Cloudflare is a leading content delivery network (CDN) worldwide. Cloudflare offers a wide range of cloud-based solutions to website owners and network administrators. It offers distributed DNS service, reverse proxy, automatic caching, and SSL offloading. No one can blame anyone if there are frequent outages that the service experiences or the criticisms made against the company’s association to hate-speech sites and forums.
These are the top 10 Cloudflare options that you can use in 2021.
Cloudflare Alternatives Best in 2021
You are looking for an alternative to Cloudflare that makes managing your entire security solution easy. Indusface AppTrana offers dynamic application security scanning (DAST), manual pen-testing and web application firewall, DDOS defense, & CDN all in one platform. AppTrana offers a pay-as-you-go model starting at $99/month. Customers can also start risk detection free of charge with their freemium service.
Get it done (Sponsored).
Cloudflare is one the few CDN service providers which offer a free, robust CDN service to all users. It’s free and you don’t have to pay anything. Cloudflare is free, regardless of how much traffic you have. This is an amazing deal. While the free tier speeds things up in some cases, it does not offer WAF protection. This leaves your site vulnerable to targeted attacks such as DDoS, spam, and bots. The Pro plan ($20/month) offers a website application firewall but does not include advanced DDoS mitigation or custom SSL. Their Business plan costs $200 per month and includes these features. This isn’t something everyone can afford.
Cloudflare is also being criticized for not complying with U.S. law enforcement agencies and giving information about clients to the government when they request it. Cloudflare pricing plans and the failure to protect user-information have led to many people considering migrating to another CDN.
Table of Contents
1. Akamai
Akamai is the most well-known and widely used CDNs as well as cloud services, provider. It is estimated to serve between 15 and 30% of all web traffic. It’s feature-rich, powerful, and provides top-of-the-line security against DDoS attacks as well as other threats. Prolexic PLXedge technology offers 2.3Tbps of bandwidth for DDoS absorption to ensure your website is safe.
Akamai also provides value-added services. One such service is “Kona Site Defender”, which can be used by companies to offload their threat protection and security monitoring to Akamai. It can be customized to allow users to monitor everything in real-time and make changes.
However, there are also some problems. Akamai’s size means it cannot change its rules quickly unlike smaller, more agile competitors. It is also the most expensive CDN provider. Akamai does not offer a free tier, unlike Cloudflare. If you don’t care about pricing, this is the best Cloudflare alternative.
Key Features:
- The best CDN for DDoS mitigation and protection
- Optimize content delivery speeds
- The Kona Site Defender add-on is ideal for companies that want to outsource security and threat mitigation
See Akamai. (Price on request)
2. Imperva
Formerly known as Incapsula. Imperva, a cloud-based security platform that protects blogs and websites, provides DDoS protection and failover services, and load balancing. The service’s bot-recognition engine reduces false positives even in the face of sophisticated layer 7 attacks. This is one of its best features. Layer 7 attackers target particular areas on websites, making it extremely difficult to detect malicious traffic.
Imperva also offers an additional layer of DDoS protection to protect subnet networks like email and FTP. It also offers a free level, but you will need to pay for WAF or DDoS protection.
Another feature that is worth mentioning is IncapRules – a fully-fledged scripting language that Imperva claims allows clients to have “full and thorough control over security policies”. Imperva claims that IncapRules gives clients access to a variety of tools to analyze incoming traffic, including headers, client types, locations, and access rates.
Imperva also has many data centers equipped with “Behemoth”, which can process over 100 million packets per minute and handle 170 Gb/s data. Imperva offers its app and data features separately. You can see their plans here.
Key Features:
- DDoS protection, failover, and load balancing services.
- Bot-recognition engine protects from Layer 7 attacks
- Protection against DDoS in subnet infrastructures like FTP or email
- For complete control of security policies, “IncapRules”, a scripting language is available.
See Imperva (Free Tier, Data, and App Features Available Separately)
3. Amazon CloudFront
CloudFront, a part of Amazon’s huge AWS (Amazon Web Services), platform, is one of the most efficient at what it does. If you need all the bells, however, CloudFront can be more costly than some of the other services on this list. It can deliver any kind of web content: static, streaming. CloudFront’s management console also has a user-friendly GUI. It also supports wildcard cName support.
The service’s dynamic scaling is one of its best features. It automatically allocates more resources to handle spikes in web traffic without the user having to do anything. This makes it one of most effective protections against DDoS attacks.
Amazon CloudFront is widely considered to be the most reliable CDN service provider . However, there are some things that users should keep in mind. Some of the settings can be a little too simple. As a sysadmin you will need to manually trigger Stackoverflow to find out details such as how long objects remain before being deleted. CloudFront is not a perfect CDN solution but it is a very good free Cloudflare alternative.
