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A quick review of Cloudflare from the perspective of a SaaS startup!
December 16, 2022

A quick review of Cloudflare from the perspective of a SaaS startup!

Cetin Sert | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cloudflare

At Elefunc, we use Cloudflare Workers to save our web playground code and serve its output to end users. Users can also implement their own User Workers which we dispatch to from our service worker inside the playground and the WfP Dispatch Worker when hosted via Cloudflare Workers.
  • Hassle-free global distribution of workers and integration with additional services such as KV.
  • Easy-to-use WAF.
  • Super simple custom hostnames for SaaS.
  • Email Workers (waiting for it since it was announced when we requested access)
  • Faster KV updates after writing to a key.
  • Improved R2 performance and new/additional distributed storage options.
  • Saved engineering time.
  • Saved planning time due to ease of use and not having to deal with explicit service regions.
  • Simplified pricing (Cloudflare to us and thus, us to our customers).
  • AWS
    • EC2: Cloudflare does not have a comparable product.
    • Cloudfront is up to 2x faster than Cloudflare caching!
    • Lambda: Cloudflare Workers is incredibly easier to use.
      We mostly use Quick Edit from the CF dashboard.
  • Scaleway is part of the Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance and offers unmetered egress from its VMs.
We applied to Cloudflare Startup program, as well as, Workers Launchpad. We got accepted to the Cloudflare Startup program, which enabled us to use Enterprise features in our effective-TLD .rt.ht (real-time hypertext). We use subdomains under .rt.ht to host user-generated content via Workers + KV and Workers for Platforms. Custom hostnames CNAME-ing to edge.rt.ht get to enjoy the same Enterprise traffic prioritization benefits. You can see everything we have mentioned so far in action at this link: https://workers.elefunc.com
After onboarding into the Cloudflare Startup program, the first few pieces of correspondences were answered with great promptness but this stopped around the time of the Developer Week 2002. A support ticket we opened for enabling Cloudflare Queues was only positively answered after 18 days. Cloudflare discord channels have been great for discussing things with Cloudflare project leads and other developers.

Do you think Cloudflare delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cloudflare's feature set?

Yes

Did Cloudflare live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cloudflare go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cloudflare again?

Yes

Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Scaleway
Cloudflare combined with WAF, Rules and Workers offer the fastest platform to deliver a product to market. The globally distributed nature of the Cloudflare network offers best-in-class speeds for our users when they connect to our services. The fact that one does not need to care about individual regions, as one would have to with traditional platforms, such as AWS, is also incredibly convenient and saves Cloudflare users lots of time and planning. Everything we build is globally available with lowest latencies and we don't have to juggle between regions and complicated consoles.

Evaluating Cloudflare and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
The fact that all settings apply without delay globally (without having to mess with orchestration across multiple explicit regions as one would have to do with other cloud offerings, such as, AWS, OCI, Azure) and new products work reliably even from early closed beta times ensured we can build on Cloudflare and encourage other companies we interact/work with to do the same. We have introduced Cloudflare to several other companies after they added Mailchannels transactional emails support via Cloudflare workers.
There would not be any changes. We strongly believe we have tested all big players in the field: AWS, OCI, Azure, Google Cloud, as well as, several smaller ones, such as, Linode and Scaleway.

Using Cloudflare

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • WAF
  • Workers
  • Rules
  • None
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.