--- title: Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Reviews meta_title: 'Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 667 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Cloudflare Application Security and Performance works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.5 review_count: 667 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-31' parent_category: name: Hosting url: https://www.g2.com/categories/hosting --- # Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Reviews **Vendor:** Cloudflare, Inc. **Category:** [Content Delivery Network (CDN) Platforms](https://www.g2.com/categories/content-delivery-network-cdn) **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 667 ## About Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Cloudflare is the connectivity cloud for the "everywhere world," on a mission to help build a better Internet. We provide a unified platform of networking, security, and developer services delivered from a single, intelligent global network that spans hundreds of cities in over 125 countries. This empowers organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to the world's largest enterprises, to make their employees, applications, and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while significantly reducing complexity and cost. Our comprehensive platform includes: - Advanced Security: Protect your online presence with industry-leading DDoS protection, a robust Web Application Firewall (WAF), Bot mitigation, and API security. Implement Zero Trust security to secure remote access, data, and applications for your entire workforce. - Superior Performance: Accelerate website and application loading times globally with our Content Delivery Network (CDN), intelligent DNS, and smart routing capabilities. Optimize images and deliver dynamic content with unparalleled speed. - Powerful Developer Tools: Empower your developers to build and deploy full-stack applications at the edge using Cloudflare Workers (serverless functions), R2 Storage (object storage without egress fees), and D1 (serverless SQL database). Cloudflare helps connect and protect millions of customers globally, offering the control, visibility, and reliability businesses need to work, develop, and accelerate their operations in today's hyperconnected landscape. Our global network continuously learns and adapts, ensuring your digital assets are always protected and performing at their best. ## Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users commend Cloudflare for its **robust security features** , including automatic DDoS protection and a helpful Web Application Firewall. (53 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of Cloudflare, with an intuitive dashboard simplifying security and performance management. (49 reviews) - Users appreciate the **user-friendly interface** and comprehensive features of Cloudflare, streamlining security and performance management. (43 reviews) - Users commend the **enhanced performance** of Cloudflare, noting faster page loads and seamless integration for website security. (35 reviews) - Users value the **effective DDoS protection** from Cloudflare, ensuring peace of mind with enhanced application security. (34 reviews) - Users value the **reliable performance** and security of Cloudflare, noting its fast setup and effective protection features. (34 reviews) - Users rave about the **lightning-fast performance speed** of Cloudflare, making DNS management efficient and seamless. (32 reviews) - Protection (32 reviews) - Users value the **lightning-fast speed** of Cloudflare's DNS updates, significantly enhancing their workflow efficiency. (32 reviews) - Speed Performance (32 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **complex user interface** challenging, especially when navigating advanced features and configurations effectively. (23 reviews) - Users find the platform **expensive** , especially as many useful features require upgrading to higher-priced plans. (23 reviews) - Users experience a **complex setup** requiring extra time, making it less friendly for those unfamiliar with security configurations. (18 reviews) - Users find the **complexity** of advanced configurations challenging, especially for those new to security platforms. (17 reviews) - Users note a **steep learning curve** for advanced features, which can complicate their overall experience with Cloudflare. (14 reviews) - Learning Difficulty (14 reviews) - Difficult Learning Curve (13 reviews) - Users find **poor customer support** frustrating, lacking direct channels for technical inquiries and timely resolutions. (12 reviews) - Users experience **pricing issues** with Cloudflare, citing potential costs and questionable support for small business customers. (12 reviews) - Limited Features (11 reviews) ## Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Reviews ### 1. Elegant, Unified Edge Security and Performance Platform **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aswindev P. | Consultant, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 31, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Shifting from cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines straight to the internet edge, Cloudflare is arguably one of the most elegant architectures I work with. ​To evaluate Cloudflare Application Security and Performance accurately, you have to stop thinking of it as just a Content Delivery Network (CDN). It is a globally distributed, highly programmable edge control plane. ​Here is what I like best about the platform, and where it provides the highest upside for enterprise architectures: ​1. The "Single Pass" Architecture (Zero-Latency Security) ​Unlike legacy vendors that force you to backhaul traffic to specific scrubbing centers for DDoS mitigation or WAF inspection, Cloudflare runs its entire stack WAF, CDN, Bot Management, and Serverless Workers on every single server across more than 330 cities globally. ​The Upside: A user's web request is decrypted, inspected for malicious payloads, routed, and cached in a single pass, just milliseconds away from their physical location. Mitigation happens at the edge near-instantaneously, ensuring you don't have to sacrifice application performance to gain enterprise-grade security. ​2. The "Global Immune System" Advantage ​Because Cloudflare sits in front of roughly 20% of all websites, their telemetry and data advantage is unmatched. ​What is most helpful: They use this massive scale to train their machine learning models for threat detection. When a massive zero-day vulnerability drops (like a Log4j or a new CVE), Cloudflare's security team deploys a virtual patch across their entire network within hours. Your applications are often protected from exploits before your DevOps team even has time to schedule a patching window. ​3. Killing User Friction (Bot Management & Turnstile) ​Traditional bot management ruins the user experience with endless, frustrating CAPTCHAs. ​The Upside: Cloudflare integrates its Bot Management directly into the edge and heavily utilizes Turnstile a free, privacy-preserving, and invisible alternative to CAPTCHA. It effectively stops credential stuffing, API scraping, and inventory hoarding without annoying human users. ​Furthermore, their API Shield extends this protection by discovering API endpoints, uncovering misconfiguration risks, and blocking malicious probing before it ever hits your origin servers. ​4. Programmability via Workers (Developer Upside) ​Security tools are often rigid, but Cloudflare's platform is incredibly developer-centric. ​What is most helpful: If the out-of-the-box WAF rules don't fit your exact business logic, Cloudflare Workers allows engineering teams to deploy custom serverless functions globally. We can intercept a request, run custom authentication checks, rewrite headers, or dynamically route traffic based on real-time loads all without touching the core backend application code. It operates effortlessly within CI/CD workflows and Infrastructure as Code (like Terraform). ​Ultimately, the biggest upside of Cloudflare is that it completely collapses the edge stack. You can rip out a legacy CDN, a standalone WAF, and a separate bot management appliance, and replace them all with a unified platform that accelerates and secures the application simultaneously. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** While Cloudflare's edge architecture is elegant, it introduces its own set of operational headaches. When you route 100% of your enterprise web traffic through a third-party reverse proxy, you trade visibility for convenience. ​Here are the biggest architectural friction points and downsides you will encounter when deploying Cloudflare Application Security and Performance in a production environment: ​1. The "Black Box" of False Positives ​Cloudflare's Managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules are excellent at blocking zero-day exploits, but they frequently trigger false positives on legitimate, complex API traffic (like GraphQL queries or custom JSON payloads). ​The Friction: When a legitimate user gets blocked by a managed rule, troubleshooting is notoriously painful. Because Cloudflare owns the rule logic, it often feels like a "black box." Your DevOps team will spend significant time digging through Security Events logs trying to figure out exactly why an anomaly score was triggered. To fix it, you often have to bypass or disable specific OWASP rules entirely, which weakens your overall security posture. ​2. The Origin Bypass Vulnerability ​This is a classic architectural flaw. Cloudflare only protects your application if the traffic actually goes through Cloudflare. ​The Friction: If an attacker manages to discover the true IP address of your backend origin server (via historical DNS records, server misconfigurations, or leaked SSL certificates), they can bypass Cloudflare's WAF, DDoS mitigation, and Bot Management completely and attack your infrastructure directly. To secure this, you have to strictly enforce Authenticated Origin Pulls (mTLS) or configure complex network firewalls to ensure your servers