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Cloudflare vs Fastly comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

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
Ranking in CDN
1st
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (4th), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (10th)
Fastly
Ranking in CDN
7th
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
10th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (23rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.7%, down from 22.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 5.7%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare18.7%
Fastly5.7%
Other75.6%
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.
PP
Technical support engineer at Adobe
Optimized ecommerce performance and improved access control through image handling and IP filtering
I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP addresses instead of POP IPs. Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list. Additionally, a POP address should be there with a wide range of IP addresses provided, public static IP addresses, so customers can integrate egress IPs. Fastly should provide WebP image processing on the backend instead of on the fly. It would be a very useful feature to avoid unnecessary time for browser to browser and local cookies. I believe that Fastly service has a few gaps. We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers. There should be transparency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The technical support on offer is excellent; they are very helpful and responsive, and we are quite happy with the level of service they provide to their customers."
"It is very clear and the information is very useful."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"It's a great product because it's scalable, has great coverage, and is mature with good defenses against DDoS attacks."
"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."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"It's a reasonably priced solution that meets customers' needs and it's not too difficult to deploy."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"In summary, this solution is easy to manage, quick to deploy, and all of my customers are happy."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"Fastly combines both the CDN side and the Signal Sciences next-generation WAF, which is closely integrated with the CDN, allowing us to use both products seamlessly."
 

Cons

"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service."
"Yes, there were a few times when some of their CDN nodes would fail, creating serious speed issues with the site without any warning or notification from their side."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"Support is not that great."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."
"It's not easy to start with Fastly if you don't have VCL knowledge, so it appears very complex at the beginning."
"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I give the price a five out of ten."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise5
 

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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
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 Fastly?
I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP ad...
What is your primary use case for Fastly?
I am using Fastly in the Adobe Commerce Cloud project. In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and WAF, web application firewall, additionally image optimization.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
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.
Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.