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Cloudflare

Score8.9 out of 10

568 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud is a unified platform of cloud-native services designed to help enterprises regain control over their IT environments. Powered by an intelligent, programmable global cloud network, it is built to offer security, performance, visibility, and reliability.

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Categories & Use Cases

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Cloudflare Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Cloudflare has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 568 ratings of Cloudflare's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Automatic Scalability

    Scales infrastructure up and down as needed to handle incoming requests to prevent outages during a DDoS attack.

    Category average: 9.4

  • Mitigation SLA

    The speed at which the tool starts mitigating a DDoS attack.

    Category average: 8.8

  • Global threat intelligence

    Uses threat intelligence data to block known attack patterns or malicious IPs.

    Category average: 8.8

Areas for Improvement

  • Request rate limiting

    Ability to restrict the number of requests per source to slow down or prevent attackers from overwhelming the system.

    Category average: 7.8

  • Real-time analytics and reporting

    Provides up-to-date network performance reporting and dashboards, allowing organizations to monitor potential attacks in real-time.

    Category average: 7.8

  • Traffic filtering

    Identifying and blocking malicious traffic without impacting legitimate traffic.

    Category average: 7.6

Who Buys & Uses Cloudflare

Cloudflare Reviews

What users are saying about Cloudflare.
View all Cloudflare reviews

Pros

  • Robust DNS management and control
  • Comprehensive security features, including DDoS protection and WAF
  • Significant cost reduction compared to alternative services

Cons

  • Unintuitive user interface and navigation complexity
  • Overwhelming configuration due to extensive features
  • Limited or unclear reporting and logging capabilities

Cloudflare is a gift to the internet. Will its success endanger it?

Incentivized
Lucas HiltyView profile
Project Manager at Faith Builders Educational Programs (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cloudflare to handle most of our sites, from domain names to DNS records. We also subscribe to limited paid services from Cloudflare (WAF).
Cloudflare's CDN services most of our sites and allows us to take action when we're under threat. Cloudflare page rules are a first line of action for such things as 301 and 302 redirects.

Pros

  • DNS records
  • Domain name purchasing
  • Internet security

Cons

  • The range of tools on the platform is bewildering.
  • I wish billing were a little more polished and less noisy.
  • The value of various settings isn't always clear.
  • Cloudflare analytics are very raw and so helpful only on a basic level.

Return on Investment

  • Cloudflare has saved us a lot in fees for all it's tools.
  • Cloudflare gives us confidence in the security of our sites.
  • Cloudflare gives us an easy way to change DNS records when needed.

Alternatives Considered

Namecheap, Bluehost and Amazon CloudFront

Other Software Used

Cloudways, Notion, Lovable

Cloudflare is a complete security and scaling suite.

Incentivized
Luiz Eduardo GarciaView profile
System Administrator in Information Technology at JET e-business (51-200 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cloudflare is used in my organization in many use cases. The main use is as a name server for a production domain, with several subdomains as CNAME records, for static content of our applications, and also using the cache and image transformation features. Other uses are e-mail forwarding, IP Geolocation, SSL certificates, security rules, URL rewrites, and page rules. We started using Cloudflare to cache static content, moving away from another CDN provider. The results were better than expected, and we are continuing to explore and use other Cloudflare products.

Pros

  • Image transformation.
  • AI Crawl monitor and overview.
  • Security layer.
  • DNS hosting.
  • Content Delivery Network.

Cons

  • Workers - feature hard to use.
  • Billing granularity.
  • Stack trace for debug.

Return on Investment

  • Positive: unlimited subdomains.
  • Positive: image transformation.
  • Positive: network offload.
  • Positive: security stack.
  • Positive: most features are very affordable.
  • Negative: do not allow name forwarding.

Alternatives Considered

Azion, Amazon CloudFront and Akamai CDN

Other Software Used

Azion, IPgeolocation.io, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Cloudflare Features Review.

Incentivized
Shubhdeep SinghView profile
Strategic Sourcing Manager in Corporate at Mackenzie Financial Corporation (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cloudflare to protect against DDoS attacks and govern access to SaaS and Cloud apps.

Pros

  • Prevent DDoS attacks.
  • Web Application Firewall (WAF).
  • Provides Network-Layer Protection.
  • Detects and blocks harmful bots.
  • Zero Trust Access Controls.

Cons

  • Application & API Security.
  • SaaS Apps - provide more advanced protection features.
  • Cloud Security.

Return on Investment

  • Reduction in DDoS attacks.
  • Preventing Bot attacks.
  • Faster load times.

Alternatives Considered

Cloudflare API Shield, Cloudflare Bot Management and Cloudflare Access

Other Software Used

Akamai API Gateway, Fortinet Security Fabric, Google Cloud AI

Good security and Performance in one platform

Incentivized
Leela Sai Krishna BayyanaView profile
DevOps Engineer in Information Technology at FastPix (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cloudflare mainly for our DNS management , CDN , we also use this for caching, WAF, WARP and also for security , we use Cloudflare's DDoS Protection and also for traffic and performance monitoring, Cloudflare solves us the problems of protecting internet facing traffic and also controlling unwanted traffic simplifying the DNS management . We use this across all our environments and all our domains.

Pros

  • Cloudflare is really helpful in protecting our internet facing applications by filtering the traffic and also gives us control over the WAF rules without we build the protection ourselves.
  • Also i would say DNS management, having all the DNS , TLS and SSL security controls having in a single platform makes it easier for managing so many domains in one place.
  • CDN and caching, I would say these helped improving the performance of our services that receive traffic from different locations, also reducing the amount of traffic that reaches our servers.

Cons

  • Some settings are there across different sections , so to find a specific configuration or to find an issue ,it takes a bit time , also the UI changes they make frequently makes users like us to take more time to find the things we often use.
  • They have a lot of options which are powerful, but i felt few features are difficult to understand initially . Clear explanations would help beginners to understand things quicker.
  • While we are troubleshooting production traffic, like when traffic is blocked or a rule behaves differently, it would be helpful for us if they which rule is exactly reason for the issue and what is the reason.

Return on Investment

  • Time and efficiency , it reduced our time and our efficiency has increased.
  • Security Impact, Un wanted or malicious traffic will be blocked
  • Cost, scalability , it is handeling different things like CDN security DNS , i would say cost effective.

Alternatives Considered

AWS WAF, Akamai CDN, Akamai API Gateway and Fastly DDoS Protection

Other Software Used

Microsoft Teams, Azure DevOps, Grafana Cloud

Simple to use for managing personal domains

Incentivized
Dinesh AdithanView profile
Director of SW Engg in Information Technology at Cordizer (1-10 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cloudflare is used for content distribution, improving page load times for our web application users, enforcing secure http protocols, protection against DNS spoofing using its network of edge servers. It reduces latency by ensuring users receive content from the nearest geographic server, improving load times, serving cached content and improving the overall user experience.

Pros

  • Content delivery network
  • Caching
  • Enforcing secure http protocols
  • Serving content from its edge servers closest to users

Cons

  • Speed of cache purges and reseeding content
  • More locations to serve content

Return on Investment

  • Simple
  • Automatic
  • Cost effective

Alternatives Considered

Amazon CloudFront and Akamai CDN

Other Software Used

Sophos Managed Detection and Response

Cloudflare Alternatives

Products similar to Cloudflare that may also meet your needs.
View all Cloudflare alternatives
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