drop any packets that do not originate from Cloudflare's IP ranges. ​ 3. The "Enterprise Paywall" for Telemetry ​Cloudflare's pricing model draws you in with a low entry cost, but the features required for true enterprise architecture are heavily paywalled. ​The Friction: If you need to stream your raw HTTP request logs and WAF telemetry into a SIEM (like Splunk or Datadog) for long-term retention and threat hunting, you must be on an Enterprise tier. Furthermore, the advanced Bot Management platform which is critical for stopping sophisticated credential stuffing is also restricted to expensive Enterprise contracts. Smaller organizations frequently experience "sticker shock" when they try to graduate from basic CDN caching to full application security. ​ 4. The Single Point of Failure (Centralization Risk) ​By placing Cloudflare in front of your entire stack, you are consolidating your DNS, WAF, CDN, and Load Balancing into a single vendor. ​The Friction: If Cloudflare experiences a global routing leak or a configuration outage which has happened multiple times in recent years your application goes completely dark. Even if your AWS or Azure backend is running perfectly, your users will see a 502 Bad Gateway or a Cloudflare error screen. You are outsourcing your uptime entirely to their network stability. ​Ultimately, Cloudflare shifts the operational burden away from managing your own hardware appliances, but it replaces it with the burden of managing complex edge routing rules and fighting aggressive caching behaviors. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** From a business perspective, deploying Cloudflare isn't just about blocking hackers; it is an aggressive infrastructure consolidation play. When you architect for modern multi-cloud environments, you quickly realize that gluing together disparate performance and security appliances is incredibly expensive and operationally fragile. ​Here are the core business problems Cloudflare solves, and the direct benefits to the enterprise bottom line: ​1. Eliminating Vendor Sprawl and Infrastructure TCO ​ The Problem: Enterprises traditionally buy a Content Delivery Network (CDN) from one vendor, a Web Application Firewall (WAF) from another, and a Bot Management appliance from a third. This creates a fragmented stack, complex network routing, and massive, overlapping licensing costs. ​The Benefit (Cost Reduction): Cloudflare collapses all of these edge functions into a single, unified connectivity platform. By replacing legacy hardware load balancers, dedicated DDoS scrubbing centers, and disparate SaaS contracts with a single programmable edge, organizations significantly reduce their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Your engineers no longer have to manage hardware lifecycles or troubleshoot competing policies across three different vendor dashboards. ​2. The Cloud Egress Tax & Bandwidth Optimization ​ The Problem: Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP charge heavy data transfer fees for outbound traffic (egress). If you are serving massive amounts of data, or worse, serving malicious bot traffic directly from your origin servers, it inflates your monthly cloud bill exponentially. ​ The Benefit (Cost Avoidance): Cloudflare caches static and dynamic content at the edge, drastically reducing the request load on your origin servers. More importantly, by blocking automated API scraping, credential stuffing, and volumetric DDoS attacks at the network edge, you stop paying your cloud provider to serve data to attackers. This can cut bandwidth and egress expenses significantly in some enterprise cases by up to 90%. ​3. Revenue Loss from Latency and Downtime ​ The Problem: In modern SaaS and e-commerce, latency directly kills conversion rates. Furthermore, if a targeted attack takes down your main application control plane, the business bleeds revenue by the minute. ​ The Benefit (Business Continuity): Cloudflare’s global Anycast network places content within 50 milliseconds of roughly 95% of internet users. Because it inspects security payloads, executes serverless code, and routes traffic in a single pass, it accelerates application performance without adding a "security tax" to load times. Faster load times translate directly to higher user retention. Additionally, edge load balancing intelligently steers traffic away from unhealthy backend servers, ensuring continuous high availability. ​4. The Operational Burden of Emergency Patching ​ The Problem: When a massive zero-day vulnerability drops in an open-source library, IT teams have to scramble, pulling weekend all-nighters to manually patch vulnerable backend containers before they are exploited. ​ The Benefit (Risk Mitigation): Because Cloudflare proxies roughly 20% of internet traffic, they operate as a massive global immune system. When a new threat emerges, they can deploy virtual patches across their entire global edge network in seconds. This immediate Layer-7 WAF protection buys your infrastructure teams the critical time they need to test and deploy permanent backend patches safely during normal business hours, without leaving the business exposed. ​Ultimately, I utilize Cloudflare to shift the burden of security and performance as far away from the origin infrastructure as possible. It catches the noise at the edge so your core infrastructure can focus purely on business logic. ### 2. Unified Security and Performance Platform That Delivers Fast, Reliable Results **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Atharva S. | SRE, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is how it combines security, networking, and performance optimisation into a single platform. Features like the Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, CDN, bot management, and caching work seamlessly together to improve both website security and user experience. The dashboard is well organised and easy to navigate, making it simple to configure policies and monitor traffic. Integrations with popular cloud platforms, DNS services, and development workflows are straightforward, and the platform has consistently delivered fast, reliable performance with minimal latency. Overall, it has helped improve application availability, strengthen security, and reduce infrastructure overhead while providing excellent value through a unified, AI-assisted security platform. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** One area where Cloudflare Application Security and Performance could improve is making some of its advanced security and traffic management features easier to configure for users who are not networking or security specialists. The platform offers extensive capabilities, but fine-tuning WAF rules, bot management, and caching policies can involve a learning curve. I'd also like to see more granular reporting, deeper analytics for troubleshooting, and clearer guidance on the impact of specific configuration changes. While performance and reliability have been excellent, expanding onboarding resources and providing more AI-driven recommendations for security policy optimisation would make the platform even more accessible and efficient for teams managing complex environments. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solves the challenge of protecting internet-facing applications while improving speed, reliability, and scalability. Instead of managing separate solutions for DDoS protection, Web Application Firewall (WAF), CDN, bot mitigation, SSL, and traffic optimisation, it brings these capabilities together on a single platform. Its global network, intelligent caching, and seamless integrations with cloud providers and development workflows help reduce latency, improve application availability, and simplify security management. This has reduced operational overhead, strengthened protection against common web threats, improved page load times, and allowed teams to focus more on building and maintaining applications rather than managing multiple security and performance tools. ### 3. Enterprise-Grade Security and Global Performance in One Cloudflare Platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sai Sumanth C. | Customer support specialist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Cloudflare Application Security and Performance stands out by combining enterprise-grade protection with global edge acceleration in a single, cohesive ecosystem. The UI/UX makes complex infrastructure management easier through a clean, single-pane dashboard, while deep integrations—enabled by robust APIs, SIEM connectors, and serverless Cloudflare Workers—fit smoothly into existing DevOps workflows. On the performance side, its massive Anycast global network can dramatically reduce latency and help mitigate large Layer 7 DDoS attacks without bottlenecking traffic. Pricing/ROI also feels strong, thanks to a generous free tier and predictable upgrade paths that can reduce origin server costs. That said, the support and onboarding experience can be inconsistent: lower tiers lean heavily on self-service community documentation, while Enterprise tiers benefit from dedicated support managers. Lastly, its AI/Intelligence capabilities (including automated bot mitigation, WAF ML rules, and AI Gateway) help it proactively adapt to emerging zero-day threats in real time across billions of daily edge requests. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Even though the timeout feature for authentication is useful and improves security, it can be somewhat annoying. