Welcome to our roundup of the best Cloudflare alternatives.
Cloudflare is one of the most popular CDNs (content delivery networks) out there, but it isn’t the only option.
There are lots of other providers out there that you can use to boost your website performance and security instead. And in this post, we’ll be revealing our favorites.
Below, you’ll find everything you need to know about all the best Cloudflare alternatives available this year, including their pros and cons, key features, pricing, and more.
The best Cloudflare alternatives – comparison
TL;DR:
NitroPack is the best Cloudflare alternative for website owners that want to speed up their website without getting wrapped up in technical issues. In a few clicks, it will deploy a CDN, optimize and convert images to next-gen formats, and run other optimizations to speed up your site.
Sucuri offers an integrated CDN and WAF (web application firewall). Plus, it provides website monitoring for important stuff like malware as well. Malware removal is included.
#1 – NitroPack
NitroPack is the best Cloudflare alternative for content creators, entrepreneurs, and publishers. It’s an all-in-one site speed and performance optimization solution that includes much more than a CDN.
Like Cloudflare, NitroPack operates a global CDN with tons of data centers distributed all across the world, which serve your website resources to the end-user more quickly for faster page load times.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. It also comes with a raft of other performance-boosting features that you won’t find in Cloudflare’s free plan, including best-in-class caching, CSS and HTML minification, image optimization, JS optimization, lazy loading, and much more.
And the best part is, it deploys all those optimizations automatically. So compared to Cloudflare, it’s a breeze to set everything up.
You don’t need any tech skills and you won’t have to write a single line of code—just install the plugin and run through a super-quick setup process. And within 5 minutes, it’ll start rolling out tons of optimizations that should dramatically increase your website performance.
We tested it out for ourselves on a test site and saw a huge jump in speed pretty much straight away. With NitroPack, document load time instantly went from 2.37 seconds to just 0.9 seconds. And Time to First Byte (TTFB) was cut in half, dropping from 0.35 seconds to 0.17 seconds.
Key features
- CDN
- Caching
- CSS optimization
- HTML optimization
- Javascript optimization
- Image optimization
- Integrations with WordPress, WooCommerce and custom websites
Pros
- All-in-one performance solution
- Includes image and code optimizations
- Applies all optimizations automatically
- Easy to use (5-minute setup)
Cons
- The free plan is only suitable for low-traffic sites
- Lacks some security features (no firewall)
Pricing
Free plan available. Paid plans start at $8/month, sign up yearly to get 2 months free. There’s no free trial but there is a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Read our NitroPack review.
#2 – Sucuri
Sucuri is a complete website security platform that includes an integrated CDN and WAF. You can use it to monitor, clean, and protect your site from malware and other security risks.
The main difference between Cloudflare and Sucuri is that Cloudflare specializes in boosting website performance, whereas Sucuri is all about website security.
It comes with a powerful cloud-based firewall that helps to protect your site from malicious attacks.
Plus, the built-in malware scanner is constantly monitoring your site for security vulnerabilities. And if malware does manage to slip through the net, Sucuri can help you to remove it.
Other features include blocklist monitoring and removal, automatic website backups, DDoS mitigation, load balancing, and more.
Aside from the security stuff, Sucuri also includes a CDN that’s capable of boosting speeds by as much as 70%. Its network of edge servers isn’t quite as large as Cloudflare’s, but it’s still distributed across all the most important areas for website traffic.
Key features
- Unlimited manual malware/hack cleanups
- Post-cleanup reports
- Advanced security scans
- Website Application Firewall (WAF)
- CDN speed enhancement
- Blocklist monitoring and removal
- SSL support and monitoring
- Virtual patching and hardening
- Advanced DDoS mitigation
- High availability/load balancing
Pros
- Best-in-class security features
- Advanced protection
- Complete website monitoring solution (uptime monitoring, spam database monitoring, etc.)
- Malware scanning and removal
- Compatible with all CMS and web hosting services
- Optional website backups (from $5/m)
Cons
- Website Security Platform Plans are expensive
- Fewer edge servers than Cloudflare
Pricing
Plans start from $9.99/month. There’s no free plan or free trial but they offer a 30-day guarantee.
#3 – Bunny.net
Bunny.net is a global content delivery network that offers a next-gen CDN and edge storage, as well as a raft of website optimization and security features.
What makes Bunny.net stand out is its performance. While it has fewer data centers than Sucuri (114 to 270+), it nonetheless provides lower average global latency (26ms compared to 28ms)
And even with its enterprise-grade performance, it’s still available for a fraction of the cost of Sucuri’s paid plans, making it superb value for money.
It’s also very easy to deploy. With Bunny Optimizer, you can accelerate your website performance with a single click. It also offers DNS, image processing, DDoS protection, perma-cache, video delivery, and much more.
Key features
- CDN
- Storage
- Optimization
- Video streaming
- DNS
- DDoS protection
- Perma-caching
- Free SSL certificate
- Real-time monitoring
Pros
- Broad feature set
- Easy to set up
- Enterprise-grade performance
- Good value for money
Cons
- Fewer PoPs than Sucuri
- No monthly CDN subscription plan (pay-as-you-go pricing)
Pricing
Pay-as-you-go CDN pricing starts from $0.01/GB, with a $1 monthly minimum. A 14-day free trial is available.
#4 – KeyCDN
KeyCDN is a dedicated, high-performance content delivery network and another one of Cloudflare’s biggest competitors.
KeyCDN’s edge servers are distributed across 6 continents, and each one has been optimized for maximum performance with an advanced TCP stack, 100% SSD coverage, and latency-based routing technology.
Aside from the CDN, it also comes with image optimization (image resizing, compression, etc.) and security features (DDoS protection, SSL support, access rules, OCSP stapling, TLS encryption, etc).
What’s great about KeyCDN is that it’s super developer-friendly thanks to the RESTful API, robust documentation, detailed reports, and flexible configuration.
In fact, the whole platform has been designed to be as easy as possible to configure to meet pretty much any specification. There’s also native integration with all the leading CMS platforms, like WordPress, Magento, Joomla!, and Drupal.
Key features
- CDN
- Image optimization
- DDoS protection
- Custom SSL certificates
- RESTful API
- CMS integration
Pros
- High-performance CDN
- Advanced image optimization and security features
- Developer-friendly
Cons
- No free option
- Geared more towards developers (setup requires some tech skills)
Pricing
Pay-as-you-go pricing from $0.04/GB to $0.01/GB depending on volume. $4 monthly minimum. No free plan or free trial is available.
#5 – Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is Amazon’s low-latency content delivery network. It’s a good alternative for enterprise users who want maximum performance, security, and developer convenience.
Amazon Cloudfront has 450+ globally-distributed PoPs, which is about as good as it gets. That’s more than any other CDN provider we’ve tried, including Cloudflare.
Built-in data compression, edge compute capabilities, field-level encryption, automated network mapping, and intelligent routing are just some of the feature