The 15 Best Cloudflare Alternatives In 2022

A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of servers distributed across different geographical locations that work together to deliver fast internet content delivery. A CDN enhances the fast transfer of assets required to load internet content. These assets include videos, images, HTML pages, stylesheets, and javascript files.

Cloudflare is one of the premier content delivery networks (CDNs) in the world. It provides the whole gamut of cloud-based solutions for website owners and network administrators. Not only does this CDN block suspicious traffic even before it hits your site, but it also protects a site from comment spam and registration spam.

However, Cloudflare lacks cache control, which may force users to handle it manually. Also, your website’s pages will load slower to new visits because Cloudflare adds a layer between your visitors and your web server, waiting to optimize the files before sending them. However, whether it’s due to several outages the service is experiencing on frequent basis, or the many criticisms levelled against the company’s association with hate-speech websites and forums.

No one can blame you if you are looking for other options. So, Here are the 15 Best Cloudflare Alternatives in 2022.

1. Imperva

Previously known as Incapsula, Imperva is a cloud-based security platform for blogs and websites and, provides DDoS protection, failover services and load balancing. One of the best features of the service is its bot-recognition engine that reduces the number of false-positives in case of even the most sophisticated layer 7 attacks.

For the unaware, layer 7 attackers often target specific areas of a website, making malicious traffic extremely hard to detect. Imperva also has an extra layer of DDoS protection that aims to protect subnet network infrastructure like FTP and email.

Like Cloudfront, it also offers a free tier, but you’ll need to pay up if you need DDoS protection or WAF. Another interesting feature is “IncapRules” – a full-fledged scripting language that Imperva claims gives “full and detailed control of security policies” to its clients.

According to Imperva, IncapRules provides access to a whole host of tools to analyze critical information about incoming traffic including, headers, client type, location and access rates.

Moreover, Imperva has dozens of data-centers with its “Behemoth” machines that can handle a whopping 170 Gb/s of data apiece and process up to 100 million packets per second.

Imperva now offers its data and app features separately, and you can check out their plans here.

Key Features:

• Offers DDoS protection, failover services, and load balancing
• Offers “IncapRules” scripting language for complete control over security policies
• DDoS protection for subnet infrastructure such as FTP and email
• Bot-recognition engine protects against Layer 7 attacks

2. BitMitigate

BitMitigate is a service that functions as a security measure to ensure websites and their users stay safe from DDOS attacks. One of its main features is that it allows the user to choose which specific traffic or protocols are to be filtered, this way allowing them to continue using their website while keeping it safe.

The factor that makes BitMitigate superior to Cloudflare is that it offers a more flexible and customizable service, allowing you to configure its features according to your needs. Moreover, instead of offering protection on a set of protocols and traffic, BitMitigate provides you with complete control over your site’s security.

This is done through a dashboard where one can see statistics about the website performance under attack, as well as being able to configure the mitigation settings. BitMitigate also offers the option to use dedicated IPs specifically for its users by renting them from hosting providers.

This means that the IP will point specifically to the user’s website and at no other.

3. CDN77

If a highly-rated CDN service at cost-effective pricing is what you are looking for, CDN77 could easily fit into your requirement. With a 70+ Tbps global network with PoPs on 6 continents, it has got you fully covered when it comes to handling large volume traffic and unexpected spikes. In terms of efficiency, it can match Cloudflare’s ability to handle huge traffic. Built-on advanced routing systems, CDN77 optimizes network routing daily with the help of the latest data from real-time packet inspection as well as AI-based aberration detection technology.

Even on the DDoS protection and security front, CDN77 is considered up to the task due largely to the automatic detection and blocking mechanism.

It comes with a proprietary Hurricane DDoS solution based on DPDK which helps it monitor traffic, keep a track of attacks and block them fast. The reliable content protection coupled with a host of access management features including TLS 1.3, secure token, GEO/IP blocking, and hotlink protection makes it quite competent. But what gives it an edge over many rivals is the seamless integration with your business via a robust API.

