Cloudflare vs G-Core Labs CDN comparison

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cloudflare and G-Core Labs CDN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two CDN solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloudflare vs. G-Core Labs CDN Report (Updated: July 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare vs. G-Core Labs CDN

July 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 793,295 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

IBM NS1 Connect

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the CDN category, the mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 2.5%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 21.9%, up from 21.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of G-Core Labs CDN is 3.0%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN

Unique Categories:

Managed DNS

3.5%

Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection

20.2%

Featured Reviews

Michael Wills

Senior Network Systems Engineer at McKesson

Jun 8, 2022

Balances cost and functionality, speeds up provisioning, and reduces the DNS maintenance work drastically

The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS. It is great as an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management. It is very simple to use. It allows us to rapidly provision and deprovision things. We are all around happy with the solution. From a metrics standpoint, the solution that we came from had no metrics. So, it has been great. Their service team is excellent in taking the time to provide reports for both growth and strategic planning. It has been great.

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Manjunath MR

Technical Lead at Wipro Limited

Jun 3, 2023

Helps to create DNS records and connect Cloudflare to the original server

The product helps to create DNS records and connect Cloudflare to the original server. You can also do load balancing configuration. I work with SaaS solutions. In a single product and with minimal costs, you can get multiple features. The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS.…

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Kamran Imamguliyev

Co Owner at NVC LLC

Mar 20, 2023

Free trial, easy to use, and lots of options

When I was setting up a website, I did not have a specialist who would help me to understand what settings I needed or didn't need at all. I’ve read a lot of information to understand what exactly is appropriate for my blog. It would be great if there were a section on the provider's website that shows a set of services for a particular business. It would be helpful to have some kind of checklist of services that are suitable for your blog, which are required, and which can be set up later. While it's great that there are trial periods and user-friendly interfaces, still, you can go crazy.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS."

"Everything we download into our observability platform so that we can also track any changes in traffic behavior or things like that is also something that we use quite a lot. I'd say traffic management, the speed of updates, and observability are the top three things that we use."

"For starters, it integrates with Terraform and a lot of our infrastructure is effectively built out using Terraform. That makes all this stuff extremely easy... when we deploy, all the entries are created and configuration is done."

"Monitoring is really important for us. We really care about reliability, and we want to make sure that we can remove some points of presence in our sector and in our edge network really fast when we experience any problems. So, monitoring that NS1 provides for DNS is really important for us."

"The Filter Chain is one of the most valuable features, for geo-load balancing and geo-fencing. The Filter Chain is the most useful because it allows us to do several things. With geo-fencing we can redirect a particular user to a particular answer. That's very valuable for us. Filter Chains with monitoring is our strategy to provide redundancy."

"The fact that it's an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management is one of the reasons we looked into NS1. We use it for a lot of automation and metrics gathering and it's been great."

"We leverage two things from Managed DNS that we couldn't do with any other solution. One is their filter chain technology, which allows us to shift some of the intelligence we need for the traffic steering to the DNS. The second one is data sources, which enables us to manipulate multiple records simultaneously using NS1's internal message DOS. In our case, we are trying to direct the traffic in over 150,000 different NS1 records to an arbitrary set of repeating responses."

"Their Pulsar filters allow us to collect RUM metrics from our users so that we can determine the best paths for our users to take. That has been very useful in providing the best user experience, and for responding to and recovering from downtime of our multiple CDNs."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

"It's very user-friendly."

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"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."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."

More Cloudflare pros

"Since transitioning to G-Core, our site has started working much faster, and freezes have stopped. Users are staying on the site longer and visiting more sections. We increased the number of customers by 30 percent in the past six months. This is partially attributable to G-Core services."

"Uptime is always perfect."

"The CDN interface is intuitive and user-friendly, and there are no intrusive ads or upselling additional services. Everything is self-contained, and it's a convenient CDN overall. We also loved that they provided a free trial period. They always seem to do what's best for the consumer and the internet."

"The support is amazing! They solve the issues on the fly."

Cons

"I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide. They have a simulate-filter feature so that you can simulate how your traffic would flow, based on their Filter Chains. I believe that was shut off for quite some time. Having that as a way to test our load-balanced CDN structure would be fantastic."

"I would like to see the UI updated to allow me to do finer searches. I would also like to have the ability to get reports that can sort based on various metrics. For example, I would like to be able to say, "Show me the top 10 records by total queries" in an easy-to-digest format."

