Cloudflare vs. Microsoft IIS

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, provides DDoS and bot mitigation security for business domains, as well as a content delivery network (CDN) and web application firewall (WAF).
$20
per month
Microsoft IIS
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft IIS is an application server and infrastructure.N/A
Pricing
CloudflareMicrosoft IIS
Editions & Modules
Pro
$20
per month
Business
$200
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CloudflareMicrosoft IIS
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
Features
CloudflareMicrosoft IIS
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Cloudflare
-
Ratings
Microsoft IIS
7.5
28 Ratings
5% below category average
IDE support00 Ratings8.020 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings7.028 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.028 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings8.028 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.028 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings5.017 Ratings
Best Alternatives
CloudflareMicrosoft IIS
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
BIG-IP
BIG-IP
Score 9.1 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
BIG-IP
BIG-IP
Score 9.1 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CloudflareMicrosoft IIS
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(169 ratings)
9.0
(28 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.5
(4 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(8 ratings)
10.0
(9 ratings)
Availability
9.3
(2 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.3
(2 ratings)
7.8
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(138 ratings)
9.4
(6 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.6
(2 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.3
(2 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CloudflareMicrosoft IIS
Likelihood to Recommend
Cloudflare
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.
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Microsoft
Publishing applications or websites is easy with Microsoft IIS. You don't need external software or complicated tutorials involving command lines and editing configuration files. On other hand, sometimes the troubleshooter needs a high knowledge of Windows Server, Registry, and tools to debug the application. If you need to host non-Microsoft technology as PHP pages or have a low budget, I recommend IIS equivalent software as Apache.
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Pros
Cloudflare
  • 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
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Microsoft
  • A big advantage that we use all the time is reviewing the logs that automatically get generated in IIS. It has helped us troubleshoot various problems in our applications over the years.
  • IIS integrates really well with Visual Studio and TFS. We are able to quickly deploy new applications and changes to applications when requested by the business.
  • IIS has proven that it is easy to configure and maintain with minimal effort.
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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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Microsoft
  • Angular/node apps don't run on IIS, or at least we never figured out how. Rather we ended up using nginx.
  • There are still occasional memory leaks - check your recycle settings!
  • If you have very heavy usage for web APIs, IIS requires regular restarts for reasons unknown.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cloudflare
lower cost
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Microsoft
We have no intention to replace all applications running on top of the IIS platform. Not all applications support other platforms and not all support staff are skilled in Linux/Apache platform support. Whereas IIS may not be the best performing or most secure web platform available, for the aforementioned reasons, it is impossible not to continue use of this product.
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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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Microsoft
As I've mentioned earlier, Microsoft IIS is very simple and easy to use. The user interface is a little bit overloaded with a huge number of different options, but once you have a little clue of what you are doing and what you need - no issues at all.
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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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Microsoft
ARR (application request routing) in Microsoft IIS Server enables the web-admins to increase the web app reliability and availability through the rule based routing and load balancing of HTTP requests which in turn provides highly available server. IIS 7.0 Manager also provides kernel as well as user mode caching for faster performance and in case if the server fails, the IIS server has good amount of details logged in its log files which help understand and debug the cause quickly. Load balancing facilitates IIS server to fight against availability issues.
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Performance
Cloudflare
Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
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Microsoft
In my experience, I have never had significant issues with IIS performance. Sometimes I've experienced issues with loading time, but it is mostly related to the web site code. However Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing free cloud services with very limited resources, and in that scenario, "heavy" websites on IIS could be the issue. In other situations - performance is good.
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Support Rating
Cloudflare
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.
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Microsoft
As mentioned earlier there is so much documentation or guides or stack overflow questions out there that someone will have faced the same or very similar scenario to what you are going through that you will almost certainly find a solution to what you are after.
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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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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Cloudflare
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.
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Microsoft
Apache is java. Java is unnecessary complex. No developer wants to invest in learning all the hundreds of text based configuration files to get something done. Also, apache gives you the most evil and un-usable user interface possible. [Microsoft] IIS makes [life] after development easy, which is already complex enough to be bothered by something as mundane as exposing your work over the internet.
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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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Microsoft
Microsoft IIS Server is scalable if the underlying server configuration is done correctly. Use x64 edition v/s 32bit and using 32bit mode application pools are some of the tweaks to be done to make the IIS server scalable. There are too many small configurations need to be carried out in order to make a highly scalable IIS server hence not giving full score in this area.
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Return on Investment
Cloudflare
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • Allowing us to internally host our monitoring websites allows quick access to data that can be quite hidden, saving developer time.
  • It was inexpensive compared to more bulky solutions saving upfront cost.
  • It’s easy to install and enable allowing more developer savings.
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ScreenShots