CDN77 is trusted by companies like ESL (the organizer of top-tier CS:GO tournaments), Udemy, and Avast.

Everything considered CDN77 can easily stake the claim of being one of the best cost-effective Cloudflare alternatives in the market right now.

Key Features:

• Highly cost-effective
• Automatic detection and blocking of DDoS attacks with Hurricane DDoS solution
• Uses AI-based aberration detection technology

4. StackPath

StackPath CDN (the service formerly known as MaxCDN) is a powerful content delivery network (CDN), relatively easy for novices to set up, yet with some very capable enterprise-level features on offer if you need them. The service network has 50+ PoPs worldwide. It’s a reasonable total, but most are in North America, South America and Europe, with only four locations in Asia and two in Oceania.

We can’t complain about capacity, though, with StackPath’s 65 Tbps total throughput outperforming providers like CDN77 and G-Core Labs (both claim 50Tbps). Getting started can be as simple as specifying an origin server, maybe tweaking DNS records and integrating the CDN with your site.

Free private SSL certificates are available if you need them, HTTP/2 support ramps up performance and there’s fine-grained control over caching. StackPath’s EdgeRules extend the service by allowing you to customize your content delivery, adding or modifying headers, redirecting a request, adding a new cache rule or even protecting your content with URL signing.

A capable Web Application Firewall (WAF) gives you substantial protection out of the box. Built-in rules block common areas of attack: SQL injection, XSS, remote file inclusion, response header injections, common WordPress exploits, and many, many more.

Many dangerous bots are blocked by the default settings, while behavior monitoring looks out for users acting in a dubious way, and suspicious visitors can be challenged with captchas to prove they’re legitimate. And if all that’s not enough, you can create custom WAF rules to block even more threats.

The Support site documents all this to a reasonable degree. It doesn’t have the detail you’ll get with Microsoft or Google, but it’s also far more readable, and there’s enough content to be useful.

But if it doesn’t help, 24/7 support is available via live chat, ticket, email and phone. CDNPerf measures CDN response times based on data taken from hundreds of millions of users every day, making the site a useful way to compare the top providers.

StackPath CDN worldwide response times are a little disappointing at 14th out of 20, with an average query time of 37ms. But keep in mind that the margins are tiny, and if your visitors aren’t evenly spread around the world, you might get a better idea of speeds from the regional figures.

StackPath ranks 10th place in North America, for instance. Doesn’t sound great, but its average query time was 34ms, and even the top-placed Google Cloud CDN was only fractionally ahead at 30ms. But on the down side, StackPath’s 17th place in Asia was based on an average response time of 116ms (no great surprise with a minimal four Asia PoPs), and the top seven CDNs all had responses under half the time.

The precise results you’ll see might vary significantly depending on where your visitors are located, then, but keep in mind that these raw speeds are only part of the story. They don’t take account of what you might do with features like StackPath’s smart edge rules, and how they can make your content delivery even more efficient.

CDNPerf’s rankings are a good starting point, but it’s just as important to look at a CDN’s features and what they might do for you.

Key Features:

• Great value
• Customizable edge delivery rules
• Free private SSL
• Powerful Web Application Firewall

5. BunnyCDN

BunnyCDN is a CDN (Content Delivery Network) based on open-source code. BunnyCDN delivers data fast, reliably, and securely to different locations around the world. The tool is not only faster than commercial CDNs, but it’s also at least ten times cheaper. One of its features is that you can customize your hostname and choose the location where your data will be delivered.

BunnyCDN is a worldwide CDN, so it enables you to deliver content in different countries that you target. BunnyCDN also provides you with cache statistics, resource management tools that give you ultimate control over your bandwidth. Its API makes BunnyCDN highly compatible with any platform, CMS, or programming language.

BunnyCDN is also very easy to use because it can function with four different types of scripts, namely: URL, HTTP, SOAP, and LWP. BunnyCDN can function even with non-DNS scripts. BunnyCDN allows video streaming and has a video delivery network with custom cache expiry. The software contains region-based pricing that starts at $0.01 per GB. Notably, its pricing is more affordable than Cloudflare’s and is region and bandwidth-based rather than monthly-based.

