Cloudflare vs. Imperva CDN

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

I recommend it as a WAF, but not as a CDN. There are better CDNs, in my case I use transparentCDN (now www.transparentedge.eu) and Edgecast (now Verizon CDN).

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

• Reliability / Uptime
• Security

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

• CDN functionalities are secondary and cannot be compared to a top-level CDN.
• The WebGUI interface of the dashboard is very improvable. They have been changing the UX for years and it is disjointed and with services that have not yet been migrated.
• The analysis of WAF attack logs is insufficient. It is difficult to analyze attacks of past hours, event filters are missing. It is complicated to analyze the chronology of an attack.
• There are extra modules to improve the attack logs analysis but they are expensive and add little.

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

Also TransparentCDN (now www.transparentedge.eu ) and Level 3

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.

• It's an expensive product if you have a lot of traffic volume, but I feel confident with their WAF.

Incentivized