Azure API Management vs. Cloudflare

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure API Management
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's Azure API Management supports creation of API.
$0.04
per 10,000 calls
Cloudflare
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.
$20
per month
Pricing
Azure API ManagementCloudflare
Editions & Modules
Consumption
0.042 per 10,000 calls
Lightweight and serverless version of API Management service, billed per execution
Developer
$48.04
per month Non-production use cases and evaluations
Basic
$147.17
per month Entry-level production use cases
Standard
$686.72
per month Medium-volume production use cases
Premium
$2,795.17
per month High-volume or enterprise production use cases
Isolated
TBA
per month Enterprise production use cases requiring high degree of isolation
Pro
$20
per month
Business
$200
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure API ManagementCloudflare
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure API ManagementCloudflare
Considered Both Products
Azure API Management

No answer on this topic

Cloudflare
Chose Cloudflare
While evaluating, I found Cloudflare to be more affordable and easier to use than Imperva CDN and offered more features, such as free SSL certificates, DDoS protection, and a content delivery network (CDN). As compared to Imperva CDN, Cloudflare offered the most complete set of …
Features
Azure API ManagementCloudflare
API Management
Comparison of API Management features of Product A and Product B
Azure API Management
8.0
4 Ratings
5% below category average
Cloudflare
-
Ratings
API access control8.94 Ratings00 Ratings
Rate limits and usage policies5.44 Ratings00 Ratings
API usage data8.94 Ratings00 Ratings
API user onboarding9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
API versioning8.94 Ratings00 Ratings
Usage billing and payments5.23 Ratings00 Ratings
API monitoring and logging9.84 Ratings00 Ratings
DDoS Protection
Comparison of DDoS Protection features of Product A and Product B
Azure API Management
-
Ratings
Cloudflare
8.4
4 Ratings
4% below category average
Automatic Scalability00 Ratings9.45 Ratings
Mitigation SLA00 Ratings9.05 Ratings
Security policy management00 Ratings8.65 Ratings
WAF capabilities00 Ratings8.45 Ratings
Request rate limiting00 Ratings7.65 Ratings
Traffic filtering00 Ratings7.35 Ratings
Bot detection00 Ratings8.25 Ratings
Global threat intelligence00 Ratings9.05 Ratings
Real-time analytics and reporting00 Ratings7.85 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure API ManagementCloudflare
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Workato
Workato
Score 9.3 out of 10
IBM Cloud Internet Services
IBM Cloud Internet Services
Score 9.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Workato
Workato
Score 9.3 out of 10
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure API ManagementCloudflare
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(4 ratings)
9.1
(190 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(4 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(8 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
6.5
(152 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(2 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure API ManagementCloudflare
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
APIM is useful for the standard scenarios:
1) Securing your back-end APIs - If you have a legacy back-end web service that has a basic authentication scheme, you can add some additional security by placing APIM in front, and requiring subscription keys. Leverage your existing firewall to ensure only your APIM instance can communicate with your back-end API, and you've basically added a layer of protection.
2) Lift and shift - there are always going to be clients that don't want to update their clients to use a newer API; in some cases you can make a newer API look like an older one by implementing some complex policies in APIM. You can also do the opposite, making older APIs look new, such as making an XML back-end accept both JSON and XML.
3) Centralizing your APIs - if you've acquired another company and want to make their API set look as if it's a part of the larger whole, APIM is an easy way to provide a consistent front-end interface for developers.
Read full review
Cloudflare
Cloudflare has features as a CDN/Gateway/Reverse Proxy that simply don't exist in other solutions. Having so many capabilities under a single platform, with solid support and high uptime, has been essential. I would recommend it for hobby projects all the way to enterprise scale. There's a lot of push around AI and workers. Some feel like Cloudflare is following the hype. But after reading a lot about the new features, a decent amount of them has real value.
Read full review
Pros
Microsoft
  • Easy commissioning of APIs.
  • Great policies to control access.
  • Easy mock services for testing.
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
  • Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
  • One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • Lack of robustness is a bit of an issue. Several other providers offer more options and capabilities, but then, they are lacking in interface ease.
  • As with anything Azure, pricing is really hard to stay on top of. I always find that you really don’t know what you’re paying for until you get the bill. Having an excellent Azure Administrator can help resolve that.
  • Integrating with app services outside of Azure can be a challenge, or at least much more challenging than just using Azure App Services.
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
lower cost
Read full review
Usability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
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
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
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
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
Read full review
Support Rating
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
While I have had good support in the past from Cloudflare's technical support team, I have had some terrible experiences with billing support. I have had multiple tickets sent to their billing support that I will never receive a reply to for over a month. When I finally do get a reply, it has been an automated email that never gives me an answer to my question.
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Implementation Rating
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Azure APIM vs Amazon API Gateway:
1) Azure APIM was a complete package that included a developer portal.
2) We are very Microsoft centric - so the Microsoft product suite aligned very well with our business needs.
3) It was faster and easier to stand up Azure APIM for testing than it was for the Amazon API Gateway.
Read full review
Cloudflare
Nothing like it. Organizations can utilize these Cloudflare products to enhance their online presence by improving security, performance, reliability, and developer efficiency. Cloudflare is an American company that delivers services such as DNS, a content delivery network (CDN), and various other additional services to make websites faster and more secure. Cloudflare is used by over 26 million sites, resulting in the processing of more than 1 billion IP addresses each day.
Read full review
Scalability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
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
Microsoft
  • We can always think of positive ROI impact on business
  • It helps to easily facilitate the design, deployment, and maintenance of our APIs
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
  • WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
  • CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
  • DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.
Read full review
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