6. Akamai

Akamai is one of the largest and best-known CDNs and cloud services provider in the world. In fact, it is believed to be responsible for serving between 15 to 30-percent of all web-traffic.

It is feature-rich and powerful, and offers top-of-the-line security against DDoS attacks and other threats. Its Prolexic PLXedge technology provides 2.3 Tbps of bandwidth dedicated for DDoS absorption so your website remains safe.

Akamai also offers value-added services. One such service is “Kona Site Defender”, which can help companies offload their security monitoring and threat protection to Akamai.

It’s fully customisable, and allows users to monitor every thing in real-time, and make changes. That said, there are some issues here as well. For one, Akamai’s scale means that it is unable to change its rules on the fly unlike its smaller and more agile competitors.

It’s also one of the most expensive CDN service providers. Unlike Cloudflare, Akamai doesn’t offer a free tier either.

However, if pricing is not a concern, this is one of the most feature-rich Cloudflare alternatives you can get.

Key Features:

• One of the best CDN for DDoS protection and mitigation
• “Kona Site Defender” add-on is perfect for companies looking to offload security and threat mitigation
• Optimize content delivery speeds

7. KeyCDN

KeyCDN is an easy-to-use content delivery network (CDN) which provides a solid set of features for a very low price. The company has a fair-sized network of 34 servers: 9 in North America, 14 in Europe, five in Asia, four in Oceania and one each in South America and Africa. The service supports both origin pull (KeyCDN grabs content from your origin server when required) and origin push (you upload content to KeyCDN).

Origin push features include the ability to upload content via your FTP account, and synchronize it with rysnc. KeyCDN can handle regular static HTTP and HTTP/2 content, HLS and HTTP live streaming. GZip, HPACK and Brotli compression is on hand to optimize performance. Comprehensive image processing gives you more speedup options.

If you need to flip, crop, resize or trim an image, adjust the canvas size, sharpen, blur it or more, KeyCDN’s API can do this with a single copy of the image held on its edge servers. No need for the user to wait to download multiple images, KeyCDN simply transforms the image to suit your needs. Security features include support for free shared SSL and custom Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates.

There’s some mitigation from DDoS attacks. KeyCDN can use HTTP referrers to block hotlinking, and you’re able to keep ‘bad bots’ away with a click. The service offers plenty of tweaks and settings to help customize operations, including the ability to create custom caching rules and a RESTful API to automate everything.

The ability to view raw logs in your web console might help you identify any problems, or you can stream live logs via syslog to your destination of choice (at extra cost). KeyCDN pricing varies based on the geographical source of your traffic. It starts at a low $0.04 per GB for the first 10TB in North America and Europe, rising to $0.09 in Asia and Oceania, and $0.11 in South Africa and South America.

That’s around a half to a third of the prices you’ll pay with services like CloudFront and Fastly. You don’t pay for requests, either– just the traffic. Per gigabyte pricing falls even further as you use more traffic, too, dropping to $0.01 per GB after the first 100TB.

Each account supports up to three ‘zones’, perhaps websites (depending on your setup), and you can add more for a reasonable $1 per month per zone (the speedy 5centsCDN also charges $1 per zone). Push zones can be useful for storing larger files, reducing the load on your origin server.

These are charged at an extra $0.29 per gigabyte per month up to 500GB, dropping to $0.19 per gigabyte for the next 500GB, and $0.09 per gigabyte after that. Image processing is a potentially costly extra at $1 per 2,000 operations. That’s no great surprise, though, as it’s very processor-intensive, and the option could still bring major benefits to some sites.

A free trial gives you 14 days and 25GB of traffic to try the service for yourself, no credit card details required. That’s a quick and easy way to take a look at the interface, setup and support, but it’s not as generous as some of the competition.

