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I'd rather see some serious competition for Cloudflare to be honest. They're slowly becoming the best and only choice. Competitors exist (like Incapsula) but th

I'd rather see some serious competition for Cloudflare to be honest. They're slowly becoming the best and only choice. Competitors exist (like Incapsula) but they're usually just not that good.

flurdy 8y ago
Fastly? Akamai? Pretty good competition. [1] https://www.fastly.com https://www.fastly.com [2] https://www.akamai.com https://www.akamai.com
- sascha_sl 8y ago
  Do they have a WAF? Fastly seems to have one in limited availability at least...
  - flurdy 8y ago
    * https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/waf.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/waf.jsp * https://www.fastly.com/products/cloud-security/web-application-firewall https://www.fastly.com/products/cloud-security/web-applicati... Not saying they are better than Cloudflare. I use Cloudflare myself. But they are good alternatives.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- cbg0 8y ago
  > Pretty good competition. Not when it comes to pricing.
  - ForgotMyUName 8y ago
    Both have better networks and features though. Sometimes you get what you pay for. Cloudflare is the Heroku of the CDN space. They are easy to setup, they give away free or cheap accounts to get people on their service. Once a company gets big and starts having real traffic they move off of Cloudflare to a better provider. Akamai isn't competing with Cloudflare on price, much like The French Laundry isn't competing with McDonalds on price.
    - foobarbazetc 8y ago
      Fastly has a very comparable network to CloudFlare: https://imgur.com/a/rTyV6e5 https://imgur.com/a/rTyV6e5 CloudFlare’s $200/month plan is the best CDN per $ money can buy. Once you get into “Enterprise”, then you should move somewhere else as they stop being competitive.
  - jimmy1 8y ago
    But that's not what it means to have competition. Walmart is still Amazon's competitor, despite being much cheaper in many cases.
  - gtaylor 8y ago
    Fastly has been wonderful to work with. Excellent support, being able to write VCL and deploy it to the edge has been great, and the network is fast and reliable. Also haven't had a Heartbleed type event yet.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
I agree. I do love some of what CloudFlare does, and they definitely contribute back to networking infrastructure in ways I wish other companies did and that's why I'm not entirely against them. Competition is healthy definitely. I do appreciate what they're doing with Go as well given that they've contributed code to Go itself (iirc).
josefresco 8y ago
I too was curious about competitors so I searched and found the following (there are lots more). Granted some of these probably don't overlap perfectly with CF, but they do offer at least "hosted dns": https://cloud.google.com/dns/ https://cloud.google.com/dns/ https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/premium-dns https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/premium-dns https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/dns/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/dns/ https://dyn.com/dns/managed-dns/ https://dyn.com/dns/managed-dns/ https://www.namecheap.com/domains/freedns/ https://www.namecheap.com/domains/freedns/ (free option)
- sascha_sl 8y ago
  I'd suggest Cloudflare's main product is the WAF / DDoS protection / concealment, the CDN is a nice plus of course but as soon as you start to really use it they ask you to upgrade anyway.
  - AznHisoka 8y ago
    It is also the most dangerous if they become the only dominant player. They could theoretically prevent any Google competitors from popping up.
    - adrr 8y ago
      Are they even close to becoming the dominant player? Most startups I know use fastly or CloudFront. The big players all use Akamai. I read somewhere that Akamai serves 350 of the top 500 ecommerce sites in the US.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- mjlee 8y ago
  Cloudflare's DNS is probably the least exciting aspect of their product. The real value add is in their proxy/CDN, which is pretty difficult to compete with.
dmytton 8y ago
I'm VP, Product Engineering at https://www.stackpath.com https://www.stackpath.com and we feel like our products compete nicely alongside Cloudflare in DNS, WAF, CDN and Serverless (our EdgeEngine product uses v8 just like Cloudflare workers). Our Edge Containers product launch was also on HN last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19089614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19089614
- jabart 8y ago
  Failover is a major difference I find between Cloudflare and Stackpath. Just a WAF with more options for failover or load balancing would put things on equal footing. This was based on my last trial back in November.
  - dmytton 8y ago
    It'd be great to understand a bit more about how you'd like to see this working. The WAF product team report into me so I can get a discussion going with the right people if you'd like to email me: david.mytton@stackpath.com
- kawsper 8y ago
  Hi, I am a user of MaxCDN (which was bought by Stackpath) and on every page you write "Everything customers loved about MaxCDN has been integrated into the StackPath CDN Edge Service" which isn't true and just marketing speech. MaxCDN had an API called the "raw logs api" that let my service query yours to get an understanding of what requests you have served for us, but that feature is missing with Stackpath, the feature is described here: https://reseller-docs.maxcdn.com/#raw-logs-api https://reseller-docs.maxcdn.com/#raw-logs-api
  - spben 8y ago
    Hi, This is super helpful, really appreciate it. I will say that this feature along with reporting delivery by file is among the top feature requests on the new SP// platform. We do have the ability to provide you with access logs, but it's not as convenient as the API above. We also have several users creating real-time CDN logs with our Serverless EdgeEngine so that's an option as well. Anyways, I've noted your request around the raw logs API going to the new platform and will be sure to stay on top of it. Feel free to email me anytime, always happy to help - ben.gabler (at) stackpath (dot) com
carlsborg 8y ago
AWS Cloudfront
- bbb91 8y ago
  Pricing.
delfinom 8y ago
CloudFlare's free service basically keeps any competitors from up and coming. Plenty of techies use it for personal sites and projects. It then later drives their decision to use the paid tiers for more businessy things.
nekoashide 8y ago
For us it came down to supporting various technologies we need for our application and a few extra that we are actively using. 1. mTLS 2. Websockets 3. Bot Mitigation (credential stuffing) 4. Workers We need mTLS and Websocket support. Other providers in the space may support one but not the other which is a problem.
- cobookman 8y ago
  Curious to learn about your websocket CDN needs. Mind elaborating on the use case.
  - nekoashide 8y ago
    The CDN aspect isn't really vital to our application or business needs at this time. We really liked the security aspect more and we could check off quite a few boxes without having to build that ourselves, ie, IPRM, WAF, DDOS. Websockets was a requirement in the application at that time and of course we knew we we needed to remove it as a dependency and we have for the most part.
Thaxll 8y ago
Cloudflare is what Digital Ocean is compare to AWS. Akamai is better for example.
- robertcope 8y ago
  I spent a decent part of last year testing various CDNs and this is not what I found. Cloudflare, Verizon were both better (performance, cache retention) than Akamai based on my testing. And cheaper, not even considering the cost of features that you'd have to buy from Akamai to make it a feature-equal comparison.
  - Thaxll 8y ago
    Performance testing for CDN is difficult, I'm not sure how accurate your tests were. It depends on many many parameters.