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** It provides security for profiles and users, helping enhance the overall security of our systems and technical environment. ### 4. All-in-One Security and Performance Platform with a Fast Global Edge Network **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rene M. | Solution Architect, Outsourcing/Offshoring, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 22, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** One of Cloudflare’s biggest strengths is how it brings multiple capabilities together in a single platform. The Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, bot management, SSL/TLS management, CDN, caching, and DNS services work seamlessly to protect applications while also improving performance. Its global edge network significantly reduces latency, and the caching and optimization features noticeably improve page load times for users around the world. Setup is straightforward for common use cases, yet it still offers advanced customization through rules, Workers, and APIs when needed. I also appreciate the visibility Cloudflare provides through its analytics and security dashboards. It’s easier to identify threats, monitor traffic, and troubleshoot issues early, before they impact users. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Some of the more advanced security features and rule configuration options come with a learning curve, particularly for teams that don’t have dedicated networking or security expertise. Also, many of the most powerful enterprise capabilities are limited to the higher-tier plans. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** It’s an excellent solution for businesses of all sizes that want to strengthen application security while improving website performance and availability. It’s particularly valuable for organizations operating high-traffic websites, APIs, SaaS platforms, or e-commerce applications, where reliability and speed matter. ### 5. Easy Setup, Powerful WAF and CDN That Just Works **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohd J. | Administrative Assistant, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 21, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Honestly, the best part is just how easy it is to set up and manage. We used to struggle with complex firewall rules, but Cloudflare’s dashboard is super straightforward. The WAF catches basically all the junk traffic before it even hits our servers, and the CDN actually speeds things up noticeably for our users. I don't have to think about it much once it's running, which is exactly what you want from this kind of tool. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The pricing can get pretty steep once you start needing the more advanced features, like detailed bot management. It feels like things get expensive fast as you scale up. Also, if you run into a weird technical edge case, getting a quick, helpful answer from support can be tough unless you're paying for one of their top-tier enterprise plans. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a reliable way to stop DDoS attacks and bad bots from crashing our site or eating up all our server bandwidth. Cloudflare just sits in front of everything and filters out the garbage. The main benefit for me is peace of mind -- our site stays online, pages load fast for users no matter where they are, and our hosting bills have actually gone down because we aren't processing all that malicious traffic ourselves. ### 6. Easy SSL Setup and Faster Website Performance with Cloudflare **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ajay B. | Sr. Python Fullstack Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I started using Cloudflare for my website and so far it's been good. Setting up SSL was easy and DNS changes happen quickly. I also noticed my website is loading faster now. Haven't faced any major problem till now. Overall, I'm happy with it and will continue using it. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The service is good, but sometimes DNS changes takes longer than I expected. Also there are too many options in the dashboard, which makes it confusing for new users. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare is helping me improve my website speed and security without spending much time on server configuration. It handles SSL, caching, and protects my site from unwanted traffic and bots. Because of this, my website loads faster, feels more reliable, and I don't have to worry as much about security issues. It also saves me time since most things are easy to manage from one dashboard. ### 7. Our trusted platform for security, performance, and edge computing **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pablo H. | Program Tech Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 08, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Cloudflare provides a comprehensive platform that allows us to protect, accelerate, and extend our digital services from a single solution. We use it extensively as our CDN and WAF in front of our entire digital ecosystem, serving millions of requests with low latency through its global edge network. Beyond content delivery, we rely on Cloudflare’s security capabilities—including WAF rules, bot management, rate limiting, IP allowlists, and access control—to protect critical APIs and customer-facing services. We also use Cloudflare Workers to build lightweight serverless services at the edge, enabling us to deploy functionality closer to users while reducing latency and operational complexity. The platform is highly reliable, easy to automate, and scales seamlessly to support our traffic demands. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** One area for improvement is the responsiveness of customer support. While the support team is knowledgeable and helpful, response times have occasionally been slower than we expected, particularly for issues that required prompt attention. Faster response times would further improve the overall experience. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare helps us solve three critical challenges: security, performance, and scalability. It protects our public services against malicious traffic through WAF, bot management, and rate limiting, while simultaneously improving application performance by serving cached content from its global edge network. Cloudflare Workers also enable us to deploy serverless services close to our users, reducing latency and simplifying our architecture. As a result, we can deliver a faster, more secure, and more resilient experience for millions of customers while reducing operational overhead. ### 8. Secure access with WARP and solid stability even during traffic peaks **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 08, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** From Support, I am not a direct user of Cloudflare (the Cybersecurity team manages it), but its impact is clearly noticeable on a day-to-day basis. Thanks to Warp, we can access internal pages that would otherwise be inaccessible, and this strengthens access security. Additionally, during traffic spikes or attempted attacks, the platform remains stable and we have not experienced any visible outages for the user. This prevents avalanches of tickets and complaints. I perceive the ROI mainly in the incidents avoided, something especially critical in a financial platform, where any downtime quickly increases the volume of contacts. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** As I am not a direct user of the console, my visibility on specific configurations or issues is limited. When a question arises, I rely entirely on the Cybersecurity team to get context, which sometimes slows down communication with the end user. It would also be useful to have access to a more simplified panel or receive direct alerts for Support, so that we can anticipate and confirm if an increase in tickets is due to a Cloudflare block, without having to escalate it every time. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare helps us keep the platform stable and protected against attacks or traffic spikes. In Support, this directly translates into fewer service outages and, therefore, fewer avalanches of tickets and complaints. Additionally, thanks to Warp, we have secure access to internal pages that would otherwise be inaccessible, which strengthens access control without adding friction to the team. Overall, all of this allows us to focus on user support instead of having to manage crises arising from availability or security issues. ### 9. Cloudflare Makes Website Security Much Easier **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jerome R. | Founder and CEO of 2kabes, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like most is how easy it is to manage both security and performance in one place. I use Cloudflare for DNS, SSL, caching, firewall protection, and traffic monitoring. The dashboard is straightforward, and changes usually take effect quickly. Even the free plan includes a lot of useful features. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The dashboard can feel overwhelming because there are many settings and some features are hard to find unless you already know where to look. The documentation helps, but certain configurations still take time to understand **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare helps protect my websites from malicious traffic while also improving loading speed through caching and its global network. It gives me SSL, DNS management, security rules, and performance tools in one place, which saves time and reduces the need for several separate services. ### 10. Powerful Security and Faster Performance in One Intuitive Cloudflare Platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Othrax B. | Student, Computer Networking, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 17, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is how it combines powerful security features with excellent website and application performance in a single platform. The dashboard is clean and intuitive, making it easy to configure WAF rules, DDoS protection, caching, SSL/TLS settings, and traffic analytics without requiring extensive manual management. One of the most valuable benefits has been the performance improvements delivered through Cloudflare's global CDN and intelligent caching. Pages load faster for users across different regions, which has improved both user experience and application responsiveness. The real-time analytics and monitoring tools also provide clear visibility into traffic patterns, threats, and performance metrics, helping us identify issues quickly. Cloudflare integrates seamlessly with our existing infrastructure and third-party services, making deployment straightforward. The onboarding process was smooth, and the documentation is comprehensive, allowing teams to get value from the platform quickly. Support resources and community documentation have also been helpful whenever advanced configurations were needed. An unexpected benefit has been the AI-powered threat detection and automated security features that help identify and mitigate suspicious activity with minimal manual intervention. This automation reduces operational workload while strengthening overall security. From a pricing and ROI perspective, Cloudflare delivers significant value by reducing infrastructure strain, improving application availability, and protecting against costly security incidents. Overall, it provides an excellent balance of security, performance, ease of use, and scalability for organizations of all sizes. