Cloudflare vs. Kemp LoadMaster

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.

Incentivized

Loadmaster is very powerful and flexible load balancer. Variety of options allows to create a complex network of rules and routes. During our website rollout Loadmaster allowed us to run multiple generations of the website simultaneously and seamlessly by doing the content switching on the fly. Powerful API allows easy integration into any development lifecycle.

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

• Provisioning of Virtual Services to Real IP'ed internal systems.
• Detailed logging facilitating rapid and easy Root Cause Analysis of issues.
• Extensive Online community resources and excellent customer support for issues.
• Simple, effective and intuitive UI design.
• Effortless manual failover/failback and upgrading procedures.
• Provided meticulously detailed upgrade-in-place documentation for transitioning to new hardware
• Pursued Root Cause possibilities of unforeseen upgrade issue/misconfiguration scenarios

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

• Complexity. You really need. highly skilled IT team to manage this device. This is not a solution or appliance for SME's - medium or large enterprises only!
• Bugs, during 2015-2016 we suffered from a. number of bugs that caused downtime that would not have occurred without the Kemp LM. This is especially annoying given that it was purchased to reduce downtime! During 2017 stability improved.
• Costs. This is a high cost solution with high ongoing support fees. Not for those who are very cost conscious

Incentivized

CF is a core piece of our cloud infra.

Incentivized

I'm very pleased with the support I've received as well as the quality of the product.

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

Kemp makes it very easy to setup, configure and manage the LoadMaster without needing a lot of help from their engineers. The interface is very easy to understand and intuitive to use. We like how it is not complicated - I can easily have one of my techs login and they can figure out how to setup/configure virtual services for load balancing without needing a manual or tech support.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

They are built to be fast and deliver very well on this. Performance has never been a problem.

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

Support has been easy to deal with; I have only need[ed] to contact them a few times during setup. Once its been in place and operational, we have not need[ed] to mess with the system [which] is a huge advantage. I like system[s] that do not break and require constant attention in a production environment.

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

Incentivized

The installation was straight forward. Once i installed it, their technical support team helped me with configuration

Incentivized

Nothing like it. Organizations can utilize these Cloudflare products to enhance their online presence by improving security, performance, reliability, and developer efficiency. Cloudflare is an American company that delivers services such as DNS, a content delivery network (CDN), and various other additional services to make websites faster and more secure. Cloudflare is used by over 26 million sites, resulting in the processing of more than 1 billion IP addresses each day.

Incentivized

The Kemp LoadMaster outshined both of our other evaluated products, mainly in speed of setup, features available, and overall cost of ownership. In the case of the Azure LB it wasn't going to work well for our on Premise servers. The Barracuda was unreliable and difficult to bring online with our needed applications. With the ability to import pre-configured templates into the Kemp load balancer, we were able to have it running within the first day of ownership.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• We have seen reduced usage and downtimes after using Cloudflare for Caching. This has already yielded ROI as minimal downtime ensures consistent user traffic and increases revenue.
• It can handle significant traffic spikes and shields the website from DDOS attacks. We have prevented a number of DDOS attacks after using Cloudflare and hence we are already seeing an ROI by using it.
• Some of the integrations with Cloudflare are really painful and we have faced a lot of issues because of not having native integrations to certain 3rd party apps.

Incentivized

• We used Kemp LoadMaster for many projects. For a lot of customers, load balancers were too expensive or too complicated before we introduced Kemp products.
• It's not a overly complicated product, so we were able to train many engineers on it and have them get a certification.

Incentivized