I'd rather see some serious competition for Cloudflare to be honest. They're slowly becoming the best and only choice. Competitors exist (like Incapsula) but they're usually just not that good.

flurdy 8y ago

Fastly? Akamai? Pretty good competition. [1] https://www.fastly.com https://www.fastly.com [2] https://www.akamai.com https://www.akamai.com

sascha_sl 8y ago
Do they have a WAF? Fastly seems to have one in limited availability at least...
- flurdy 8y ago
  * https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/waf.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/waf.jsp * https://www.fastly.com/products/cloud-security/web-application-firewall https://www.fastly.com/products/cloud-security/web-applicati... Not saying they are better than Cloudflare. I use Cloudflare myself. But they are good alternatives.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
cbg0 8y ago
> Pretty good competition. Not when it comes to pricing.
- ForgotMyUName 8y ago
  Both have better networks and features though. Sometimes you get what you pay for. Cloudflare is the Heroku of the CDN space. They are easy to setup, they give away free or cheap accounts to get people on their service. Once a company gets big and starts having real traffic they move off of Cloudflare to a better provider. Akamai isn't competing with Cloudflare on price, much like The French Laundry isn't competing with McDonalds on price.
  - foobarbazetc 8y ago
    Fastly has a very comparable network to CloudFlare: https://imgur.com/a/rTyV6e5 https://imgur.com/a/rTyV6e5 CloudFlare’s $200/month plan is the best CDN per $ money can buy. Once you get into “Enterprise”, then you should move somewhere else as they stop being competitive.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  But that's not what it means to have competition. Walmart is still Amazon's competitor, despite being much cheaper in many cases.
- gtaylor 8y ago
  Fastly has been wonderful to work with. Excellent support, being able to write VCL and deploy it to the edge has been great, and the network is fast and reliable. Also haven't had a Heartbleed type event yet.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

I agree. I do love some of what CloudFlare does, and they definitely contribute back to networking infrastructure in ways I wish other companies did and that's why I'm not entirely against them. Competition is healthy definitely. I do appreciate what they're doing with Go as well given that they've contributed code to Go itself (iirc).