CDN77’s trial includes 1TB of traffic, for instance, enough to see how it works with even the largest of sites. Minimum charges appear low at a tiny $4 a month, but there’s a catch: a minimum credit of $49. If you’re happy with KeyCDN’s specs and think you’re likely to stick around, that’s not much to risk.

But if you’re looking to keep payments low, StackPath CDN (formerly MaxCDN) starts at just $10 a month for 1TB of traffic, while Cloudflare’s free plan gives you the (very minimal) CDN basics for nothing at all.

8. Cloud CDN

Cloud CDN is a solution provided by Google Cloud Platform to help your website scale. It is an edge cloud service that helps to serve your content faster than ever. It allows you to host static content on the Cloud CDN servers close to the user.

The Cloud CDN content is cached on these servers, and subsequent requests by users are routed from a nearby edge location. This means it loads all assets, including HTML files, images, and media files, from a fast, low-latency edge location closest to the user, thus improving the loading speed.

Another feature of Cloud CDN is that it caches frequently accessed content on a network of over 100 edge servers around the world. Moreover, Cloud CDN allows you to configure custom cache behavior for each path of your website.

Unlike Cloudflare, you can set different cache-expiration policies and headers to meet the needs of your specific application. The tool offers a free plan to get started. On top of that, there are a variety of plans available for you, depending on how much traffic you want to use and your location.

9. Amazon CloudFront

A part of Amazon’s massive AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform, CloudFront is one of the best at what it does.

However, it can get significantly more expensive than many of the other services mentioned on the list if you want all the bells and whistles.

The service can deliver any type of web content, be it dynamic, static or streaming. CloudFront also offers a great GUI on its management console. Users can add custom SSL and it also offers wildcard cName support. One of the best features of the service is its dynamic scaling that allows it to automatically allocate more hardware resources to take care of spikes in web-traffic without any intervention on the part of the user, making it one of the most effective protections against DDoS attacks.

While Amazon CloudFront is widely regarded as one of the best and most reliable CDN service providers there is, there are a few issues that users need to keep in mind. First off, some of the settings are a bit over-simplified, so as a sysadmin, you’ll need to artificially trigger Stackoverflow just to figure out simple details like how long objects linger before being ejected.

Overall, CloudFront may not be a perfect CDN solution, but it is, very definitely, one of the best free Cloudflare alternatives there is right now.

Key Features:

• Can deliver dynamic, static, or streaming content
• Friendly User Interface
• Most reliable CDN out there
• Dynamic scaling helps handle spikes in web traffic
• Supports custom SSL and wildcard cName

10. Sucuri

Sucuri is one of the most reputable website security and monitoring service. They offer comprehensive website monitoring, scanning for malware, DDoS protection, and malware removal services. Sucuri offers CloudProxy, a website firewall and load balancing service. It blocks suspicious traffic from reaching your website by effectively blocking DDoS attacks, code injection, bad bots, and other website threats.

See our case study of how Sucuri helped us block 450,000 attacks in 3 months. Sucuri offers integration with the free Let’s Encrypt SSL for their basic plan. You can also use custom SSL certificates with their professional and business plans.

Sucuri scans your website regularly for file changes, code injection, and malware. They clean up hacked sites, with support for all popular CMS software like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. Unlike CloudFlare, Sucuri doesn’t offer a free plan. Their website security stack plan starts at $199.99 for an year, which is cheaper than CloudFlare’s pro plan.

This basic plan includes full website monitoring, website application firewall, DDoS protection, malware removal, and free LetsEncrypt SSL certificate. Instead of excluding features from lower level plans, Sucuri uses priority as an incentive for their higher paying plans.

For example, malware removal estimated time for basic plan is 12 hours, 6 hours for professional plan, and 4 hours for business plan. However, the actual cleanup timings are way faster than that for all customers. They offer 24/7 support as part of all plans. Their business plan subscribers can also use the Live Chat support.

