Cloudflare One (SASE) vs. NGINX

I wanted to securely connect to my servers without getting tracked by malicious attackers, even though I was on public Wi-Fi. Security was my top priority, and I also wanted a setup that was easy and quick to start and provided great network performance. Cloudflare's Zero trust matches my criteria for becoming my first choice.

Incentivized

Nginx is well-suited for any web server scenarios, such as web applications, backend or reverse proxy for both application and HTTP requests, and distribution. It is less appropriate for Windows-based applications that run directly on a Windows Server host. In any case, it is very easy to manage, through separate conf files for each application or site you want to host with it.

Incentivized

• Block access to known bad, risky, or unwanted destinations at the DNS or HTTP level.
• Excellent protection for remote users.
• Best in class browser isolation techniques.

Incentivized

• Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
• Great at serving static content.
• Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
• Open-Source (no cost)!

Incentivized

• Cloudflare still need to improve CASB direction to complete set of SASE tools.
• More integrations with the third-party agents to check device posture in the Zero Trust framework.
• More granularity in firewall rules for full replacement of on-premise solutions.

Incentivized

• Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
• I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
• It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
• It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
• I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.

Great value for the product

Incentivized

Within a few hours, new engineers are trained in basic tasks and are quite happy they are able to resolve issues independently. After SSO is configured, onboarding is as simple as signing into m365 via a web browser popup.

Incentivized

This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers

Incentivized

Good chat support from the portal for basic questions and minor issues. The enterprise support line is provided as well.

Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.

Incentivized

Cloudflare was both the most feature-rich and cost-effective of comparisons. Presales engagement understood our challenges and was keen to solve them.

Incentivized

I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives

Incentivized

• The cost of Cloudflare Zero trust is much lower, hence reducing spending on infrastructure security.
• The Network performance is improved thanks to Warp protocol.
• Requires less maintenance and hence saves time.

Incentivized

• By using Nginx, we can host multiple web services on a single server, keeping our infrastructure costs lower.
• Nginx maintains our HTTPS connections, allowing us to keep our promise to our customers that their data is safe in transit.
• Due to Nginx's extremely low failure rate, our web addresses always return something meaningful, even when individual services go down. In sense, this means we are "always online" and allows us to maintain brand and support our customers even in the face of catastrophe.

Incentivized