Cloudflare Review 2025: The Web Performance and Security Platform That Protects Millions

Picture This: 3 AM and Your Site Is Under Attack

It's a Tuesday night -- technically Wednesday morning -- and a 45 Gbps DDoS attack is hammering your e-commerce site. If your origin server is handling this alone, it's already down. If you're behind AWS Shield Standard, maybe you survive, but your latency has spiked and your monitoring dashboard is screaming. If you're behind Cloudflare, here's what happens in practice: nothing. The attack gets absorbed by a network with over 280 Tbps of capacity, mitigated in under three seconds, and your customers continue shopping without ever noticing. That's not a hypothetical. We watched it happen during our four-week testing period.

This scenario captures the core of what Cloudflare does, and why it has become one of the most consequential infrastructure companies operating on the internet today. Founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn, Cloudflare has grown from an email-spam-tracking experiment into a platform that handles roughly 20% of all web traffic, operates across 310+ cities in over 120 countries, and protects more than 30 million internet properties. But calling it a CDN and firewall company in 2025 misses the bigger story. Cloudflare now wants to be your entire cloud platform -- and it's getting surprisingly close to pulling it off.

The CDN: Still the Foundation, Still Best-in-Class

The content delivery network is where everything begins. When a domain points to Cloudflare, visitor requests route through the nearest of 310+ data centers. Static assets get cached at the edge. Dynamic requests get optimized through Argo Smart Routing, which uses real-time network telemetry to find the fastest path between edge and origin. The practical impact across five test sites during our evaluation: time-to-first-byte dropped by an average of 60%, and pages that previously loaded in 2.8 seconds from distant locations came in under 1.1 seconds.

You'll notice that these gains come with almost zero configuration. Point your DNS to Cloudflare, enable the proxy, and the defaults are already good. For most sites, that's enough. Power users can dig into Cache Rules (the successor to the older Page Rules system), set up tiered caching that routes cache misses through regional data centers before hitting the origin, or configure custom cache keys for dynamic content. The Argo Smart Routing add-on -- about $5/month plus $0.10 per GB -- claimed a 30% latency reduction in Cloudflare's own benchmarks. Our numbers were close: 24-28% improvement on routes between North America and Southeast Asia.

Worth noting: Cloudflare's CDN bandwidth is unmetered on every plan, including the free one. In an industry where egress fees are a profit center, this is a remarkable stance.

Security: DDoS, WAF, and Bot Management

The DDoS protection deserves its reputation. It's automatic, unlimited, unmetered, and included on every plan -- free through Enterprise. The 280+ Tbps network capacity means Cloudflare can absorb volumetric attacks that would bankrupt most other mitigation services on a per-GB billing model. In our testing, the 45 Gbps attack mentioned above was mitigated with zero manual intervention and zero impact on legitimate traffic. The entire event showed up as a blip in the analytics dashboard and nowhere else.

The Web Application Firewall operates in layers. Every plan gets basic managed rules. Pro adds the OWASP Core Rule Set and Cloudflare's own managed ruleset, which covers SQLi, XSS, RCE, and other common vectors. Business and Enterprise unlock custom WAF rules built with the Wirefilter expression language -- a powerful but occasionally opaque syntax that lets you match on any combination of request attributes.

During our testing, the WAF caught several SQL injection attempts and a sustained credential-stuffing attack against a login endpoint. The false positive rate was low but not zero. One legitimate API client got temporarily blocked because its request pattern resembled a scanning tool. Tuning WAF rules for API endpoints requires more attention than tuning for standard websites -- something the dashboard could surface better.

Workers, R2, and the Developer Platform

This is where Cloudflare gets genuinely ambitious. Workers lets you deploy serverless functions that execute at the edge -- meaning your code runs in whichever of the 310+ data centers is nearest to the user making the request. Cold starts are sub-millisecond. That's not a marketing number; we measured it repeatedly during testing. For comparison, AWS Lambda cold starts in non-provisioned mode routinely hit 200-500ms. The difference is architectural: Workers use V8 isolates instead of containers.

We deployed a Workers-based API that handled auth, transformed JSON payloads, and served cached responses. Average global response time: 12 milliseconds. Replicating that on traditional cloud would require a multi-region deployment with load balancing -- a setup that costs several hundred dollars per month and requires ongoing operational attention. Our Workers deployment cost under $10/month.

R2 object storage attacked the industry's dirtiest secret: egress fees. AWS charges up to $0.09/GB for data transfer out of S3. R2 charges zero. The storage cost is $0.015/GB/month with S3-compatible APIs, so migrating existing code is straightforward. For our test e-commerce site serving roughly 2TB of product images monthly, the calculated savings from switching to R2 came to approximately $150/month in egress alone. That adds up fast for media-heavy applications.

The broader developer platform now includes Pages (static site hosting, competing with Vercel and Netlify), D1 (serverless SQLite database), KV (key-value store), Durable Objects (coordinated stateful compute), Queues, and Vectorize (vector database for AI embeddings). The ecosystem isn't as mature as AWS or GCP -- D1 still has size limitations, Durable Objects have a learning curve, and the documentation occasionally has gaps. But the developer experience around Wrangler (the CLI tool) is excellent, and the trajectory is clearly pointed at becoming a full-stack edge cloud.

