Cloudflarevs
Prometheus
Prometheus: Open source monitoring and alerting toolkit for cloud native environments
Cloudflare
The web performance and security company
As of 30 August 2026, Cloudflare is free to use. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Softwr lists it under Networking. Cloudflare is made by Cloudflare Inc, launched in 2009, available on Web.
Overview
What Cloudflare does
Cloudflare protects and accelerates any internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Cloudflare's intelligent global network acts as a content delivery network (CDN), DDoS protection, DNS, and security provider.
What people use it for
- Global content delivery network (CDN) with 330+ data centres worldwide
- DDoS protection and bot blocking
- Web application security and rate limiting
- DNS management and domain protection
- Static and dynamic content caching
- Serverless computing via Cloudflare Workers
- Database and storage services (D1, R2)
- Performance optimisation for Core Web Vitals
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Cloudflare.
- Free tier limited to basic features (no advanced analytics or premium features)
- Pro tier ($20-25/month) caps at professional websites (higher tiers needed for enterprise scale)
- Caches only anonymous API GET responses (authenticated requests and non-GET methods not cached)
- Geographic coverage limited to announced 330+ cities (may not cover all regions globally)
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Cloudflare
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- CloudflarevsConsul
Consul: Service discovery, networking, and security
- CloudflarevsGrafana
Grafana: Observability and Data Visualization
- CloudflarevsIvanti
Ivanti: Security, service management, and unified endpoint management
Capabilities
Features
Global CDN
DDoS Protection
WAF
DNS
SSL/TLS
Load Balancing
Bot Management
Workers (Serverless)
GitHub
Integration with GitHub
GitLab
Integration with GitLab
WordPress
Integration with WordPress
Shopify
Integration with Shopify
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Does Cloudflare have a free tier?
Yes, Cloudflare includes a free tier with generous allowances: 100k daily requests for Workers, 10 GB monthly storage for R2, and 1 GB for Workers KV.
SourceHow much does Cloudflare cost beyond the free tier?
Cloudflare uses pay-as-you-go pricing beyond free allocations, charging per million requests, per GB-month of storage, or per vCPU-second depending on the service.
SourceDoes Cloudflare charge egress fees?
No, Cloudflare explicitly states no egress fees and no hidden costs; you only pay for the usage metrics specific to each service.
SourceWhat's the Enterprise pricing model for Cloudflare?
Cloudflare Enterprise offers custom pricing and volume discounts available through direct sales for organizations with specialized needs and large-scale usage.
SourceBehind it
Who makes Cloudflare
- Company
- Cloudflare Inc
- Based in
- San Francisco, CA
Keep looking
Where to go from Cloudflare
- Cloudflare alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Cloudflare pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Cloudflare badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Networking softwareThe full category
- Best Networking softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Networking software for
Compare Cloudflare with
- Consul
- Ivanti
- ngrok
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- Tailscale
- Ubiquiti UniFi
- Traefik
- Palo Alto Networks
- Splunk
- Catchpoint
- ThousandEyes
- ZeroTier
- Juniper Mist
- Eclipse Mosquitto
- Nebula
- ngrok
- Traefik
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Free plan12 researched notesEffortlessly manage 100+ APs in the same way you manage an individual AP
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Free plan11 researched notesInternet and network path monitoring, owned by Cisco but still sold as a standalone product on its own annual contracts
Pricing on request11 researched notesSoftware-defined mesh networking, free up to 10 devices and one network, then billed per device
Free plan12 researched notesAI-driven wireless and wired networking where a Wi-Fi Assurance subscription is a required, not optional, add-on
Pricing on request12 researched notesSmall, EPL-licensed MQTT broker that runs on hardware other brokers cannot
Open source12 researched notesCertificate based overlay network from Slack, with identity and firewall rules carried in the certificate
Open source12 researched notesReverse tunnel service that gives a local or private service a public URL without opening a firewall
Free plan12 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Cloudflare, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Cloudflare
Cloudflare alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Cloudflare pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Cloudflare
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Cloudflare badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best Networking software alternatives
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Per collector or per managed device per monthAI-driven wireless and wired networking where a Wi-Fi Assurance subscription is a required, not optional, add-on
quote, hardware plus required Wi-Fi Assurance subscription
Free, community-driven network monitoring with commercial support sold by a third-party partner, not the project itself
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Free tier plus published entry tiers, enterprise quote-only
Network observability platform built on flow and traffic data, sold on annual-only contracts starting around $24,000/year
Annual contract only, per tier
Cloud-managed networking hardware where the licence is mandatory and the hardware stops passing traffic if it lapses
quote, hardware plus mandatory recurring licence
Cloud-based network monitoring and management priced by managed device count, quote-only
quote, per managed device