Cloudflare vs. Fastly Edge Cloud Platform

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.

Incentivized

The service is really well-suited for pretty much any site that is primarily display-driven (that is, mostly GET requests). The network is able to handle massive volumes of traffic and their POPs have spread out pretty much anywhere that it's easy to get them (so basically everywhere but China and Russia). My team witnessed several large-scale attack attempts on some high-profile websites (attacks in the 10s of millions of requests per second) that were mitigated before ever coming back to the actual application; in one case we didn't realize the attack had happened until we looked at the logs the next day. Because it's a cache store option, the default configuration does not cache POST responses, and it can be difficult to set up things like authenticated paywalls as a result.

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

• Very performant and fast -- major companies have drastically reduced page load times with Fastly's edge technology.
• Support for many types of media, including video.
• Image add-on makes serving and manipulating images very simple.

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

• WAF is hard to configure.
• No comprehensive rate limiting without a pricey upgrade.
• Account access controls are extremely limited.

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

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.

Incentivized

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

It’s the fastest and most configurable.

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.

• Fastly dramatically reduces load times for clients all over the world thanks to their global system of POPs.
• Fastly is a cost-effective choice when a highly-performant CDN is required and makes it simple to support data that is quickly invalidated.

Incentivized