Cloudflare

Cloudflare sells a network that sits in front of a website and answers visitors from servers close to them. The CDN part stores copies of images, scripts and pages in data centres in more than 330 cities, according to the vendor, so fewer requests travel back to your own server. The same proxy carries DNS, TLS certificates, DDoS mitigation, a web application firewall and bot controls, which is why many site owners treat it as a single front door rather than a pure CDN.

Plans run from Free through Pro and Business to Enterprise, and the same company also sells a developer platform (Workers, R2, D1), zero trust products and network services. The problem it addresses is a slow or exposed origin: a small site gets caching and attack filtering without running its own infrastructure, while a large site gets rules, analytics and contractual uptime terms.

• Cache Rules and Tiered Cache. Cache Rules decide which resources are stored and for how long, down to individual page level on paid plans. Tiered Cache adds upper-layer data centres so fewer requests reach the origin. Both are described in the vendor's cache documentation, available on every plan.
• Cache Reserve and instant purge. Cache Reserve keeps content in persistent storage to extend cache times, and purge removes specific files or everything on demand. The vendor's example is Docker Hub, which says it lifted its hit ratio from 97% to above 99% by combining Tiered Caching with Cache Reserve.
• DDoS protection. Mitigation of distributed attacks is part of the proxy on every plan, including Free, and the vendor calls it unmetered. Rate limiting is a separate product priced on total HTTP traffic.
• WAF and bot tools. Pro lists Super Bot Fight Mode, the OWASP Core ruleset, the Cloudflare Managed ruleset, an exposed credentials check and 20 custom WAF rules. Business adds client-side security to detect malicious third-party scripts.
• DNS with several setup modes. Full setup makes Cloudflare your primary DNS. A CNAME (partial) setup keeps your current provider and only proxies chosen hostnames, and secondary zone transfers are also documented. The partial setup is limited to Business and Enterprise plans.
• Argo Smart Routing and Load Balancing. Argo Smart Routing sends traffic along less congested paths, and the vendor claims about a 30% web performance gain. Load Balancing spreads requests over healthy servers with health checks and failover. Both are add-ons, each starting at $5 per month.
• Business-plan extras. The Business page lists image optimization with Polish and Mirage, the WordPress Automatic Platform Optimization plugin, cache analytics, Enhanced HTTP/2 Prioritization, custom certificates, a 100% uptime SLA and chat plus ticket support.

• A personal blog on shared hosting. The owner points the domain's nameservers at Cloudflare on the Free plan, gets caching, a certificate and attack filtering, and keeps the origin server hidden behind the proxy. Setup takes a few steps in the dashboard.
• An online shop with sales every month. The vendor's own guidance says a site that earns revenue, passes 1 TB of traffic or runs server-side code should consider Pro. The shop gains custom WAF rules, bot fighting and finer cache rules.
• A company that must keep its current DNS host. Because the CNAME setup is limited to Business and Enterprise, an organization tied to another DNS provider by policy can proxy selected subdomains through Cloudflare while leaving the rest of its zone where it is.

The Free plan is sold on a self-service basis with a promise that sign-up takes about five minutes. You create an account, add your domain, review the DNS records Cloudflare imports, and change the nameservers at your registrar so Cloudflare becomes the authoritative DNS. Until the zone shows as active, the documentation warns against using pending zones for production traffic on paid plans.

After that, traffic is proxied and caching starts with defaults, which the cache docs describe by file extension. Further tuning happens through Cache Rules, WAF rules and the analytics views. Business and Enterprise customers who cannot move DNS can use the CNAME setup instead. The Free plan has no phone support, and Business adds chat and ticket support.

The CDN comes with DNS, unmetered DDoS protection and a certificate on every plan, including the zero-cost one. The catch is the setup: Free and Pro require Cloudflare to become your authoritative DNS, and a CNAME setup is limited to Business and Enterprise.

The service terms also bar using the CDN to serve video or a disproportionate share of large files without paid services.

The CDN providers list places Cloudflare 8 of 12: Fastly sits directly above it and Akamai directly below. Established names take the places after the first three, in ranked order, and we give no numeric score.

Home market: the United States, one of 8 North America bases among the 12 products here.

The route in is a primary setup: add the domain, then change nameservers at the registrar.