josefresco 8y ago

I too was curious about competitors so I searched and found the following (there are lots more). Granted some of these probably don't overlap perfectly with CF, but they do offer at least "hosted dns": https://cloud.google.com/dns/ https://cloud.google.com/dns/ https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/premium-dns https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/premium-dns https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/dns/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/dns/ https://dyn.com/dns/managed-dns/ https://dyn.com/dns/managed-dns/ https://www.namecheap.com/domains/freedns/ https://www.namecheap.com/domains/freedns/ (free option)

sascha_sl 8y ago
I'd suggest Cloudflare's main product is the WAF / DDoS protection / concealment, the CDN is a nice plus of course but as soon as you start to really use it they ask you to upgrade anyway.
- AznHisoka 8y ago
  It is also the most dangerous if they become the only dominant player. They could theoretically prevent any Google competitors from popping up.
  - adrr 8y ago
    Are they even close to becoming the dominant player? Most startups I know use fastly or CloudFront. The big players all use Akamai. I read somewhere that Akamai serves 350 of the top 500 ecommerce sites in the US.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mjlee 8y ago
Cloudflare's DNS is probably the least exciting aspect of their product. The real value add is in their proxy/CDN, which is pretty difficult to compete with.

dmytton 8y ago

I'm VP, Product Engineering at https://www.stackpath.com https://www.stackpath.com and we feel like our products compete nicely alongside Cloudflare in DNS, WAF, CDN and Serverless (our EdgeEngine product uses v8 just like Cloudflare workers). Our Edge Containers product launch was also on HN last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19089614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19089614

jabart 8y ago
Failover is a major difference I find between Cloudflare and Stackpath. Just a WAF with more options for failover or load balancing would put things on equal footing. This was based on my last trial back in November.
- dmytton 8y ago
  It'd be great to understand a bit more about how you'd like to see this working. The WAF product team report into me so I can get a discussion going with the right people if you'd like to email me: david.mytton@stackpath.com
kawsper 8y ago
Hi, I am a user of MaxCDN (which was bought by Stackpath) and on every page you write "Everything customers loved about MaxCDN has been integrated into the StackPath CDN Edge Service" which isn't true and just marketing speech. MaxCDN had an API called the "raw logs api" that let my service query yours to get an understanding of what requests you have served for us, but that feature is missing with Stackpath, the feature is described here: https://reseller-docs.maxcdn.com/#raw-logs-api https://reseller-docs.maxcdn.com/#raw-logs-api
- spben 8y ago
  Hi, This is super helpful, really appreciate it. I will say that this feature along with reporting delivery by file is among the top feature requests on the new SP// platform. We do have the ability to provide you with access logs, but it's not as convenient as the API above. We also have several users creating real-time CDN logs with our Serverless EdgeEngine so that's an option as well. Anyways, I've noted your request around the raw logs API going to the new platform and will be sure to stay on top of it. Feel free to email me anytime, always happy to help - ben.gabler (at) stackpath (dot) com

carlsborg 8y ago

AWS Cloudfront

bbb91 8y ago
Pricing.

delfinom 8y ago

CloudFlare's free service basically keeps any competitors from up and coming. Plenty of techies use it for personal sites and projects. It then later drives their decision to use the paid tiers for more businessy things.

nekoashide 8y ago

For us it came down to supporting various technologies we need for our application and a few extra that we are actively using. 1. mTLS 2. Websockets 3. Bot Mitigation (credential stuffing) 4. Workers We need mTLS and Websocket support. Other providers in the space may support one but not the other which is a problem.

cobookman 8y ago
Curious to learn about your websocket CDN needs. Mind elaborating on the use case.
- nekoashide 8y ago
  The CDN aspect isn't really vital to our application or business needs at this time. We really liked the security aspect more and we could check off quite a few boxes without having to build that ourselves, ie, IPRM, WAF, DDOS. Websockets was a requirement in the application at that time and of course we knew we we needed to remove it as a dependency and we have for the most part.

Thaxll 8y ago

Cloudflare is what Digital Ocean is compare to AWS. Akamai is better for example.

robertcope 8y ago
I spent a decent part of last year testing various CDNs and this is not what I found. Cloudflare, Verizon were both better (performance, cache retention) than Akamai based on my testing. And cheaper, not even considering the cost of features that you'd have to buy from Akamai to make it a feature-equal comparison.
- Thaxll 8y ago
  Performance testing for CDN is difficult, I'm not sure how accurate your tests were. It depends on many many parameters.