11. Zscaler

Zscaler is a cloud security solution with over 100 data centers across the world. It has flexible scalability and top-notch performance that enables its clients to deliver content at fast speeds. Zscaler partners with internet exchange points to provide boosted performance with excellent uptime.

It reliably scales to its users’ traffic needs, including SSL. With this solution, you are well protected against cloud security issues since it responds automatically to breaches and blocks. The CDN offers a three-tiered solution with unified control and consistent policy. It contains modules that offer swift and resilient performance.

Users can send their traffic into Zscaler’s enforcement nodes to generate data logs. This capability lets users access services, applications, and content with utmost security. Its activity monitor scans the cloud system to allow users a unified interface for threat data, software and database updates, and settings.

The software has Nanolog technology for compressing logs while ensuring that they stay lossless. Zscaler uses HTML5, JQuery, and other products. While Cloudflare hides its network security features, this software shows them openly.

It has helped many large enterprises to reduce their costs by simplifying IT operations. Its prices are quote-based.

12. Microsoft Azure

When it comes to delivering high-bandwidth content, very few including Cloudflare can compete with the repertoire of Microsoft Azure. So, if top-of-the-line proficiency is at the top of your priority list, you should keep Microsoft’s offering in mind.

One of the major highlights of this content delivery network is the ability to cache static objects with the help of the closest point of presence (POP). Furthermore, it also excels in accelerating dynamic content by leveraging several networks and efficient routing optimizations. Another department where Microsoft Azure is quite good is large scaling that comes into effect when handling instantaneous high loads.

Times when you are hosting a big event, the large scaling will ensure that the over-the-top-traffic won’t bring down your site. As for customization, Azure is on par with Cloudflare (if not better). So, depending on what works best for your website, you can fine-tune the CDN service to yield the desired result.

What’s more, it also allows you to create custom mobile experiences with the help of Azure Cosmos DB, Xamarin, HockeyApp, and the smart traffic manager.

Key Features:

• One of the best for handling high-bandwidth content
• Offers Azure Cosmos DB, Xamarin, HockeyApp and more for creating custom mobile experiences
• Good at scaling to handle instantaneous high loads

13. Fastly

San Francisco-based Fastly is a versatile cloud company with a lengthy roster of big-name customers: New York Times, Spotify, Github, Kickstarter, Ticketmaster, Deliveroo and more. Fastly’s CDN follows the simpler-than-most Cloudflare-like reverse proxy model. Instead of giving you a ‘cdn.mydomain.com’ address where you can store specific files, Fastly routes all website traffic through its servers.

To make this work you must update the CNAME record for your site with the domain registrar, but after that it ‘just works’, no website code changes required. Once configured, the system operates much like any other CDN. When someone visits your site, Fastly checks their location and fetches content from the nearest point of presence (PoP).

The company offers powerful PoPs spread all around the world – 20 locations in North America, 6 in South America, 13 in Europe, 8 in Asia, 6 in New Zealand and Australia and 2 in Africa – so most web users should get a speedy response. Fastly has highly configurable support for video caching. It can deliver any HTTP-based media streaming protocol, including Apple’s HLS, Adobe’s HDS, and MPEG-DASH.

The service does its best to keep your content safe, too, with support for encryption, DRM, and secure tokens which restrict access to your media (your web app provides these, and they expire after a configurable period of time). Enterprise-level security features include a fully configurable web application firewall, capable DDoS mitigation and intelligent bot detection and blocking.

There’s new and high-end tech everywhere you look. Tired of CDNs expecting you to be impressed by their support for HTTP/2? Fastly supports the speedy UDP-based HTTP/3.

That won’t help you much right now (the big-name browsers support HTTP/3, but it’s turned off by default), but it’s good to know the option is available. Fastly already has seriously impressive real-world performance in other areas, though, including the ability to purge everything in the cache – that’s globally, in every single PoP – in 150ms or less.

The company uses this speed to enable the caching of ‘event-driven’ content. The idea is that even website objects which are updated very frequently – news headlines, stock prices – can be served by the CDN for a short time, then invalidated and reloaded almost as soon as they’re updated on your origin. When you do clear the cache, Fastly works to reduce the impact.

