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CDNetworks CDN vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in CDN
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (10th)
CDNetworks CDN
Ranking in CDN
11th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Ranking in CDN
10th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (20th), API Security (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.7%, down from 22.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CDNetworks CDN is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 2.4%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare18.7%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services2.4%
CDNetworks CDN0.9%
Other78.0%
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
Jakir Shaikh - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Caching content across regions has improved access speed and reduced downtime risks for global users
The best features CDNetworks CDN offers are low latency, improved service performance, and easy accessibility for users from anywhere. The low latency and improved service performance have helped users significantly. For instance, users in India trying to access a data center in the USA would experience a long wait, but with multiple CDNetworks CDN points of presence around India, users are getting the content nearby their country or region, thus eliminating the need to connect directly to the USA data center. CDNetworks CDN has many points of presence and their service is also very good. They are very proactive, and if there is an issue in the backbone network, CDNetworks CDN connects all the points of presence through their backbone, and they have edge swaps which makes it faster for users to get the service. CDNetworks CDN has positively impacted the organization significantly. If CDNetworks CDN is down for a moment, there could be a million dollar loss due to the nature of the work being solely in the financial domain, which highlights the criticality of the financial sector. If CDNetworks CDN goes down or any part of it experiences issues, there is a substantial business-critical impact.
Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management
F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"I have used it to bring enterprise-grade features to my small business clients at low or no cost."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"Cloudflare improves performance on my websites and is a great partner for cloud infrastructure for anyone who wants to use the security service and other features."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"If it was not for CloudFlare, I would have to hire a dedicated resource to manage all this for me."
"The low latency and improved service performance have helped users significantly, for instance, users in India trying to access a data center in the USA would experience a long wait, but with multiple CDNetworks CDN points of presence around India, users are getting the content nearby their country or region, thus eliminating the need to connect directly to the USA data center."
"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."
"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."
"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."
 

Cons

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"It looks like they don't support as many TLDs as other registrars, but since they are very new as a registrar, I expect this may improve soon."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"CDNetworks CDN is currently very good, but there is room for improvement on weekends as some issues occur on Saturdays and Sundays, where there is a little less response from CDNetworks CDN."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."
"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
Information not available
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
No data available
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
No data available
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What needs improvement with CDNetworks CDN?
CDNetworks CDN is currently very good, but there is room for improvement on weekends as some issues occur on Saturday...
What is your primary use case for CDNetworks CDN?
CDNetworks CDN is used primarily for Malala, where vendors connect through the networking infrastructure via CDN. CDN...
What advice do you have for others considering CDNetworks CDN?
If someone is looking to implement CDN and has a data center in one part of the world while users are connecting from...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I am not involved in sales, so I do not deal with the pricing aspect directly. I give the cost of the solution a four...
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
There are some gaps between the implementation, expectation, and the reality. The main point is user integration with...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
F5 Distributed Cloud Services works as a Software as a Service based security, networking, and application management...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Hostelworld, MailUp, Leader Summaries, Linkstorm, The French Tennis Federation, Oxybul, King Jouet, Thomsons Online Benefits, Calam_o, Yatedo, Wistia, Wacker
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Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Imperva and others in CDN. Updated: March 2026.
885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.