Likelihood to Recommend Akamai Ion is excellent if you have the staff to manage the configurations and understand how best to leverage its benefits amidst ongoing Dev work without getting in their way. You'll have to communicate consistently on what the CDN does and does not do as well as drive knowledge sharing sessions on expected behavior or unexpected behavior to help reduce unnecessary troubleshooting from your IT and Dev teams when tickets/issues arise. Akamai Ion is best suited for well equipped and well informed IT or Marketing teams that can leverage the delivery benefits of caching and offload. Doing so will increase customer satisfaction, reduce bounce rates, improve conversion rates as well as drive more time on site. Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Ease of management with good UI for making rules and behaviors. There is also an API and Code integration for the advanced Dev-Ops team to use as well. Read full review Registrar and DNS services are impeccable, with registrations done at cost and without ADs. DNS services setting standards for speed of resolution. DDOS protection. With their content distribution network to back them they have the bandwidth and tools to be both proactive and reactive to bad actors. WAF - Their Web Application Firewall helps mitigate common site vulnerabilities and has active zero-day protection running for breaking exploits Read full review Cons The learning curve on using a CDN is steep and requires class time. The initial onboarding and integration with the business' DevOps teams should be a bit closer relationship. Global vs. Regional management can be a bit challenging if your account is centralized overseas, and you want a local time-zone account manager on your time. Read full review In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy. Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions. While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies. Read full review Likelihood to Renew lower cost
Read full review Usability Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.
Read full review Reliability and Availability In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
Read full review Performance Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
Read full review Support Rating Support for tickets has gotten better/quicker over the years. Also, there is a wealth of information on the knowledge base, documentation, and there is also a message board too now. Read full review We really like to talk to a person on the phone or using chat. But the system is very slow and sending to much email to get the issue solve. Something we don't like to spend time writing on the community forum our issue because we don't want to share detail information of our POC.
Read full review Implementation Rating Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Firebase can be a good starter for basic projects but as I scaled up, I found it lacking the maturity Cloudflare has. Naturaly, I opted for Cloudflare for bigger projects. I still use
Firebase , but for small scale hobby projects only.
Read full review Scalability They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
Read full review Return on Investment Improved conversion rates. Reduced page load times. Read full review A lot of requests are cached and so egress costs from downstream providers are mitigated. DDoS protection has also managed to keep our site up and our cloud computing bill down. Setting up a proxy with a worker made putting various Google Cloud Functions running behind a single URL very easy and performant. Plus they offer API Shield on top of this. Read full review ScreenShots