Its Origin Shield feature designates a specified PoP to handle requests in the event of a cache miss. If you clear the cache, your shield pulls content from the origin, and other PoPs then access the shield, preventing your server getting hammered by update requests from around the world.

A powerful Image Optimizer is available as an optional add-on. This goes way beyond the simple file and quality optimizations you might get with Cloudflare and others. It can resize images, crop or trim them, change orientation, convert format and more.

Tie this all together with Fastly’s support for Varnish Configuration Language and you can intelligently deal with all kinds of image handling decisions at the edge, for example serving a user a WebP image when you detect they’re using Chrome.

Key Features:

• Many powerful features
• Purges its cache almost instantly
• First $50 traffic for free
• Hugely configurable

14. Rackspace

Rackspace is a dedicated cloud computing platform offering CDN services to help enhance the performance of your websites, web applications, and eCommerce sites. It utilizes the pay-as-you-go pricing system which lets you pay $0.16/GB to use its services. The platform is built on a powerful cloud infrastructure to ensure fast speeds.

It has over 200 data centers across the globe. Some of its features include rules for caching, pulling content from the website’s origin servers, purging content from the CDN edge nodes, and access restrictions. It also has top-notch customer support compared to Cloudflare.

Rackspace enhances performance for publicly distributed assets including web application components, website content ads, interactive experiences, and media-like videos. CDNs reduce these assets’ load time by caching them on the edge nodes (edge servers or point of presence (POP) servers). With edge nodes distributed worldwide, they get to cache the content, serving it directly to your clients to reduce the transit time to their location.

The Rackspace Cloud Control Panel (API) has simple provisioning that helps you to CDN-enable your applications and websites in seconds regardless of where your content is stored.

You can also manage your CDN-enabled domains and all the assets and origins connected with these domains. It works well with all origins including cloud load balancers, cloud servers, dedicated servers, cloud files, and other sources that have a public interface. Its prices are quote-based.

Rackspace uses Akamai Technologies CDN, which is among the largest distributed computing platforms in the world with more than 230 edge nodes.

It can cache publicly accessible resources that are hosted in a public cloud files container or on a cloud server instance. With a single global endpoint for accessing API and a RESTful API, you have everything you need to achieve the best outcomes.

15. Reblaze

If Sucuri isn’t to your liking, Reblaze is the best alternative to Sucuri.

It’s an Israeli company with offices in the U.K. and the U.S. and, claims to have successfully protected many “high-profile clients” from from a broad range of attacks including, SQL injection, XSS and DDoS.

The company also claims to be able to protect its clients from platform-specific zero-day vulnerabilities. The service also allows its users to block incoming traffic from specific countries, cities, networks, companies and anonymizer networks.

Reblaze also protects its customers from hackers by routing all traffic through its own locked-down Security Gateways with dynamic DNS allocation. Moreover, it uses “Elastic Load Balancing” to distribute the increased traffic across its global network of Security Gateways to relieve stress on local ISPs and bandwidth providers.

Reblaze also claims to have a robust solution in place to mitigate DDoS attacks firstly by identifying and isolating malicious traffic and then, scaling its bandwidth deployment as required to absorb unusually large number of get requests.

Reblaze also claims to use “next-generation human and bot identification algorithms” to identify advanced scraper bots powered by full-stack browsers.

Key Features:

• One of the best for protection against zero-day attacks
• Good at bot-detection to protect websites from scrapers and other bots
• Elastic load balancing to mitigate spikes in traffic

Conclusion

That’s pretty much it! So, there are Best Cloudflare Alternatives.

If you have any other favorite Best Cloudflare Alternatives then don’t forget to share them with us in the comment below. Also, if you liked this article, Share on your favorite Social media platform.

Source:

• https://beebom.com/cloudflare-alternatives/
• https://rigorousthemes.com/blog/best-cloudflare-alternatives/