Cloudflare vs. Lightspeed Filter

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

Lightspeed web filtering using the Chromebook Relay agent is amazing and does a great job for a cloud filtering solution. The reports that are available are great and can be customized and retains data for 90 days. Reports are easily shared with staff and/or parents for transparency and disciplinary reasons. The agent for Lightspeed (Relay) does not work well with OSX and works okay in Windows, but doesn't allow you to access local IP addresses in the web browser. There needs to be a way to bypass filtering for local network access. This can make it unusable in some cases.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Reduces bandwidth consumption.
• Improves network performance.
• It is compatible with a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.
• It can be implemented in both wired and wireless networks.
• It can be installed in minutes and you can configure its settings with a few clicks.
• Learning environments work.

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

• It sometimes takes longer than expected for new filtering rules to apply.
• Sometimes a site is blocked due to sub-sites or links, but it does not easily identify the source of the block if it is buried in the site.
• They have several reports included, but it would be nice to create custom reports.

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

It is unreliable and does not function as it is supposed to do so. As previously mentioned, there is a glitch when creating a block list.

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

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.

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

We were already a [Lightspeed] customer so the transition was seamless to Relay. Their support and team at [Lightspeed] are top-notch. We have been with Lightspeed for over 20 years and have evaluated on occasions other options and [ended] up back with [Lightspeed] each time. Their price point, ease of use, great team of engineers, and overall customer focus keep them on top in my eyes.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Very costly per year
• Does a great job with 1:1 filtering on Chromebooks
• Safety Check checks student for possible self harm and alerts staff

Incentivized