Top 10 Cloudflare Alternatives

This article will explore ten of the best Cloudflare alternatives. The list includes Cloudfront, Akamai, Sucuri, Google Cloud CDN, etc.

With a unique offering combining website security and performance, Cloudflare has become a highly sought-after tool for website owners. It is a highly adaptable tool that is suitable for beginners and experienced webmasters, offering a host of features that eliminate the worry of downtimes and security threats from a single platform.

The tool has repeatedly absorbed DDoS attacks that have peaked over 400Gbit/s, providing DNS services to over 25 million internet properties.

If you are considering migrating to another CDN service, here is a list of some of the top alternatives to Cloudflare that you can use for your website. Continue reading to find the best features in each of the following options and select the one that best matches your requirements.

Keep reading to discover companies similar to Cloudflare.

Cloudflare Overview

Cloudflare identifies itself as a web infrastructure and security service that provides a highly available content delivery network and DDoS mitigation services. It essentially acts as a giant VPN or “reverse proxy” for websites with security features built into each layer, thereby speeding up your website and protecting it from security threats.

Your visitors will be physically redirected to the closest data server, where Cloudflare stores a cached version of the website, thereby improving its availability and performance.

The tool also allows website owners and sysadmins to control the type of traffic the website is receiving. It monitors and controls the incoming traffic for discrepancies pinpointed by the user that compromises the website or waste bandwidth and other server resources. As a result, it can mitigate and eliminate security threats like SQL injections, DDoS attacks, spamming, etc.

Cloudflare is unique in the sense that it is not a hosting provider. Once a website is up and running, owners can change the DNS settings to Cloudflare servers, thereby caching the website and improving the loading speed using their data centres.

It also supports the use of multiple plugins, which makes it exceptionally easy to use for new and experienced website owners alike. One of the most popularly used plugins with Cloudflare is Google Analytics which can be added without making any changes to the website backend to monitor site traffic and tracking.

The service is available in both free and paid plans, i.e., Pro, Business, and Enterprise. The free plan offers several notable features, like a broad range of security services, website statistics, shared SSL encryption, web application firewall, etc., albeit with a few caveats like limited site crawls and delayed activation periods and analytics updates.

Cloudflare recommends paid plans for professional websites that offer advanced security features and mobile optimisation.

How CDN speeds up site delivery

Users looking for Cloudflare alternatives need to understand how a content delivery network optimises site loading times and improves its security. Essentially, when using a service like Cloudflare, website owners are allowing the tool to create copies of the website that are cached in data centres spread across the globe.

The website is served to the visitors from the closest geographical location, which substantially lowers the loading times and improves the security of the page.

Cloudflare uses a proprietary service called Anycast, which is used to redirect visitors to the nearest data centre. On average, a CDN service can increase the loading times to up to twice as fast as average speeds. Moreover, Cloudflare automatically optimises site speeds for visitors on an IPv6 network even if the server environment still uses the older IPv4 infrastructure.

With this information out of the way, let’s take a look at some of the top Cloudflare competitors that are available for use in the market.

Top 10 Alternatives to Cloudflare

Please find below ten of the best alternatives to Cloudflare.

AWS CloudFront

Offered as part of the massive Amazon Web Services, CloudFront is a highly popular and extremely effective content delivery network that can deliver static, dynamic, or streaming content with high-speed, low latency performance.

With over 300 points of presence (PoPs) and 205+ edge locations around the world, AWS can substantially improve the loading times and download speeds. CloudFront is primarily preferred by streaming services as it allows them to start and play streams quickly and consistently to any device with the help of AWS Media Service and Elemental integrations.

Akamai

Akamai is one of the largest content delivery networks available in the market, serving between 15 to 30% of all web traffic. It offers a myriad of features and top-of-the-line security against online threats.

When a user visits the site using Akamai’s CDN, the browser is redirected by the DNS to a proximal edge server using sophisticated algorithms, which enables reliable and faster web downloads.

Akamai also offers a host of additional features, the most popular of which is the Kona Site Defender which allows organisations to offload their security monitoring and threat protection.

Imperva

Imperva is a popular cloud-based security platform that offers a host of features like DDoS protection, load balancing, and failover services. Its bot recognition service is one of the most sophisticated ones available in the market, which reduces the number of false positives in case of a layer 7 attack.

Imperva is a worthy Cloudflare alternative in terms of security, offering additional security layers for subnet network infrastructure and a fully-fledged scripting language.

Fastly

Founded in 2011, Fastly has become of the most popular cloud computing services providers in the market. It defines its network as an edge cloud platform that allows software developers and sysadmins to extend their core cloud infrastructure closer to the users.

Fastly offers a wide range of services like instant purging and configuration requests, real-time log streaming, analytics, mitigating traffic spikes, etc. Like CloudFront, Fastly is also highly suitable for content streaming and media delivery and real-time CDN.

Microsoft Azure CDN

If you are looking to deliver high-bandwidth content, Azure CDN is one of the most capable Cloudflare alternatives available in the market. Being a highly proficient delivery network, Azure CDN can easily cache static objects with the help of the closest point of presence, thereby accelerating dynamic content by leveraging multiple networks and efficient routing.

Azure is almost unmatched in its ability to handle instantaneous high loads, which allows users to host big events effortlessly.

Google Cloud CDN

Cloud CDN is a low latency, low-cost content delivery network that utilises Google’s globally distributed points of presence (PoPs) to cache external load balancing content closer to users. It supports multiple modern protocols that improve site performance for mobile users in emerging markets.

Cloud CDN offers greater connectivity thanks to edge caches being peered with every major end-user ISP in the world. Being a Google product, Cloud CDN is tightly integrated with Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging which enables additional functionality.

StackPath CDN

Founded in 2015, StackPath is one of the new yet highly available edge computing platform providers in the world powered by over 50 PoPs around the world. StackPath offers several key features like intelligent caching and cache control, which can be used to accelerate page loads, audio and video streams, API interactions, etc., significantly.

The Instant Purge feature removes every instant of the content from the CDN simultaneously, meaning it will no longer be served anywhere on the network.se

Sucuri CDN

Sucuri is a renowned website security, protection, and monitoring provider owned by the hosting service GoDaddy. It recognises itself as a platform-agnostic cloud services provider that protects the website against DDoS attacks, malicious traffic, and code injection irrespective of the backend or CMS frameworks.

Like several Cloudflare competitors, Sucuri allows its users to use custom SSL certificates, offers a load balancing service and Website Application Firewall, blocks SQL injections, etc.

CDN77

CDN77 is one of the most cost-effective CDN services on this list, offering its users a 70+ Tbps network with points of presence in 6 continents that can easily handle large volume traffic and unexpected surges.

Since it is built on advanced routing systems, CDN77 can easily match Cloudflare’s ability to handle large volumes of traffic by optimising network routing, along with real-time packet inspection and AI-based aberration detection technology. 

Netlify

Netlify is a highly renowned cloud computing company that offers serverless backends and hosting services for static websites and web apps. Netlify Edge is the global distribution platform for web apps that can make websites and applications up to 10 times faster.

This tool eliminates the need for CDN and private web servers, broken deploys, and maintenance windows by publishing the apps across every global edge location on the Netlify network.

Conclusion

Despite big names like Microsoft and Google jumping into the fray with their CDN services, Cloudflare has retained its position as one of the most popular CDN and security providers in the market.

For new webmasters and sysadmins, the list above should help you get some idea about the notable features necessary for maintaining the performance and security of their web deployments.

If you need more information about the use of Cloudflare alternatives for your next project, consider getting in touch with the experts at a leading app hosting company and talk to them about your requirements.

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