Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Cloudflare vs Managed DNS Services comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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 Managed DNS
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (10th)
Managed DNS Services
Ranking in Managed DNS
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 29.2%, down from 35.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Managed DNS Services is 0.6%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare29.2%
Managed DNS Services0.6%
Other70.2%
Managed DNS
 

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.
Vijay Muddu - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager server admin and security at Vivaconnect
Cost-effective and helpful in the updation of DNS records
I improve the uptime of my company's website by opting for free DNS-related services offered by Google and other vendors, which are available in the market. You need services like Amazon Route 53, AWS, or DNS Made Easy when you want fast resolutions and updates. I can use some free DNS services like GoDaddy if terms of request come into my website, but its resolution is slow. DNS Made Easy helps me with the DNS query in a very fast manner. DNS Made Easy works very fast if any changes I want to make, especially in scenarios where I change my server ID in the DNS records in GoDaddy. Within a fraction of a second, it globally updates the DNS records so that my new server can reach everywhere. The valuable feature of the product to manage high traffic volume stems from the fact that the DNS resolution part is good and very fast. The DNS updation part is also very fast. The DNS records are very quickly updated. The tool also provides a failover option. With the automatic failover option, users can configure the DNS automatic failover to multiple DNS records, where if one of my nameservers fails, it is possible to switch to another nameserver. I can add multiple IPs to my single domain, and if one of my IPs fails, it can use the automatic failover for my present IP. The product provides help during failovers and helps add multiple nameservers. The tool updates DNS records very fast while also serving the DNS queries at a fast rate. The GoDNS feature of the product has impacted my company's global website performance since it works at a very fast rate. As soon as you update any of the IPs, the GoDNS feature works at a drastically super fast speed. If I want to change my website's IP right away, the GoDNS feature takes only 10 seconds to update the IPs at a global level. The API integration is not an area I used to streamline our company's DNS management process since I prefer to use the dashboard manually. The product is very cost-effective compared to other products in the market, like AWS or Amazon Route 53. The transition time offered by the product is super fast. Those people who don't want to spend much money on cloud services offered by AWS or opt for other third-party services that may be very expensive can opt for DNS Made Easy since it is a fast and cost-effective solution. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

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 is good."
"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."
"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."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"It is a very robust and stable solution."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"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."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"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. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"Support response time could be improved."
"The tool fails to offer load-balancing options compared to products like Azure or Amazon Route 53."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"The tool offers paid services at a very cost-effective rate."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Managed DNS solutions are best for your needs.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
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 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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Managed DNS Services?
The product is a very cost-effective tool. The tool offers paid services at a very cost-effective rate.
What needs improvement with Managed DNS Services?
The tool fails to offer load-balancing options compared to products like Azure or Amazon Route 53. The tool needs to offer load-balancing options. The product provides failover options, but there a...
 

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.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), BlueCat and others in Managed DNS. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.