Key Features:
- Can deliver dynamic, static, or streaming content
- Friendly UI
- Supports custom SSL and wildcard characters
- Dynamic scaling is able to handle spikes of web traffic
- The most reliable CDN available
See Amazon CloudFront (Free Tier; Pricing for premium tiers varies by region and volume).
4. StackPath
Stackpath was built on top the MaxCDN open-source platform, which was acquired by the company in 2016. The content delivery service includes an integrated Web Application Firewall and a fully-documented API. Instant configuration updates, instant purging and real-time analytics are all part of the service.
StackPath provides built-in analytics, reporting and extensive standard policies that can be managed through the portal. It also offers a RESTful and Serverless Scripting. StackPath’s pricing strategy makes it both affordable and easy to understand. Its plans range from $15 per month to enterprise plans. You can contact their sales department to get the price. All plans include SSL, WAF, and DDoS protection.
Although StackPath serves clients all over the world, the company focuses primarily on North America and Europe with a few POPs in Brazil, Japan and Singapore. The company has seen rapid growth in recent years and recently acquired Highwinds, a Florida-based CDN provider. This CDN service is excellent and quite affordable. This CDN is a great choice if you’re looking for Cloudflare-type CDNs.
Key Features:
- WAF Integrated Web Application Firewall
- Instant purge and configuration updates
- Provides RESTful API and serverless scripting
See StackPath (Pricing starting at $15 per month).
5. Quickly
Fastly was founded in 2011 and is already a major player in the market. It provides a variety of services, including instant configuration updates and instant purging . You can also cache dynamic content, log streaming, analytics, protection against traffic spikes, and real-time log streaming. It offers streaming media delivery and private CDN. It also includes a “real time CDN” feature which allows for changes to be made instantly.
Fastly’s web application and API security protects your site against account hijack (ATO), bots, OWASP injection attack, and other threats. It also offers add-ons that can be used to optimize your website with cloud optimizer, HIPAA compliant caching, deliver, and many other features.
Fastly provides on-the-go pricing based on data transfer volume and total requests. Users can also test traffic up to $50 for free without any commitment. You can opt for Fastly Enterprise, Professional, and Essential plans, which offer more predictable plans. All clients have access to extensive documentation and API references.
Key Features:
- Instant purging, instant configuration updates, and many other features.
- Private CDN and Real time CDN
- Protects against account takeover, Business Logic Attacks and OWASP.
Get Fastly (Free Trial, Contact Sales for Pricing)
6. Sucuri
Next, we will look at Cloudflare. It offers protection against malicious traffic and code injections but, unlike its more famous counterpart, does not offer CDN services. This is the right service to look at if you are using Cloudflare’s Free Tier and only need inexpensive, but effective protection against targeted attacks.
Sucuri is a platform-agnostic, cloud service provider that protects your website regardless of whether it’s a WordPress blog or a Magento ecommerce portal. Along with Microsoft’s. Net Framework, it supports open-source CMS platforms such as Drupal, Joomla, and v Bulletin.
It offers a Website App Firewall (WAF), and load balancing in the form of CloudProxy. Sucuri also blocks DDoS attacks and SQL injections, as well as XSS JavaScript Hacks . However, Sucuri allows customers to use their own SSL certificates with certain of its higher-priced plans.
Sucuri offers website monitoring, malware scanning and DDoS protection as well as malware removal services. Sucuri does not offer a free plan like Cloudflare. However, its basic paid plan is much cheaper than Cloudflare and includes website monitoring, website application firewalls, DDoS protection, and reputation monitoring. It also includes malware removal and a free LetsEncrypt SSL certificate.
Companies such as Harper Collins, GoDaddy and the NYU use Sucuri.
Key Features:
- Platform-agnostic
- WAF
- Protection against DDoS, SQL injections, XSS, etc.
- LetsEncrypt SSL for Free
Visit Sucuri (Pricing starts at $199.99/year).
7. Reblaze
If Sucuri is not for you, Reblaze may be a better alternative. It is an Israeli company that has offices in the U.K. as well as the U.S. The company claims to have protected many high-profile clients from a wide range of attacks, including SQL injection, XSS, and DDoS. It claims that it can protect clients against platform-specific zero day vulnerabilities.
It also allows users to block traffic coming from certain countries, cities or networks. Reblaze protects customers from hackers by routing all traffic through its secure Security Gateways that use dynamic DNS allocation. Reblaze also uses Elastic Load Balancing to spread the increased traffic throughout its global network Security Gateways, to alleviate stress on local ISPs as well as bandwidth providers.
Reglaze claims that it has a robust solution to protect against DDoS attacks. This includes identifying malicious traffic and then scaling its bandwidth deployment to absorb an unusually high number of requests. Reglaze claims it uses “next-generation human and bot identification algorithms” in order to identify advanced scraper robots powered by full-stack browsers.
