Sucuri and Cloudflare are top-rated website security and optimization services. The former is employed by some of the most reputed internet companies. Top hosting companies, such as InMotion hosting, GoDaddy, etc are using it in their technology stack. The latter is a big player in the CDN industry. Millions of websites use its content delivery network service to make their site faster. The company might be serving hundreds of millions of pages every month via its servers. Sucuri is not only a CDN company but also offers malware removal and hacked site cleaning services. CF powers vital services of many internet companies.
In the following paragraphs, we’ve covered several interesting differences and similarities between Cloudflare and Sucuri. Find out which company has cheaper CDN, firewall (WAF), website security, and performance plans among the two.
Caching
Caching is one of the most important features of content delivery networks. Sucuri and Cloudflare not only let you enable caching but also allow you to change the way the company handles the cached files. In CF, you can set up caching rules. Sucuri lets you specify the URLs you don’t want the company to cache. The user dashboard of the CDN service providers has the option to purge the entire cache or delete individual pages from the cached files. They support Google Brotli compression technology. Cloudflare can minify HTML, JS, and CSS files and enable rocket loader.
Sitecheck
Sucuri provides a free online tool called Sitecheck that scans files and analyzes code on website pages for malware infection. Before running this scanner, you won’t be asked to register an account. What does the Sitecheck tool do? The tool accepts one website or page URL as input. After entering the URL, click the button displayed on the form. The Sitecheck tool will immediately scan the code/page. Malware is nothing but malefic code on the site. If the tool detects malicious code, it will display a warning message. CF hasn’t launched such a tool for its users, but there are free online tools similar to Sucuri that enable you to check a site for malware infection.
DDoS attack prevention
DDoS attack prevention is one of the core features of the two platforms. Sucuri offers an “Emergency DDOS protection” section, while CF lets users enable the “I am under attack mode”. When any of these two functions are active, you can sit back and relax when your site is under a DDoS attack.
Firewall
Sucuri and Cloudflare firewalls can protect websites from numerous types of attacks. The firewalls of the two services require little configuration, and you can see the firewall log and check the IPs responsible for the attack or attacks on your site. CF free account lets users create and manage up to 5 firewall rules. The rules let users block/allow traffic when criteria involving one of the following things match with the condition you set:
- Cookie, country, referrer.
- Hostname, user agent, URI, IP Source address, etc.
CF Pro users are allowed to create managed firewall rules. They also get access to more detailed reports on firewall activity. Like CF, Sucuri also supports custom firewall rules.
SSL certificates
The two platforms can make your site HTTPS ready with two clicks of a button. CF can enable one of these three types of SSL certificates for your site – strict, flexible, and full. Sucuri can generate an SSL certificate for your site. It supports two SSL modes – full HTTPS and partial HTTPS. It also lets you use your own certificate. To use the certificate, you must copy the key file and paste its content into the form that appears when you click the upload certificate button. You’ll find this button in the HTTPS/SSL section under the settings menu. In the CF dashboard, you can see the number of SSL requests the CDN company has handled.
Media handling and optimization
Cloudflare will automatically optimize photos stored on their servers if you’ve subscribed to the Cloudflare images plan. CF also supports videos. If your hosting company doesn’t offer cheap storage plans or your server offers limited storage space, you can buy the Starter Bundle plan, which enables you to store up to 10000 images and up to 1000 hours of videos on their servers. The price of the Bundle subscription starts at 10 dollars per month.
Workers
CF worker is a service that enables users to create serverless code for their apps or serverless apps. On the CF website, you’ll find Cloudflare Worker examples for fetching HTML pages, serving HTML pages, fetching JSON, returning a JSON response, aggregating requests, creating redirects, etc.
Registration
Cloudflare is not only a great CDN service but also a good domain registrar. You can register 50+ types of domains with the company at a cheaper rate than leading registrars. Sucuri is a website security and CDN service provider only. You cannot register or transfer a domain to it.
Malware handling
When your site is affected by malware, the Cloudflare support team may not help you out, but if you have a paid Sucuri subscription plan, the firm’s technical support team will clean your site and fix any issue that has been caused by malware. What can malware do to your site? Malware can insert URLs in the pages, redirect the main pages to spam sites, etc. If the malware is removed on the day it infected the site, you won’t see any major or minor change in the site’s ranking in the search results, as search bots seldom crawl all website pages daily. If search bots have crawled all pages with malicious code, you may have to wait days for the rankings to stabilize.
Pricing
Sucuri doesn’t have a free plan, but Cloudflare does. CF offers several paid services grouped into these categories – Application services, Zero Trust services, Network services, and developer platforms. The price of the premium Cloudflare subscription plans starts at 20 dollars per month. The pricing of the subscription depends on the service type you choose. If you go for the business or custom service, you will have to dole out more money than the Cloudflare Pro subscription users. Sucuri subscriptions – Business platform, Pro Platform, and the Basic platform cost 499.99, 299.99, and 199.9 dollars
Closing words: If you want to quickly make your site faster without spending a dime or editing server configuration files, you can use Cloudflare. If you have a money-making site that is often targeted or attacked by spammers, hackers, etc, you can buy a CF premium/plan. Sucuri offers a guaranteed malware removal service. Thus, if your site is impacted by malware, you can use it to get your site fixed.