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** One downside of Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is that some advanced security and performance features are only available in higher-tier plans, which can become expensive for smaller organizations as their requirements grow. While the platform is powerful, certain configurations—such as custom WAF rules, bot management settings, and complex traffic-routing policies—can have a learning curve for new users. Another challenge is that troubleshooting can sometimes be difficult because traffic passes through Cloudflare's network before reaching the origin server. When issues occur, it may take additional time to determine whether the root cause is related to Cloudflare settings, DNS configuration, caching behavior, or the application itself. Although the dashboard is generally user-friendly, the large number of features and settings can occasionally feel overwhelming, especially for teams that are new to application security. In some cases, security rules may require fine-tuning to avoid false positives that could block legitimate traffic. However, these drawbacks are relatively minor compared to the overall security, performance, and reliability benefits the platform provides. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare Application Security and Performance helps solve several critical business challenges, including application security, website performance, uptime, and traffic management. Before implementing Cloudflare, protecting applications from threats such as DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and common web vulnerabilities required significant manual effort and multiple separate tools. Cloudflare centralizes these capabilities into a single platform, making security management more efficient. The platform has also improved application performance through its global CDN, intelligent caching, and traffic optimization features. This has reduced page load times and improved the overall user experience, especially for users accessing services from different geographic regions. Faster and more reliable applications contribute to higher customer satisfaction and engagement. Another important benefit is increased availability and reliability. Cloudflare helps absorb large traffic spikes and mitigates attacks before they reach the origin infrastructure, reducing downtime risks and ensuring business continuity. The real-time analytics and security insights also enable faster identification and response to potential issues. Overall, Cloudflare helps reduce operational overhead, strengthen security, improve performance, and enhance application reliability, allowing teams to focus more on business growth and less on infrastructure and security management. ### 11. Eight Years Later, Cloudflare Remains a Core Part of My Technology Stack **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chevas M. | IT Security Architect, Marketing and Advertising, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 15, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Title: One of the Most Valuable Technology Platforms I Have Used in the Past Decade I have been using Cloudflare for more than eight years across personal projects, small businesses, and enterprise environments. As a Security Architect, I rarely encounter products that consistently deliver on their promises over such a long period of time, but Cloudflare is one of those exceptions. What initially attracted me to Cloudflare was the ability to improve website security and performance with minimal effort. Over time, it became a foundational part of my technology stack. Today, I rely on Cloudflare for DNS management, CDN services, SSL/TLS management, Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, Cloudflare Tunnel, Zero Trust access controls, analytics, bot management, and AI crawler controls. The biggest strength of the platform is its ability to provide enterprise-grade capabilities to organizations of every size. Features that previously required expensive hardware appliances, multiple vendors, and dedicated security staff are now available through a single platform. The fact that Cloudflare offers so much value through its free plan is remarkable. In my opinion, no business owner should operate a public-facing website without Cloudflare or a comparable service protecting it. From a security perspective, Cloudflare has helped reduce attack surface, mitigate malicious traffic, protect administrative interfaces, and improve visibility into threats. The WAF, DDoS protection, and bot management features provide significant protection without requiring constant tuning. Cloudflare Tunnel and Zero Trust have been especially valuable by allowing secure access to applications without exposing infrastructure directly to the internet. From a performance perspective, Cloudflare consistently improves page load times, caching efficiency, and overall website reliability. Even small websites can benefit from the global content delivery network and optimization features. The impact is noticeable both for website visitors and backend infrastructure. The platform also integrates well with modern technology stacks. I have successfully used Cloudflare with WordPress, Microsoft 365, Azure, Google Workspace, various cloud platforms, and numerous business applications. Deployment is generally straightforward, and most organizations can realize value very quickly. Another area where Cloudflare stands out is innovation. Over the years I have watched the platform expand from a CDN and security provider into a comprehensive application delivery, networking, security, and developer platform. Their continued investment in Zero Trust, AI-related controls, threat intelligence, and application security demonstrates a strong understanding of where technology is heading. No product is perfect. Some advanced services have a learning curve, and the growing number of capabilities can occasionally make navigation more complex for new users. However, the benefits far outweigh these challenges, especially given the depth of functionality available. Very few products earn my unconditional recommendation. Cloudflare is one of them. Whether you are protecting a personal website, managing a small business, or securing enterprise infrastructure, Cloudflare delivers exceptional value, strong security, excellent performance, and one of the best returns on investment available in technology today. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** One of my biggest frustrations over the past year has been the pace of change within the user interface. Cloudflare continues to add impressive capabilities, but the navigation, menu structure, and feature locations have changed frequently. As someone who uses the platform regularly, I occasionally find myself searching for settings that were previously easy to locate. The rapid expansion of services has also increased the complexity of the platform. While this reflects Cloudflare's growth and innovation, new users may find the number of available products and configuration options somewhat overwhelming at first. For advanced features such as Zero Trust, WAF customization, application security, and developer services, there can be a learning curve. Improved consistency in navigation and greater stability in the interface would make it easier for long-time users and administrators to adapt to new functionality. That said, these concerns are relatively minor compared to the overall value of the platform. Most of the changes have been introduced to support new capabilities, and Cloudflare continues to be one of the most innovative and valuable technology platforms I use. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare solves several critical challenges that every organization with an internet presence faces: security, performance, reliability, and operational complexity. From a security perspective, Cloudflare helps protect websites, applications, and infrastructure from DDoS attacks, malicious bots, vulnerability exploitation, credential attacks, and unwanted internet traffic. The Web Application Firewall (WAF), bot management, rate limiting, and Zero Trust capabilities have significantly improved our security posture while reducing the amount of time spent manually responding to threats. From a performance perspective, Cloudflare's global CDN, caching, optimization, and traffic routing services improve website speed, reduce latency, and enhance the user experience. This has helped improve site responsiveness while reducing load on backend infrastructure. Cloudflare has also simplified operations by consolidating multiple services into a single platform. Instead of managing separate solutions for DNS, SSL certificates, content delivery, security controls, remote access, analytics, and application publishing, these capabilities can be managed from one centralized platform. One of the most valuable benefits has been reducing risk without significantly increasing administrative overhead. We gain enterprise-grade security, visibility, and performance improvements without needing to deploy additional hardware or maintain multiple vendors. The result is a more secure, more reliable, and easier-to-manage environment. As Cloudflare has expanded into Zero Trust, Cloudflare Tunnel, AI bot controls, and application security services, it has become much more than a CDN provider. It has evolved into a strategic platform that helps secure applications, improve performance, simplify operations, and support modern business and security requirements. ### 12. Easy Setup, Strong Protection, and Faster Loading with a Global CDN **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** LOKESH G. | Engineer.SGB TCS-FS CORE BANKING,Production, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 22, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** It protects against common online attacks, improves website loading speed through its global CDN, and is easy to set up and manage. The dashboard is straightforward and user-friendly, which makes it simple to monitor traffic and keep an eye on overall website performance. