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Cloudflare vs Sophos Cloud Optix 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 Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
12th
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 (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th)
Sophos Cloud Optix
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
31st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 1.5%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sophos Cloud Optix is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cloudflare1.5%
Sophos Cloud Optix0.6%
Other97.9%
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
 

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.
Tanzeel Iqbal - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Architect at Testware ApS
Cloud posture has improved and security reports drive ongoing compliance and cost control
I really appreciate most aspects of Sophos Cloud Optix, especially that we can set it up on AWS marketplace without needing to host a new machine. We can use their trial version where we can monitor a small number of resources without any additional cost. Setting up Sophos Cloud Optix on AWS is not difficult at all, also because my team has experience with it, making it very easy and quick to set up a trial version that helps us see the initial posture of our security setup as we grow, and then they charge based on the cloud resources. Sophos Cloud Optix impacts us positively in many ways, particularly in security, which is an important part. It is not just about fixing everything without a clear picture of what we have done to improve security, as there must be a portal explaining our progress, which I really appreciate, and it helps us save time and in optimization for performance and cost. While I have not seen much for cost optimization as we have another great tool for it, Sophos Cloud Optix aids us to set up our infrastructure appropriately, making sure databases are in a private network, and if systems are wrongly set up, it helps us quickly mitigate those issues and provides a report indicating the problem. I am really impressed with the way Sophos Cloud Optix provides its features, so I am not sure about any specific improvements needed. I am really satisfied about the reports Sophos Cloud Optix generates, provided in a PDF format which is very useful for our recording purposes.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"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 features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos Cloud Optix is the simple way to manage my devices on the network. Additionally, it is easy to navigate and has a user-friendly interface."
"I find Cloud Optix to be a valuable solution since it provides a single, unified dashboard to monitor cloud assets, such as AWS and Azure."
"The most valuable feature for me would be the solution's endpoint protection."
"DLP is a valuable feature that we use a lot for info audits."
"Sophos Cloud Optix impacts us positively in many ways, particularly in security, which is an important part, and it helps us save time and in optimization for performance and cost."
"I find Cloud Optix to be a valuable solution since it provides a single, unified dashboard to monitor cloud assets, such as AWS and Azure."
 

Cons

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"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."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"Technical support is lacking."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"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."
"There are times when the devices are at maximum capacity, and it takes a while before the device is updated. For example, if the device has a virus, and it's not aligned to connect to the network, even after you've scanned the device, and cleaned out the virus, once the management clears the system to allow it back on the network it takes some time. It can be frustrating when you have your line manager or in management affected trying to access the network."
"The setup was a little bit complex."
"Sophos should enhance its AI-driven detection features and anomaly detection."
"Sophos should enhance its AI-driven detection features and anomaly detection."
"The dashboard and the process for applying policies could be more intuitive. Cloud Optix isn't that difficult once you get the hang of it, but the IT folks managing this want it to be more user-friendly."
"I have not connected with Sophos Cloud Optix customer support yet, but I had a bad experience when our AWS cloud got compromised, leading to many resources being provisioned, and while Sophos Cloud Optix identified those resources, the resulting bill from AWS was quite high due to the usage charges, which I tried to investigate with the Sophos team, though I am not sure if they assisted with the refund."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"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."
"Regarding the pricing for Sophos Cloud Optix, I would say that it was a very good price."
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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
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
8%
Media Company
8%
Insurance Company
8%
 

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 needs improvement with Sophos Cloud Optix?
I believe there can be improvements in the logging mechanism, with more detailed information available about systems or network logs being beneficial.
What is your primary use case for Sophos Cloud Optix?
I use Sophos Cloud Optix most of the time to harden our AWS infrastructure or Azure infrastructure, and sometimes I use it to meet different types of compliance requirements such as SOC 2 and ISO 2...
What advice do you have for others considering Sophos Cloud Optix?
I have not integrated Sophos Cloud Optix with other tools, but I believe there are many integration options available. The learning curve for new users on my team with Sophos Cloud Optix is not muc...
 

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.
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