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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

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.
- cbzbc 8y ago
  The cloud services all have their own CDN/Proxies/WAFs - AWS has Cloudfront, Azure has edge cdn etc.
  - adventured 8y ago
    None of those services is offering a low-hassle, free CDN & proxy for smaller sites. Nobody offers one for free anywhere on earth that is of the quality and scale that Cloudflare offers. That's what lured so many sites to their service so quickly in a very competitive landscape. If you've got a site that needs $0.50 per month in CDN service, they give it to you for free, along with various other benefits included at no cost. You can throw a cheap, low traffic site (or 20 of them) onto Cloudflare and never worry about cost (whether on the CDN side or otherwise), period. It's an immense cost benefit for lower traffic sites.
pjc50 8y ago
DNS is a sideline for CF, it's the DDOS-resistant CDN that people choose them for.
Gigablah 8y ago
For DNS there's also https://ns1.com/ https://ns1.com/ .
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  They appear to skip directly from a free tier to "Contact us for pricing". That does not inspire confidence.
  - bobjordan 8y ago
    I found the enterprise pricing quickly when I wanted CDN inside China.
ATsch 8y ago
I haven't tried namecheap DNS recently, but I used to use it. I hated DNS. It would just take hours and hours for any change to propagate, regardless of TTL and it was just extremely painful to work with. I thought this was just the way DNS was, until I switched to cloudflare. Suddenly, new records appeared instantly and changes applied in seconds or minutes it felt like pure magic. So, that's my review of Namecheap freeDNS. I suppose they make it bad on purpose so people upgrade to their premium DNS?
- asah 8y ago
  +1 love namecheap but DNS would regularly fail esp "v2"
- jorgec 8y ago
  Yesterday I configure NameCheap DNS and it propagated to the first DNS in 15 minutes and globally I think it could take an hour if not less. Sometimes the problem with the DNS is not the propagation but the cache, usually, the DNS is cached locally so we (as end-users) are unable to see the changes unless we refresh the dns and it is not automatic.
- dkersten 8y ago
  I’ve been using namecheaps free DNS work in recent weeks and it propagated super quickly (2 or 3 minutes, I used a dns checker to see and various hosts around the globe all saw the changes). For my own stuff, I use digitalocean for hosting so use their nameservers for DNS.

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.

cbzbc 8y ago
The cloud services all have their own CDN/Proxies/WAFs - AWS has Cloudfront, Azure has edge cdn etc.
- adventured 8y ago
  None of those services is offering a low-hassle, free CDN & proxy for smaller sites. Nobody offers one for free anywhere on earth that is of the quality and scale that Cloudflare offers. That's what lured so many sites to their service so quickly in a very competitive landscape. If you've got a site that needs $0.50 per month in CDN service, they give it to you for free, along with various other benefits included at no cost. You can throw a cheap, low traffic site (or 20 of them) onto Cloudflare and never worry about cost (whether on the CDN side or otherwise), period. It's an immense cost benefit for lower traffic sites.

pjc50 8y ago

DNS is a sideline for CF, it's the DDOS-resistant CDN that people choose them for.

Gigablah 8y ago

For DNS there's also https://ns1.com/ https://ns1.com/ .

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
They appear to skip directly from a free tier to "Contact us for pricing". That does not inspire confidence.
- bobjordan 8y ago
  I found the enterprise pricing quickly when I wanted CDN inside China.

ATsch 8y ago

I haven't tried namecheap DNS recently, but I used to use it. I hated DNS. It would just take hours and hours for any change to propagate, regardless of TTL and it was just extremely painful to work with. I thought this was just the way DNS was, until I switched to cloudflare. Suddenly, new records appeared instantly and changes applied in seconds or minutes it felt like pure magic. So, that's my review of Namecheap freeDNS. I suppose they make it bad on purpose so people upgrade to their premium DNS?

asah 8y ago
+1 love namecheap but DNS would regularly fail esp "v2"
jorgec 8y ago
Yesterday I configure NameCheap DNS and it propagated to the first DNS in 15 minutes and globally I think it could take an hour if not less. Sometimes the problem with the DNS is not the propagation but the cache, usually, the DNS is cached locally so we (as end-users) are unable to see the changes unless we refresh the dns and it is not automatic.
dkersten 8y ago
I’ve been using namecheaps free DNS work in recent weeks and it propagated super quickly (2 or 3 minutes, I used a dns checker to see and various hosts around the globe all saw the changes). For my own stuff, I use digitalocean for hosting so use their nameservers for DNS.