A CNAME setup keeps your DNS elsewhere but is limited to Business and Enterprise.

Pricing as recorded: Free, Pro and Business plans published; Contract quoted per organisation.

The vendor's plans page prints Free at $0 per month, Pro at $20 per month billed annually or $25 billed monthly, and Business at $200 per month billed annually or $250 billed monthly. The top tier is a contract plan with custom annual pricing. Printed add-on prices: Load Balancing from $5 per month, Smart Shield plus Argo Smart Routing from $5 per month, Advanced Certificate Manager from $10 per month, Cloudflare Stream from $5 per month, and Client-Side Security at $0.099 per 1,000 requests, with rate limiting priced on HTTP traffic. The developer platform has its own free allowances, such as 100,000 Workers requests per day and 10 GB-month of R2 storage, and then usage-based rates.

Checked against cloudflare.com for Best CDN Providers in 2026, review date 5 November 2026.

The vendor says it does not sell customer data and describes itself as privacy-first. Compliance documentation can be downloaded from the dashboard, and a compliance resources page and a GDPR page are linked.

The plan comparison lists PCI DSS 4.0 compliance from the Business tier, and the Business page names PCI and SOC 2 Type II compliance. The proxy terminates TLS with custom or universal certificates. Data residency options and CDN log retention are not stated on the pages fetched.

Integrations the vendor names (8):

• WordPress (Automatic Platform Optimization plugin)
• Workers
• R2
• Cloudflare Stream
• Cloudflare Images
• Load Balancing
• Cloudflare One (Zero Trust)
• Turnstile

The choice below rests on shared catalogue tags, price model, free plan and region, with rank distance as the tie-break.

A full write-up exists: Cloudflare alternatives, with reasons buyers leave and what moving involves.

• Gcore (#4 of 12): Luxembourg-based, with a pay-as-you-go column at EUR 0 a month that includes 1 TB of traffic, then EUR 0.01 per gigabyte. It lists 210+ points of presence. The firewall (WAAP) is marked on-demand rather than included, so the security side is a separate conversation, unlike a Cloudflare plan. Switch if you want a zero-fee start with a terabyte included and are happy to add security separately.
• Fastly (#7 of 12): An American edge platform whose Full Site Delivery gives 100 GB and 1 million requests free, then bills bandwidth per region and requests per 10,000. Europe costs $0.12 per gigabyte on the first tier. Caching is controlled by configuration code, which is more work than Cloudflare's dashboard rules for a plain site. Switch if your engineers want to program caching and can accept metered bills. (United States)
• Google Cloud CDN (#12 of 12): Not stand-alone: Google's documentation puts it behind an Application Load Balancer. The bill adds cache data transfer out (Europe $0.08 per GiB at the first tier), cache fill and lookups, plus load balancer charges on a miss. Cloudflare's flat plans are far easier to forecast. Switch if your backends sit on Google Cloud behind its load balancer.

When Cloudflare is still the right call: Cloudflare is still the right choice when you want the CDN, DNS, a certificate and DDoS protection from one account at a known monthly price. The plans page lists those items on every plan including the $0 one, and the other providers on this list sell most of them separately or not at all. It also fits a site of ordinary pages and images, where the 512 MB cache limit and the video clause never matter, and a team happy to let Cloudflare run its DNS. Stay unless your files are large, your DNS must stay put without paying for Business, or your finance team wants a rate per gigabyte.

Read from the vendor’s own pages on 5 November 2026.

• cloudflare.com/plans: Plans overview, developer platform free allowances and rates
• cloudflare.com/plans/free: Free plan description, add-on prices, privacy statement
• cloudflare.com/plans/pro: Pro plan security features, upgrade guidance, CNAME limitation
• cloudflare.com/plans/business: Business features, PCI and SOC 2 Type II, 100% SLA
• cloudflare.com/application-services/products/cdn: CDN overview, 330+ cities, Docker Hub example
• developers.cloudflare.com/cache: Cache Rules, Tiered Cache, Cache Reserve, purge
• developers.cloudflare.com/dns/zone-setups: Full, CNAME, secondary and subdomain DNS setups

The same four questions are asked of every CDN providers product: time to value, real cost, the way out and the intended buyer. Here that gives Cloudflare the #8 position in a list of 12. The editorial process sets out how facts are gathered and how commercial links are handled.