Cloudflare vs. ImageKit.io

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

E-Commerce is a perfect example where a service like ImageKit.io, is well suited. It takes a lot of the guesswork related to browser image format support, correct image dimensions for every kind of device, away from the developer. Thus reducing the need for maintaining code ourselves to check for and deliver an image for every user and his specific browser. This reduces code maintenance time in the long run and less custom code will ensure stability after integration for our online store running on OpenCart 3.

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

• Automatically convert images for fast delivery based on browser support and network quality.
• Well-documented integration documentation that is easy to follow when getting started with your implementation.
• Easy to navigate user dashboard for setup and management of server origins and account settings. The usage analytics page is also handy to track and fix any 404 errors there might be for an image/s.

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

• The Usage Analytics page could be laid out a little better and include filtering options, options may include path, country, IP Address, etc.
• The ability to add an additional user to the starter plan would be great to illustrate the possibility to new customers.
• The API Reference guide could include some more section-specific code examples for each of the supported technology stacks.

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

I have only used their support a few times, and most times, they are responsive and able to resolve my issue with a minimal amount of time and effort. However, there was one instance where I simply asked about how to purchase some more resources (redirect rules), and I received some type of automated/AI response that was very unhelpful and gave me no opportunity to escalate to a person.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The main consideration for our choice was to be able to optimize and deliver the images from the server they are stored on without needing to move or change the current product upload workflow for our Marketing team. This is where ImageKit.io provided the best solution at the time we evaluated the options available in the market.

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.

• Our code has become easier to maintain, we no longer need to let the backend generate thumbnails
• Our site speed up significantly, which boosted our SEO ranking
• We had a similar solution built in-house on AWS lambda, but we no longer have the headache to maintain this solution ourselves.

Incentivized