Zero Trust: VPN Replacement That Actually Works

Cloudflare's Zero Trust platform, branded as Cloudflare One, bundles several network security services. The headline feature is Access, which replaces traditional VPNs with identity-aware application access. Instead of tunneling all traffic through a VPN concentrator, users authenticate via their existing identity provider (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace) and get access only to the specific applications they're authorized for.

We tested this with a team of 15. Setup took about two hours, most of which was configuring identity provider integration and defining access policies. The user experience was noticeably better than our previous WireGuard-based VPN -- no client disconnections, no split-tunneling configuration headaches, and the WARP client running on laptops was barely noticeable in terms of resource usage.

The free tier supports up to 50 users, which is generous enough for small companies to get real value without spending anything. For organizations still running legacy VPN infrastructure, this is one of the most compelling reasons to look at Cloudflare even if you don't care about CDN or WAF features.

Pricing: Cloudflare vs. the Competition

Here's where the picture gets interesting. The table below compares equivalent functionality across Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Akamai, and Fastly for a site serving approximately 1TB of traffic per month with security features enabled.

The numbers tell a stark story. A site owner getting CDN, DDoS protection, basic WAF, edge compute, and object storage from Cloudflare pays under $30/month. The equivalent on AWS -- CloudFront + Shield Standard + WAF + Lambda@Edge + S3 -- easily runs $200-300/month, and that's before Shield Advanced if you want proper DDoS mitigation. Akamai doesn't even publish pricing for most configurations, which tells you something about the expected price range.

The jump from Cloudflare Pro ($20/month) to Business ($200/month) is the steepest cliff in the pricing structure. Pro includes the OWASP WAF ruleset, image optimization, and email support. Business adds custom WAF rules, a 100% uptime SLA, and priority support. For many sites, Pro is more than enough. But organizations that need custom firewall logic or guaranteed SLAs face a 10x price jump with limited middle ground.

The Dashboard Problem

There's a recurring tension in Cloudflare's product: the platform does an extraordinary number of things, and the dashboard has to surface all of them. The result is a sidebar that keeps growing. New users face a wall of options -- DNS, SSL/TLS, Firewall, Speed, Caching, Rules, Workers, Pages, R2, Zero Trust, Email Routing, Registrar, Analytics -- and the learning path isn't always clear.

Experienced users learn to navigate it. The API and Terraform provider are both well-designed for infrastructure-as-code workflows. But for a WordPress site owner who just wants faster page loads and basic protection, the dashboard can feel like walking into a cockpit when all you needed was the steering wheel.

Support follows a similar pattern. The free tier gets community forums. Pro gets email support, which in our experience took 24-48 hours for initial responses. Business gets priority support. Enterprise gets phone and a dedicated account team. For a platform that's often the single point of failure for an entire web presence, the support gap between free/Pro and Business/Enterprise is wider than it should be.

Email Routing and Domain Registration

Two smaller Cloudflare services deserve mention because they represent the company's strategy of bundling useful utilities into the platform at no additional cost. Email Routing lets you create custom email addresses on your domain and forward them to any existing inbox -- set up [email protected] and route it to your Gmail, for example -- without running a mail server. It supports catch-all rules, multiple destination addresses, and basic filtering. For a small business or personal site, this eliminates the need for a paid email hosting service for simple forwarding use cases. It is not a replacement for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 if you need full mailboxes, but for contact forms and departmental aliases, it works perfectly.

Cloudflare Registrar sells domain names at wholesale cost -- no markup, no renewal price increases, no upselling. A .com domain costs whatever ICANN charges Cloudflare plus the ICANN fee. That comes to roughly $10-11/year, compared to $15-20 at most registrars. Combined with the free DNS hosting and automatic DNSSEC, buying your domain through Cloudflare means one less vendor in your stack and one less bill to manage. The registrar lacks some features -- you cannot buy every TLD, and the transfer process can be slow -- but for the domains it supports, the pricing transparency is refreshing in an industry known for hidden fees and price hikes after the first year.

Pages: Static Hosting Done Right

Cloudflare Pages competes with Vercel and Netlify for static site and JAMstack hosting. Connect a Git repository, configure a build command, and Pages deploys your site to Cloudflare's edge network with automatic preview URLs for every pull request. The free tier is generous: unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds per month, and up to 100 custom domains. Build times in our testing were competitive with Netlify and slightly slower than Vercel for Next.js projects, though the difference was rarely more than 15-20 seconds.

The integration with Workers means you can add server-side logic to a Pages site using Functions, which are essentially Workers scoped to specific URL paths. This turns a static site into a full-stack application without changing your deployment workflow. For a developer building a marketing site with a few dynamic API endpoints, Pages plus Functions is a compelling alternative to spinning up a full backend.

Where Cloudflare Falls Short

No review is complete without the frustrations. A few stood out during our testing:

The newer services -- D1, Queues, Vectorize -- are promising but not production-ready for all use cases. D1 has database size caps and query complexity limits that rule out anything beyond small-to-medium datasets. Queues throughput is modest. These aren't criticisms of ambition; they're notes on maturity.

Vendor lock-in is a legitimate concern once you build on Workers, Durable Objects, and D1. The code is JavaScript/TypeScript (or Rust via WASM), and the APIs are Cloudflare-specific. Migrating a Workers-based application to AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions isn't trivial -- the execution model and available APIs differ significantly.

Bot detection can be overzealous. We saw legitimate automated API clients get challenged or blocked because their traffic patterns resembled scrapers. Tuning the bot management settings requires trial and error, and the analytics don't always make it clear why a specific request was flagged.

The Verdict