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** One thing I dislike is that some of the more advanced security and performance features are only available on the higher-priced plans. Also, it can take new users a while to understand all the settings and make sure everything is configured correctly. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare helps keep my website secure from online attacks while also making it load faster for visitors. It cuts down on downtime, improves overall site performance, and gives me peace of mind by handling security and traffic efficiently, even during busy periods. ### 13. Solid security and smart performance in one step **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cristian T. | Técnico de Operaciones, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 07, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like the most is the security. I like that it processes everything in a single step on the server closest to the user, also its global-scale DDoS mitigation without any problem and its intelligent performance. It allows me to manage DNS, SSL certificates, firewall rules, ... **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like the least is the WAF and the false positives, as well as the gap between the features of the plans offered, since there is a big difference between choosing one or the other, the technical support is quite basic in the basic plans, and the loss of direct visibility. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Resolve unexpected traffic spikes, as it acts as a global buffer. Also, denial of service attacks, as its network detects and blocks these attacks. ### 14. Reliable Security with Excellent Performance **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Sports | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like most about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is that it brings strong security and fast performance together in one platform. Features like the Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, and the CDN work seamlessly as a set, so it’s easy to protect applications while also improving load times and the overall user experience. The dashboard feels intuitive, and managing security rules is straightforward without adding unnecessary complexity. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** One thing I dislike is that some of the more advanced security features are only available on higher-tier plans, which can get expensive for smaller businesses. On top of that, the sheer number of configuration options can feel overwhelming at first. When issues come up, troubleshooting sometimes means digging through the documentation to find the right details. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare Application Security and Performance helps protect our applications from security threats such as DDoS attacks and other malicious traffic, while also improving website speed and reliability. As a result, we’ve seen less downtime and a better overall user experience thanks to faster page loads. It also gives us greater confidence that our applications stay available and secure, without needing constant manual intervention on our side. ### 15. All-in-One Speed, Security, and Availability in One Dashboard **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Oil & Energy | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The best thing I like about this Cloudflare Application platform is it brings the website performance, along with the security and all the needed availability tools, into a single platform. Instead of using separate tools for CDN and bot protection, their API security and caching, along with the traffic management allows us to manage most of these requirements from a single dashboard. The biggest advantage is the combination of speed and protection, where it helped us to improve the page load performance while the security features help protect applications for malicious traffic and dos attacks. This also reduces the unnecessary load on the application infrastructure and gives us better confidence during the traffic spikes or attack attempts. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Their main drawback is their cloud fair which can feel complex when it goes beyond the basic setup, where their initial DNS and CDN setup is simple, but also advanced features like custom rules and bot management equipped with API shield need a proper understanding at the initial level. Sometimes, even legitimate users or crawlers or even 3rd party app integration may get challenged or blocked if the rules are too strict. The dashboard has improved a lot, but because it offers more products, new users may need time to understand which setting is located and how different features interact with each other. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** This platform helped us by solving the problem into 3 categories: application security, website performance and also the availability of its own. From a performance perspective, the image optimisation and age delivery capabilities help us to improve page loading and speed for users across different regions. This is very helpful for businesses with customers from multiple geographies. From an operations perspective cloudfare reduces dependency on multiple tools; instead of separately managing and mitigating along with the SSL and traffic rules, the team can manage everything right from a single place. And also another biggest benefit in our performance our application becomes faster and more stable, better than the protected one, without even requiring major changes to the underlying application architecture. ### 16. Effortless Security with Unmatched Performance **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ronak D. | Senior Project Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I like how Cloudflare Application Security and Performance lets me easily block countries we don't do business with just with easy clicks. It gives me the ability to monitor requests by individual IP addresses and block them if necessary. The analytics part is amazing and helps me quickly glance at the traffic. The AI Crawl traffic is also impressive, as it helps me understand where the traffic is coming from and how it's managed. Migrating DNS was super easy, and their caching mechanism makes our application work faster without having to process every request by reaching out to the server. I've seen many images being processed using this caching mechanism. Setting it up was a breeze; it was just plug in, and everything was ready with zero downtime. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Some of the feature are only available with higher version but essential for smaller business too. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Cloudflare Application Security and Performance to secure our Magento application, stop unauthorized access and bots, filter traffic, and protect against DDoS attacks. It includes firewall and CDN services, offering thorough web application security with easy-to-use controls. ### 17. Stronger Security and Faster Performance with Minimal Overhead **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Subhashree S. | Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What stands out to me is Cloudflare's ability to improve both security and performance without requiring major infrastructure changes. The global edge network, DDoS protection, WAF, caching, SSL/TLS, and traffic optimization work together to deliver faster, more secure applications with minimal operational overhead. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The main downside is that some advanced features are locked behind premium plans, and the platform can take time to learn if you're new to web security. However, once configured properly, it provides strong security and performance benefits. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps keep applications secure and fast by protecting against cyber threats while optimizing content delivery. This improves uptime, enhances the user experience, and reduces the operational effort required to manage security and performance. ### 18. Effective Bot Defense and Easy Setup **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I like that Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is easy to set up, which saves me time and resources, and makes fixing problems easier and faster. The good data analytics feature lets me see where traffic is coming from and how many requests or visits were blocked, which is helpful in determining the value of the service. I also appreciate how it helps prevent bots from overwhelming my website, protecting my landing pages from spam and preventing detrimental impacts on my business. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** It doesn't stop every bot from visiting the site. So if it could stop every bot, that would be an improvement. Although, I don't know if there's a service on the earth that does stop every bot. Otherwise, I've been very happy with the service. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Cloudflare Application Security and Performance to stop bots overwhelming my website, saving us from deactivated landing pages. It's easy to set up, saves time, provides valuable data analytics, and helps prevent bot spam, which is crucial for my business. ### 19. An Indispensable Tool Despite Its Complexity **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Antoine D. | Associé, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I appreciate that the free offer of Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is already very comprehensive, allowing me to perform most of the uses I want. This is particularly useful for me as a small company because it provides me with professional tools for free. Moreover, when I exceed the free usage, I like the fact that there are measured costs thanks to pay-as-you-go, which is appreciable compared to other tools. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I find that the rules can be complex, and the documentation is not always up to date. I think the interface is quite heavy and complex, which complicates its use. However, I am relieved that Cloudflare has recently released an MCP solution to which I can delegate an AI agent. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Cloudflare Application Security and Performance to accelerate my targets with CDN management and enhance security through IP obfuscation, load balancing, and an efficient application firewall. ### 20. Cloudflare Brings Fast Performance and Strong Security Together **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dhinesh K. | DATA ANALYST, Manufacturing, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 22, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like most about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is how it brings security and speed together in a single platform. The CDN helps websites load faster, and features like DDoS protection, WAF, and bot mitigation add strong protection without needing much ongoing maintenance. I also find the dashboard easy to navigate, which makes it straightforward to monitor traffic and keep an eye on security events. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** One drawback is that some of the more advanced security and performance features are limited to the higher-tier plans, which can get pricey. On top of that, the sheer number of configuration options can feel overwhelming at first, so there’s definitely a learning curve when you’re trying to set up more advanced rules and policies. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare helps protect our websites from malicious traffic, bots, and DDoS attacks, while also improving page load times through its global CDN. As a result, we’ve seen less downtime, a better overall user experience, and more confidence that our sites stay secure and accessible, even during periods of high traffic. ### 21. Strong Security and Performance Optimization with Cloudflare **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pramoda H. | Full Stack Developer, Program Development, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like most about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is how it combines strong security and performance optimization in a single platform. It provides essential features such as DDoS protection, Web Application Firewall (WAF), and a global CDN, which together significantly improve both the security and responsiveness of my applications. In my personal setup, I use Cloudflare in front of a VPS hosted on DigitalOcean. I configured Cloudflare DNS and proxy (orange cloud) to route traffic through Cloudflare’s network instead of exposing my server directly to the internet. This helps reduce direct attack exposure on the origin server. Additionally, I experimented with Cloudflare WARP connectivity in my setup to secure traffic paths and improve routing stability for VPN-style access. This setup helps me manage traffic more safely while benefiting from Cloudflare’s edge network performance improvements. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** One downside is that some advanced configurations, such as custom WAF rules, firewall tuning, and routing optimizations, require a good level of technical understanding. For users who are new to networking or security concepts, the learning curve can be challenging. Also, certain advanced security and performance features are only available on higher-tier plans, which may limit flexibility for smaller projects or personal use cases. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare helps me secure my VPS infrastructure hosted on DigitalOcean by protecting the origin IP and filtering malicious traffic before it reaches the server. This significantly reduces direct exposure to attacks such as DDoS attempts and automated bot traffic. By placing Cloudflare in front of my application, I can ensure that only verified and filtered traffic reaches my VPS, which improves stability and reduces server load. In my setup, I also use Cloudflare WARP-based connectivity concepts to create a more secure access path for users. This helps maintain encrypted traffic flow and improves routing efficiency. Overall, Cloudflare improves system reliability, enhances security posture, and boosts performance by leveraging its global edge network. ### 22. All-in-One Security and CDN with No Noticeable Latency **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Liridon S. | Software Developer, Consulting, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 10, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like most is how much Cloudflare lets you do in one place without introducing noticeable latency. You point your DNS at Cloudflare and, all of a sudden, you’ve got DDoS protection, a WAF, bot management, and CDN caching working together, instead of having to stitch five different vendors into a single setup. A concrete example is rate limiting: the rules are dead simple to create—something like “block an IP hitting /login more than 20 times a minute”—and you can see the impact in the analytics dashboard within minutes. There’s no waiting around for logs to slowly trickle in before you know whether it’s doing what you intended. It’s also worth calling out that the free/cheap tier is genuinely useful rather than just a teaser. Basic DDoS protection and CDN are free, so even a small side project can get real protection without feeling like it’s just being funneled toward an enterprise pitch deck. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** A few things stand out. Over the years, the WAF rule language and dashboard have become more complex. There are now multiple overlapping products and rule layers (WAF, Rulesets, Bot Management, Page Rules vs. Rules) that can accomplish similar goals, and it isn’t always clear which one should “own” a given policy. New users will often create a rule in one place and then wonder why traffic still isn’t being blocked, only to find that a rule in another layer is overriding or interfering. Debugging false positives is another pain point. When the WAF blocks a legitimate user (which can happen with aggressive managed rulesets), the error page is generic, and figuring out exactly which rule fired usually means digging through logs. Those logs also aren’t consistently available on lower-tier plans, since proper WAF event logging is often gated behind Enterprise pricing. Pricing can also jump significantly between tiers. The free and Pro plans are great, but once you need advanced bot management, custom WAF rules at scale, or stronger support SLAs, the cost can rise sharply into enterprise territory. It ends up feeling like a steep cliff rather than a gradual scale-up. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** DDoS and bot traffic — previously, a traffic spike (whether malicious or just a poorly behaved bot scraping the site) could take down origin servers or drive up hosting costs. Now that traffic gets absorbed at the edge before it ever reaches our infrastructure. For example, during a scraper-bot wave hitting a client’s e-commerce site, Cloudflare’s bot management quietly filtered most of it out, and the origin server load barely moved. Performance/latency — CDN caching means static assets (images, CSS, JS) are served from a nearby edge node instead of the origin. Page load times dropped noticeably for users far from our servers, without us having to touch our own infrastructure. SSL/TLS management — the free automatic certificates and renewals removed a recurring ops chore, with no more scrambling when a cert expires. Single pane of glass — rather than juggling separate tools for firewall, CDN, and analytics, it’s all in one dashboard. That saves real time during incident investigation, since traffic patterns, blocked requests, and cache performance are visible together. Net benefit: fewer 2am pages about traffic spikes, lower origin server costs, and faster sites for end users, with less engineering time spent maintaining security infrastructure ourselves. ### 23. Cloudflare Delivers Trustworthy Security and Performance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tracy P. | volunteer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 08, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** So I basically know that when I don't have the time to look up information on the website to b proven legit, if it is stamped with the cloudflare logo at the bottom or top of the website I totally trust it one hundred percent. Cloudflare has a wonderful security and performance program all in itself let alone a whole program of amazing features. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I have not found much on the cloud flare application security and performance that I don't like so far. Love it actually and think its wonderful along with sum of the extra features that come with it as well. