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Cloudflare vs Quad9 comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 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 Managed DNS
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Quad9
Ranking in Managed DNS
5th
Average Rating
6.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 33.8%, down from 35.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quad9 is 32.5%, up from 31.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cloudflare33.8%
Quad932.5%
Other33.7%
Managed DNS
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
Louis Geoffroy - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to use and set up, but I've faced performance problems
I have experience with Quad9 and most other filtering solutions. Quad9 was working well initially, but it started slowing, so I switched to OpenDNS. I recently checked Tom's Hardware, an IT review site, and read a review of seven DNS filters. Open DNS was ranked the fastest, and Quad9 was second. Google was on there too, but they said it didn't filter enough.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The most valuable feature of Quad9 is that it is a free solution."
"Setting up Quad9 is straightforward if you know what you're doing, and it's easy to use overall."
 

Cons

"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."
"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."
"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."
"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"Quad9 could improve by having more free features, such as custom DNS filtering."
"It used to work fine for all the devices, but it started to slow and become non-responsive. I would have to reload the page two or three times before all the pages loaded. With OpenDNS, I only need to load the page once."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"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."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The price of Quad9 is free."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
22%
Computer Software Company
18%
Hospitality Company
7%
Educational Organization
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
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.
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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.
CISCO, Netlab, proofpoint
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Quad9 and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,019 professionals have used our research since 2012.