Cloudflare vs. Cloudflare Zero Trust Services

Based on my experience, Cloudflare is well-suited for high-traffic websites and probably e-commerce platforms. Cloudflare can mitigate the risk of attacks on these websites using WAF and DNS protection mechanisms and provide cached content to the end-users quickly. The websites where it is not suitable are those that need high security and compliance requirements as Cloudflare might not meet all those criteria.

Incentivized

For example, Cloudflare is a very good solution for ZTNA implementation. Cloudflare has Warp for propagating Gateway rules and checking device posture. Browser Isolation gives you more abilities to use internet resources without any restrictions and at the same time not put the company at risk. For example, if there is no DLP solution in place blocking the printing function can partly protect the company's sensitive data from intentional or intentional leakage through the online forms. A similar approach protects the end-user device from Zero-day threats and malicious software code. Moreover, Remote Browser Isolation technology protects not only the user's device but also the user himself from possible phishing attacks - for example, even if the user enters his username and password on the phishing website, bank card issuers, or other personal or confidential data, data will not go beyond the isolated cloud environment. Cloudflare Access gives company administrators a great opportunity to implement role-based access policies and make effect segmentation and diversification of company network groups.

Incentivized

• 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

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• Very API [oriented] which is fine, but the GUI is sometimes inconsistent

Incentivized

lower cost

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.

Incentivized

Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.

Incentivized

Because of the lack of no live chat for non-paid customers. Sometimes I need urgent help on the Cloudflare engineering team. That is to solve an issue on their Cloudflare platform. The FAQ and the Cloudflare community forum take to much time to find the answer, and setup it manually up.

Incentivized

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

Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

As long as all Cloudflare products and services rely on anycast technology, in a complex approach Cloudflare is faster and more relevant for cloud applications. The balance between security and performance is fully established. Also, Cloudflare has quite a good stack for API connection protection, like the API Shield example, which makes it more effective compared to F5 for example. Warp as a ZTNA agent gives better visibility and device posture information than FortiClient does.

Incentivized

They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Complete solution in case of using with Cloudflare Access.
• No need of maintenance.
• No skilled staff and trainings required.

Incentivized