"When we first deployed, we flipped the switch, and it didn't work as well as we expected. It wasn't a complete outage, but we had issues in some places with some customers. The NS1 team went out of their way to resolve it on Thanksgiving. We have a post about it on our blog. We called it "Black Thursday.""

"There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution."

"The reporting metrics are great from an API standpoint, but it would be a little bit nicer if there was some type of dashboard around that. There should also be some type of reporting that's more executive-level focused."

"We use the geo load balancing functionality and there are a couple of things that are helpful there. But the language itself is something we had to get used to a little bit. Some of my folks made a few mistakes in rolling out the Filter Chain...The Filter Chain setup is a bit hard to grasp at first. It would also be nice to have a way to simulate changes in addition to staging."

"We care about monitoring and telemetry work, and NS1 provides a pretty good system for monitoring. We can monitor our endpoints and points of presence around the world. If there are any issues, we can easily remove them from our network, but this area needs some improvement because it is not always reliable in NS1. In the past, we had a number of false-positive cases when the monitoring system told us about some problems in our infrastructure that were not true. NS1 is improving the system, and we are constantly talking about this with them. I know that they are releasing a new version of their monitoring system, which is really important for us, but this is a different area where we would expect them to improve."

"We use our client in our infrastructure to communicate with NS1. This client is a bit complex in the way that it is set up. NS1 has their own client solution that you can deploy into your platform to do this, but even that is a bit complex. So, I would like a very simple, thin, light API agent that we can deploy into our platform to communicate with NS1. That would be welcome."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."

"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."

"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."

"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

More Cloudflare cons

"I would like to have one optimized report that we could use for our own needs."

"It would be great if there were a section on the provider's website that shows a set of services for a particular business. It would be helpful to have some kind of checklist of services that are suitable for your blog, which are required, and which can be set up later."

"Once in the past six months, we got a "site is unavailable" error for a maximum of 20 minutes."

"There are some nuances in the tariff configurations that we found confusing. We would like more flexibility in this area."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"NS1's pricing is much more aggressive than its competitors in the market and you get more value out of what you pay for it."

"Everything can always be cheaper, but as it is today the pricing is fair."

"The cost of this product is one of the reasons that we chose it."

"We pay about $30,000 a month. We used to pay about $20,000 with Dyn every month, for lower volume than we're doing right now, but it had none of the features that we have available with NS1, so it was worth it for us. It seems competitive for us, given that we're doing 4.5 billion requests."

"From a cost standpoint, it's certainly not the most expensive out there, and it's also not the cheapest, but it does well to balance the cost and the functionality/reliability."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"We are using the free version."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"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."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The price of G-Core Labs CDN is very reasonable in comparison with other companies. We've done a lot of research into CDN providers, and G-Core offers the best service for the lowest cost."

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Comparison Review

it_user68487

Security Expert with 51-200 employees

Nov 6, 2013

CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall

CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

14%

University

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

24%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Media Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about NS1 Managed DNS?

For starters, Managed DNS from NS1 is an easy way to get the job done. Whether you're a novice or a pro, Managed DNS ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

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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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for G-Core Labs CDN?

Compared to other solutions currently available on the market, the price of G-Core Labs CDN is very reasonable. G-Cor...

See all answers

What do you like most about G-Core Labs CDN?

Uptime is always perfect.

See all answers

What needs improvement with G-Core Labs CDN?

We are closely monitoring the improvements in statistics on using the CDN resource. Now it can be viewed by different...

See all answers

Comparisons

Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 25% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 14% of the time

Neustar UltraDNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 9% of the time

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM NS1 Connect Competitors

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Neustar UltraDNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Amazon CloudFront vs G-Core Labs CDN

Compared 5% of the time

More G-Core Labs CDN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

July 2024

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

July 2024

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

CDN

June 2024

Download G-Core Labs CDN product report

Also Known As

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Learn More

IBM

Cloudflare

G-Core Labs

Overview

Why

In a 24/7 world, customers demand applications, websites, and content that load instantly and are always on. When those connections are unreliable or slow, businesses don’t meet customer expectations, causing customers to leave. When that occurs, revenue may suffer.

What

IBM NS1 Connect delivers the high-performance, reliable, secure network connectivity that businesses need to meet increasingly sophisticated customer expectations. Leveraging a global network with a 100% uptime SLA, IBM has the capacity and scale to meet the needs of any business. IBM NS1 Connect takes performance to the next level, powering the sophisticated needs of enterprises with complex network infrastructures.