Key Features:
- The best protection against zero-day attacks
- Traffic spikes can be mitigated by elastic load balancing
- Bot-detection is a great tool to protect websites against scrapers and other bots
See Reblaze (Price on request)
8. CDN77
CDN77 is a highly rated CDN service with cost-effective pricing. It has a global network of 70+ Tbps and PoPs across 6 continents to handle large volumes of traffic as well as unexpected spikes.
It can handle large traffic with the same efficiency as Cloudflare. CDN77 is a combination of advanced routing systems. It can match Cloudflare’s ability to handle large volumes of traffic.
CDN77 can be trusted to provide DDoS protection and security. This is due to its automatic detection mechanism and locking mechanism. It also comes with DPDK, a Hurricane DDoS solution that helps to monitor traffic and keep track of attacks.
It is highly competent thanks to its reliable content protection and a variety of access management features such as TLS 1.3 secure token, GEO/IP block, hotlink protection, and secure token. Its seamless integration to your business through a robust API is what makes it stand out from other competitors.
Companies like Udemy, Avast, and ESL have a lot of trust in CDN77. All things considered, CDN77 is easily able to claim the title of one of the most cost-effective Cloudflare options on the market.
Key Features:
- Highly cost-effective
- AI-based aberration detection technology
- Hurricane DDoS Solution automatically detects and blocks DDoS attacks.
Get CDN77 a 14-day trial and 6TB traffic plan for $199/month.
9. Microsoft Azure
Cloudflare cannot compete with Microsoft Azure when it comes to high-bandwidth content delivery. Microsoft Azure’s proficiency should be at the top of your priority list. This content delivery network has one of its major strengths: the ability to cache static objects using the nearest point of presence (POP). It excels at accelerating dynamic content by leveraging multiple networks and efficient routing optimizations.
Microsoft Azure excels on a large scale and is used to handle high-load instantaneously. When hosting large events, the large scaling will make sure that your site is not impacted by excessive traffic.
Azure offers customization capabilities that are comparable to Cloudflare, if not better. You can adjust the CDN service to produce the best result for your website based on the site’s needs. It also lets you create mobile experiences using Azure Cosmos DB and Xamarin as well as HockeyApp and the smart traffic manager.
Key Features:
- The best solution for high-bandwidth content handling
- Scales well to handle high loads quickly
- For creating mobile experiences that are unique, Azure Cosmos DB and Xamarin are available.
Get Microsoft Azure (12 Months Free, Plan Stars Starting at $13/month).
10. KeyCDN
KeyCDN is another trusted CDN service you should consider. Although it isn’t as flexible as Cloudflare and as efficient as Azure, KeyCDN offers a simpler experience. It could be an alternative to Cloudflare if you find it difficult to use.
The CDN service uses fully optimized hardware which plays an important role in delivering content faster and avoiding unexpected bottlenecks. It delivers smooth content globally by leveraging IP anycast technology and latency-based routing technology.
Personalization is key to delivering a customized experience. KeyCDN is slightly better than Cloudflare in this regard. To get the desired result, you can configure the necessary components and add them to any CMS or custom app.
KeyCDN allows you to easily optimize images without affecting their quality. better Zone Management is one of my favorite features of this CDN service. To improve performance, you can add and edit zones as well as delete them. You can also get real-time reports to give you a better understanding of the areas that require special attention.
You might be curious about KeyCDN’s history. KeyCDN is used in companies such as Intel, Sennheiser, and Discourse.
Key Features:
- Simple experience
- Cloudflare offers more customization
- Instantly identify problems with real-time reports
KeyCDN offers a 14-day free trial and plans to start at $4/month
Cloudflare Alternatives Best for Different Use-Cases
Here’s a list of Cloudflare competitors that are best suited to your specific needs.
- The Best Free Cloudflare Option: Amazon CloudFront or Imperva
- Best Cloudflare Competitor in DDoS Protection: Akamai
- Cloudflare is the Most Reliable CDN: Amazon CloudFront
- Best for Realtime CDN Changes
- Protective against Zero-Day Attacks and Vulnerabilities: Reblaze
- Most suited for high bandwidth content: Microsoft Azure
- Best to Recover Hacked Websites: Sucuri
- CDN Service for KeyCDN: Easy to Use
Cloudflare Alternatives – Best CDN Services Available Right Now
CDN services, like cloud storage services, are available in a variety of prices. It can be difficult to choose between them. The space is becoming more competitive with big names such as Microsoft joining the fray with Azure CDN services. While we have seen some consolidation in the industry recently, it will be interesting for us to see if there is an imminent shakeup.
Even though there are many companies competing for our attention in this highly saturated market, we still have to choose from a few services. This is especially true for site-owners and system administrators who are familiar with the features they need and those that are redundant. Are you currently using any of these services for your blog or website? You may also know of other CDN services such as Cloudflare you feel should be included on the list. No matter what, we want to hear your thoughts by commenting below.