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I do think that cloud flare application security and performance starts working its magic and making the system work its ins and outs when it runs into the walls when they do come. but if everything is literally working and doing what is needed for each and every one of the details like they should b doing then it won't ever crash or need to b rebooked. if every role is doing the things that it should b doing then how could or would it ever mess up, shouldn't ever do that, right....? ### 24. Rock-Solid Security and Smooth Integrations Across Providers **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** shantanu g. | softwaer devloper, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 31, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I really like the security of this application. Cloudflare works really well with GoDaddy, AWS, and many other providers. I recently started using Modal for my AI as a serverless provider, but I ran into some difficulties, and Cloudflare came in clutch and helped me run the model more efficiently. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The UI is a little complex and can feel nested at times, which makes it confusing. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using the Cloudflare application for DNS, CDN, proxy, and as a security layer. Recently, I’ve also started using it as an AI gateway provider. ### 25. Good Performance but paranoid Protection from Cloudflare **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** John C. | French entry level -1 Language Reviewer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Cloudflare Application Security is quite often "too paranoid", at least on my wordpress sites. The performance is good in general, works but not that easy to set up regarding APIs. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The security is way too complicated. When I tested, it was often blocking my websites pretending that my website was a "malicious" url, although it was only plugin incompatibility with Wordpress or slows down the server due to scam users detected. The Performance of Cloudflare is good but from my experience not that stable, specially if using old browsers. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I end up stopping using Cloudflare due the incompatibility to provide accurate protection and not against my self. So the performance is what did slow down my sever because it detects all kinds of issues. IE: it did not benefit me. ### 26. Zero Trust Made Easy with Cloudflare’s All-in-One Access Control **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Praveen N. | Principal Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Zero Trust and access control are important to me, especially since earlier VPNs used to be a bit slow. It feels better with Cloudfare to have everything in one place. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Managed WAF and bot-detection rules can occasionally block legitimate traffic, so ongoing tuning and monitoring are still necessary. Also, pricing is something that feels less predictable at times. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use it company-wide for VPN/WARP and zero-trust security access. Any employee who needs access to internal apps has to go through Cloudflare first, which keeps our access process consistent across the organization. ### 27. Cloudflare Application Security and Performence: Reliable, Fast, and Secure Platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rinu L. | DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 21, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Strong DDoS protection and security features Fast CDN improves website speed and performance Easy DNS and SSL management Helpful caching and traffic optimization tools Simple and clean dashboard UI WAF helps block malicious traffic and bots Flexible pricing with useful free tier Easy setup and quick domain onboarding Smooth integration with CDN, DNL, SSL, and WAF services **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Support response time depends on the plan. Pricing can increase for advanced security features Some settings are difficult to troubleshoot **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Protect applications from DDoS attacks and malicious traffic: improve security CDN and cache reduce load times: faster website performance WAF blocks bots and common vulnerabilities: fewer security risks DNS and SSL management simplify infrastructure handling: save time Improves uptime, reliability, and user experiance overall ### 28. Fast, Secure, and Affordable—WAF, DDoS Protection, CDN, and Caching Made Easy **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** saifuddin s. | Project Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** It helps that I give us Security and speed. WAF, DDOS and CDN, caching all are available. Also it is Cheaper and easy to use. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Configuration might be complex especially when tuning WAF rules. Troubleshooting can also be challenging because multiple Cloudflare services interact with each other. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helps solve the challenges of protecting web applications while maintaining fast and reliable performance. It reduces the risk of attacks such as DDoS, SQL injection, and bot abuse through features like WAF and traffic filtering ### 29. All-in-One Security and Performance with Minimal Setup **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Manish K. | Managerial, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 07, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is how it combines WAF, DDoS protection, bot management, and CDN into a single, easy-to-manage platform. It improves both security and website performance with minimal configuration while providing excellent global scalability. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** None in particular, as it's continuously evolving. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare Application Security and Performance protects our websites from DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and common web vulnerabilities while significantly reducing server load and improving page load times through its global CDN and caching. ### 30. Easy Setup and Reliable for Site Protection **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Phani C. | Founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I really appreciate that Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is easy to use and set up. It solved a major issue I had where customers couldn't access or sign up due to traffic being diverted to a sinkhole by a local Internet provider. Cloudflare provided a good workaround for that problem. I mainly use its DNS service, which is quite valuable to me. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** nothing, I havent really had a chance to push usage to that limift where i find some issue **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I found Cloudflare Application Security and Performance to be a good workaround when my customers were unable to access/signup due to traffic diversion by local ISPs, aiding in site protection and DDoS prevention. ### 31. Great DDoS Protection and WAF That Speeds Up Our Site **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ishani S. | Business Development Intern, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I love how it combines really good DDoS protection and WAF. You get really got security that actually speeds up your site instead of slowing it down. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I would say the bot protection is kind of aggressive and could block real users or lock them in CAPTCHA loops. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is solving the problem of cyberattacks and blocking bad traffic. It benefits me because it keeps the web services I interact with reliable. ### 32. Convenient, Secure, and Easy to Setup **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Simon T. | operations manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 08, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I appreciate Cloudflare Application Security and Performance as a convenient all-in-one solution that integrates workers and domain control, making it easier for me by keeping everything in one place. The integration with Git is also a nice touch. I love the combination of speed and security it offers, with features like bot blocking and DDNS protection that simplify my life by ensuring my web apps are protected from attacks and can maintain reliable uptime. The initial setup was very easy, with every step being self-explanatory and supported by good information. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I occasionally struggle with navigation around the site. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I find it a convenient all-in-one solution with syncing to Git, bot blocking, DDNS protection, speed, and security—all essential for my SaaS webapps' reliable uptime. ### 33. Effortless Security with Seamless Performance **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I use Cloudflare Application Security and Performance to keep our app fast and online. I love that it automatically handles site speed and blocks threats in the background, which gives me peace of mind knowing our users have a smooth experience. What I like the most is how it's 'set it and forget it'. The Global CDN and automated threat protection work seamlessly in the background to keep our app fast and safe with minimal developer setup. I also love the clear dashboard—it gives me great visibility into our traffic and blocked attacks without needing a technical background to understand it. The combination of these features provides me with complete peace of mind and operational autonomy. The dashboard and consolidated features in one place were key reasons for switching to Cloudflare, and I found the initial setup fairly easy. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I find much of the help doc written for deep engineers rather than me as a PM trying to troubleshoot. I feel that security settings and help documentation could be simplified for a non-tech person. