Cloudflare is the most popular free content delivery network service provider. In addition to CDN, it offers add-on services such as Workers, Polish, APO, etc. Workers is free to some extent. APO costs $5 per month per site. CF also enables users to transfer or register domains. It has introduced three paid plans – Pro, Business, and Enterprise. The plans are priced at 20, 200, and XXX dollars, respectively.
Cloudflare paid plans are ideal for large websites with good revenue. People who own or administer a site with low to moderate traffic and find the paid plans of the CDN service provider expensive or users who have used CF and want to try out another content delivery network company can use one of the following content delivery network services:
CloudFront
CloudFront is a leading content delivery network service provider and the best alternative to Cloudflare. It has a free tier plan with some generous limitations. What are the limitations? CloudFront’s free tier supports 1TB data transfer and can handle 10+ million HTTP/HTTPS requests. It also lets users invoke CloudFront functions up to 2 million times programmatically or manually. The restrictions will be reset every month. CF free plan doesn’t have any data transfer limitations. This is perhaps the biggest difference between the two CDN companies.
Like other companies, CloudFront’s bill depends on the CDN bandwidth usage in the regions. The pricing of CLF in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and Israel region is 0.085 dollars. For South Africa, the Middle East, Kenya, and South America, the pricing is 0.110 dollars. For countries such as Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, you’ll be charged 0.114 USD per GB.
KeyCDN
Cloudflare has fixed pricing, but KeyCDN doesn’t. As in CloudFront, your KeyCDN bill at the end of the month depends on the number of GBs your site has transferred when the content delivery network service was active. For the North American and Europe regions, the first 10TB data transfer will cost you 0.04 per GB. For Asia and Oceania regions, the cost of 1GB data transfer up to 10TB is 0.08GB, and for Latin America/Africa regions, the price is 0.10GB. KeyCDN supports HTTP/2 technology and log forwarding. You can enable GZip compression for pages and create a custom caching policy.
Bunny
Bunny is one of the best content delivery network services on the internet. Like the above firm, it has a per GB pricing. It is one of the few companies on this list that offer a free trial. Bunny has 98 PoPs, and it offers two add-on services storage and Optimizer. BCDN charges 0.1 for 1 GB of storage, and the optimizer service costs 9.5 dollars per zone. It has an excellent rating on internet business review sites and the social media portal Facebook. According to the company, it handles over 300k requests per second and has optimized over 50 billion images to date.
StackPath
StackPath was earlier known as MaxCDN. It was a popular company in the 2010s, but when Cloudflare started its operations, the company’s popularity decreased. This content delivery network service provider has monthly upfront pricing. It supports segmented downloads and offers a custom rules editor. It also lets users create and manage serverless scripts. StackPath has 60 edge locations. Its pricing is not listed anywhere on the company’s website. You should get in touch with their support staff to learn more about their pricing.
Google Cloud CDN
The Google Cloud CDN is a great alternative to CloudFront. As Google owns it, one can expect the service and performance of the content delivery network to be top-notch. The search engine giant allows users of its CDN service to use 20 services for free. It also provides a $300 free credit. GCDN supports QUIC and HTTP 2/3 protocols and allows users to control caching. Its tariffs are nearly the same as its leading competitor Amazon CloudFront. For Asia Pacific regions, their tariff is 0.09 dollars. For traffic from China, the company will charge you 0.08 USD. The pricing for the North and South American regions is 0.08 and 0.09 dollars, respectively.
Fastly
Fastly is a high-performance Cloudflare alternative CDN service provider. It supports all variants of HTTP and TLS protocols and also supports QUIC. Every request to Fastly passes through a highly secure firewall. Fastly has one of the fastest purge times in the CDN industry. According to the company, a purge task on its servers is completed within 150 milliseconds. The company also has a robust 198 TBPS network. Fastly pricing starts at $50. The company bundles these services in the $50 plan – WAF, cloud data center, TLS/DDoS protection.
The price is in front of you. Thus, choose your content delivery network service provider wisely.
Note: Cloud computing companies such as AWS, Fastly, and Google offer many other services which Cloudflare offers. For example, Amazon offers Route 53 DNS service. Google also provides a DNS service.
