Cloudflare vs. Cloudways

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 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
Cloudways
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Cloudways, by DigitalOcean, offers a range of managed hosting solutions, including managed Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and others, with a choice of infrastructure providers and media delivery via CloudwaysVPN, and CloudwaysBot notification system.
$10
per month
Pricing
CloudflareCloudways
Editions & Modules
Pro
$20
per month
Business
$200
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Starting Price
$10.00
per month
Maximum Price
$274.33
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CloudflareCloudways
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup fee$25 per application
Additional DetailsCloudways offers 1 free migration to all customers. For any further migration needs the customer can use our free WordPress migration plugin and do it themselves. Or they can request paid migration services for any PHP based application, which start at $25 per application.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CloudflareCloudways
Considered Both Products
Cloudflare
Chose Cloudflare
Eventually, we found out that Cloudflare and Cloudways had different feature sets for web dev and we ended up using both.
Cloudways
Chose Cloudways
DigitalOcean: harder to set up, hands-on maintenance and controll, but needs work-hours of a linux expert.

GoDaddy: absolutely worst of all providers, charges stupid people money for nothing-services. Horrible products in my opinion.
Best Alternatives
CloudflareCloudways
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Flywheel
Flywheel
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Internet Services
IBM Cloud Internet Services
Score 9.0 out of 10
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 7.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.5 out of 10
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CloudflareCloudways
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(184 ratings)
9.4
(6 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.6
(8 ratings)
8.4
(2 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.8
(149 ratings)
9.7
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CloudflareCloudways
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudflare
Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.
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DigitalOcean
When you dont know how to set up a cloud server technically, (The LAMP stack or the PHP settings etc) Cloudways comes handy. You can easily modify the server settings with one click.
Less Appropriate - If you want to save costs, go for direct cloud providers. Setting up technical stuff is a one time job.
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Pros
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.
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DigitalOcean
  • Automatic Daily One Click Restore Backups
  • Integrated CDN
  • Easy & Intuitive Alternate Interface to cPanel and WHM
  • Very Affordable for High Specs
  • 24/7 Customer Support is Extremely Helpful
  • Serve & Application Management is a Breeze
  • Choose from Multiple Server Locations
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Cons
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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DigitalOcean
  • Their free alternative to WP Rocket could be made more user-friendly and easier to understand
  • Create a function to automatically report heavy usage to specific email IDs
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Likelihood to Renew
Cloudflare
lower cost
Read full review
DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Usability
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.
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DigitalOcean
They are constantly improving their dashboards and interface to make it easier to use and find the things that we use the most. It's a lot of features to pack in to one UI and they have done a great job of making it user friendly. Their layout is intuitive and easy to learn and is extremely granular. We are able to control every aspect of our websites and applications from an individual level from scaling, to cache, to DNS, security, WAF, and everything in between.
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Reliability and Availability
Cloudflare
In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Performance
Cloudflare
Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Cloudflare
Excellent product, Cloudflare is a true pioneer of the modern Internet, providing tools, services, and expertise that vastly improve the performance and security of web services. Any issues are resolved quickly with detailed RCA and follow-ups published publicly. I'm thankful to Cloudflare and use their services both at work and at home.
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DigitalOcean
Technical support is just 2-3 clicks away and the Cloudways homepage and the operators are available almost 24/7. They also are able to answer any kind of question related to their services, whether economical or technical. I sometimes made mistakes while using their services and they have been keen to help me, and fixed my problems really fast.
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Implementation Rating
Cloudflare
Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Cloudflare
They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.
They have very good reputation.
They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.
Read full review
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean: harder to set up, hands-on maintenance and controll, but needs work-hours of a linux expert. GoDaddy: absolutely worst of all providers, charges stupid people money for nothing-services. Horrible products in my opinion. HostGator: okay-ish hosting, nowhere to the power of Cloudways, the customer support also is much less knowledgeable. I would advise against all managed hostings. Go managed-cloud instead.
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Scalability
Cloudflare
They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
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DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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.
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DigitalOcean
  • We were able to reduce load on our main server.
  • By migrating social sentiment platform to cloudways, we were able to scale and run it effeciently.
  • It saved lot of time as well in terms of server management.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Cloudways Screenshots

Screenshot of Managed ServicesScreenshot of Team Management