How

IBM NS1 Connect provides network connectivity solutions that give networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect also enables IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.

Details

IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service that provides authoritative, premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience. Revenue-generating applications require authoritative DNS resolution to keep critical applications and websites online. Unless your DNS infrastructure is always-on and resilient, network reliability and user experience will suffer, your network reliability may suffer, resulting in poor user experiences if revenue-generating critical applications and websites are not online. IBM NS1 Connect’s always-on, API-first architecture provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world with premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering. It also enables your IT teams to efficiently monitor networks, deploy changes and conduct routine maintenance.

IBM NS1 Connect uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to ensure that websites and applications are:

Online, all the time: Global network with 100% uptime SLA and DDoS protection
Fast: Top tier response and propagation times, custom traffic steering to optimize connections
Cheaper to run: Far less expensive than self-hosting
Automation friendly: API-first platform with Ansible/Terraform integrations and support for Pliant rapid network automation
Easier to troubleshoot: Unique DNS data insights offering

Designed for enterprises looking to optimize their DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service delivering authoritative DNS and advanced traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience and provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world. NS1 Connect streamlines DNS management by automating both simple and complex DNS configuration tasks via API and preconfigured integrations, so you can spend more time on higher-value work.

IBM NS1 Connect is delivered through our unified delivery platform. The cloud-based platform gives networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect solutions also enable IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.

For enterprises looking to further optimize DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect offers rich DNS data analytics to streamline the identification of the root cause of anomalies within traffic.

IBM NS1 Connect Features

Global anycast DNS network: Enjoy fast connections to consumers around the globe through an anycast network with 26 points of presence (PoPs).
100% uptime SLA on DNS resolution: Maximize uptime and revenue generation with resilient, always-on, authoritative DNS.
API-first architecture: Integrate and automate workflows with NS1 Connect's well-documented API; every line of code starts as an API call, all functionality is available through the API.
Real-time user monitoring (RUM)-based traffic steering: Uses real-time intelligence on network performance and availability to direct DNS connections to the best available application resource; the widest range of filter options and data sources in the industry, not data that is extrapolated from sampling; the most flexible, granular controls for your network.
Built-in resilience: Add a single-tenant, redundant DNS layer and manage it from a single control plane as your primary DNS.
Managed DNS for China: Improve performance for the Chinese mainland by segmenting traffic with NS1 Connect’s Managed DNS for China.
DNS insights: Get a better understanding of DNS traffic patterns by mining your DNS data to identify security issues, misconfigurations and performance issues.
DDoS protection: Cap your query-based spending with protection against unexpected surges in traffic from distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Uptime monitor: Quickly identify issues and automatically adjust DNS traffic steering configurations with native health check alerts.
DevOps tool integrations: Preconfigured integrations with leading DevOps tools including Ansible and Terraform to help automate routine maintenance, manage data sources and feeds.
Propagation speed: fastest propagation in the industry, measured in seconds not minutes; worldwide propagation in under five seconds.
Independence: neutral arbiter between infrastructure services (CDNs, clouds).

IBM NS1 Connect helps enterprises modernize and optimize networking infrastructure to provide customers with faster connections to websites, applications, services and content.

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distribution Denial of Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can use the solution and experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to access Cloudflare highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end-users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD ( bring your own device) access ensure end-users and employees always have the best resources and technology available to them at all times.

Cloudflare Benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

Faster load times
Robust DNS security
Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Free universal SSL
Image Enhancement
Automatic Browser Caching
Next-generation cloud load balancer
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Rate Limiting
Minification
Zero-trust capabilities
Cost-effective
Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from Real Users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” A PeerSpot user who is a Competence Center Manager at a tech services company.

Powerful edge and cloud solutions for media business and the entertainment industry

Sample Customers

Avast Software, Bloomberg L.P., BBC, Carfax, CNBC LLC, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Disney Streaming, Dropbox, EBAY Inc, Gannett Media Corp, Salesforce, Wayfair, Workday

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

avast, TEDx, Nanobit, Group Wagner, Momento

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare vs. G-Core Labs CDN

July 2024

Free Report: Cloudflare vs. G-Core Labs CDN

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. G-Core Labs CDN and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.

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