecture you will probably find everything you need on Cloudflare on a engineering perspective. I suggest trying out their ZTNA solution which is awesome and is something really interesting for modern companies with distributed workforces working remotely.
Pros
WAF
ZTNA
DNS
HTTPS Enforce
CDN
Cons
ZTNA
Terraform Integration
Likelihood to Recommend
If you need a web application firewall you can use Cloudflare. If you need fine tuned access control for your services when you have remote distributed workforce you can use ZTNA. If you need to share local application with someone you can use cloudflared. If you need DNS you can use Cloudflare. If you need CDN you can use Cloudflare. If you need DDOS protection you can use Cloudflare. If you need to ensure traffic encryption for you website or your workforce you can use cloudflare.
Alternatives
OpenVPN Access Server
VPN gives access to your entire network and if your access key is compromised the attacker has a HUGE surface of attack. By leveraging Cloudflare ZTNA you can choose who has access to exactly which resource and keep all management remote and IAC on terraform. It also enables the company to ask for permission and insert a purpose for the specific access, which is pretty cool for production restrictions.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 51-200 employees)