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Cloudflare Application Security and Performance to prevent unexpected downtime from malicious traffic, improve load times for global users, and save engineering time. It gives me peace of mind with its automated threat protection and easy setup, ensuring our app remains fast and safe. ### 34. Robust Security with Seamless Streaming **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I like the single-pane-of-glass dashboard in Cloudflare Application Security and Performance because it lets us manage security rules, caching, and traffic routing across our entire streaming infrastructure without needing to switch between different tools. The WAF and bot management features run seamlessly in the background, keeping our origin servers safe and saving us hundreds of engineering hours by blocking threats before they reach the servers. The edge caching and smart routing speed up API responses and media delivery globally, ensuring our video playback is fast and uninterrupted. I also appreciate the smooth onboarding process, which took less than an hour. The ability to consolidate our edge security and media acceleration into one unified network really helps reduce our origin server load during high-traffic events. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The enterprise pricing model feels opaque and scales up quickly when you need advanced feature add-ons for high-volume streaming traffic. Additionally, propagating complex custom WAF rules or worker scripts across their global edge network can occasionally take longer than expected during live events. To improve Cloudflare Application Security and Performance, the analytics interface could offer more granular, real-time logging without requiring additional paid add-ons. It would also help if they simplified the UI for managing complex page rules and worker deployments across multiple streaming domains. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Cloudflare Application Security and Performance to secure our OTT streaming endpoints from DDoS attacks and bot scraping. It speeds up API responses and video delivery globally, reducing buffering and latency. The centralized dashboard and automated protection save us engineering hours. ### 35. Reliable DNS, Performance, and Security in One Platform **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Construction | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like most is that Cloudflare brings DNS management, performance, and security together in one platform. As someone who oversees our websites and landing pages from a marketing perspective, I can quickly review DNS records and make updates when we connect new tools or campaigns without digging through a complicated interface. I also appreciate the added security layer it gives our sites, since bot protection and traffic filtering in front of our websites gives our team more confidence, especially since our sites are a key source of customer leads. It offers enough depth for technical work while keeping routine tasks manageable for a business user like me. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Cloudflare has a large number of products, settings, and technical options. That is valuable, but it can feel overwhelming when trying to figure out which features or settings are actually relevant to our websites. Some of the more advanced security and caching settings require a fair amount of technical knowledge, and clearer explanations inside the dashboard about what a setting does and how it might affect the site would help business and marketing users like me feel more confident making changes. DNS, caching, proxying, and firewall settings can also interact with each other, so it helps to understand the consequences before adjusting anything advanced. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare gives us one place to manage DNS while also supporting website speed and security, which matters because our business relies heavily on our websites and landing pages to generate homeowner leads. Reliable DNS management helps us connect our websites, landing pages, analytics tools, verification records, and other marketing technology without a lot of hassle. The CDN and performance tools help our pages load efficiently for visitors, and the security and bot protection features reduce our exposure to suspicious traffic in front of the origin site. The overall benefit for us is operational simplicity, since we can manage DNS, performance, and basic website protection through one platform instead of piecing together separate tools. ### 36. Effortless Security with Cost-Effective Plans **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christopher D. | Website Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I like the cost, performance, and ease of use of Cloudflare Application Security and Performance. Even on the free tier, there's a good standard of product that helps me. I find the paid plans valuable because they include allowances for additional filters and rules over the free one. The initial setup was super easy, and I obviously benefit from their DNS and domain registrar services. I'm also looking into using their Storage. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Nothing. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use it for website app security, mainly WAF and DDoS protection to keep unwanted traffic off my server. It's cost-effective, performs well, and is easy to use. Even the free tier is solid, and paid plans offer extra control. ### 37. Integrated Security with Ease, But Limited Zero Trust **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I like that all of the solutions are managed in one single console, and that the application all work together seamlessly and are very well integrated. The initial setup was very easy, with a lot of it working out of the box, and we only needed to tweak a few things to get it to where we need it to be. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I think that their zero trust solution they offer is not as robust as some of its competitors, and that's why we are not using that product currently. I feel like their zero trust solution is primarily targeted at mid-sized customers, sub 2,500 users. As a larger organization, it doesn't seem like it has all the needed functionality. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Cloudflare Application Security and Performance to secure my web apps with their firewall, protect against DDoS attacks, and boost my website's performance with their content delivery network. I like that all solutions are managed in a single console, working together seamlessly. ### 38. Affordable, Easy-to-Use Security and Performance with Cloudflare **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Eyal R. | VP R&D, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** What I like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is the combination of affordability, ease of use, and strong security capabilities. The pricing is very competitive compared to similar solutions, making it accessible even for smaller teams. At the same time, the platform is easy to build, configure, and manage, with a straightforward setup process that doesn’t require heavy effort. On top of that, Cloudflare provides robust security features, including effective protection against common web threats, DDoS mitigation, and performance optimization tools. This balance of cost, simplicity, and powerful functionality makes it a highly practical solution for managing and securing applications. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The jump in cost to access some premium features doesn’t feel reasonable for SMBs. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare Application Security and Performance helps us solve several key challenges around security management and service protection. Before using it, managing security across our SaaS environment and integrations required more effort and coordination across different tools. With Cloudflare, we now have a reliable firewall layer in front of our SaaS services, which helps protect against common web threats, unauthorized access, and malicious traffic. This is especially important for our B2B integrations, where we need to ensure secure and consistent connectivity with partners. The platform simplifies security management by centralizing controls, reducing operational overhead, and giving us better visibility into traffic and threats. As a result, we benefit from improved system stability, stronger protection for our services, and greater confidence when onboarding and supporting external integrations. ### 39. Solid WAF that drastically cuts down on SOC noise **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** UTKARSH S. | Student Intern, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Honestly, their WAF is top-notch and surprisingly easy to configure. I really value how fast we can push custom rules when a new vulnerability drops or when we're seeing weird traffic anomalies. The real-time visibility is great for threat monitoring, and getting those security events forwarded into our SIEM for deeper correlation is a pretty seamless process. It handles the heavy lifting for DDoS mitigation on autopilot, which gives me peace of mind. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The main headache is around log retention and exporting. Getting granular, real-time logs pushed out to a SIEM can be unnecessarily restrictive and expensive if you aren't on the higher enterprise tiers. Also, while their managed rulesets are generally solid, tuning out false positives sometimes requires writing some pretty complex regex exceptions to ensure you aren't accidentally blocking legitimate API traffic. Support response times can also lag a bit unless you're a massive enterprise account. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** The biggest issue it solves is filtering out the sheer volume of automated bot traffic, basic vulnerability scanners, and volumetric attacks right at the edge. From a SOC perspective, this is a massive benefit because it drastically reduces the noise we have to ingest and parse downstream in our SIEM. By dropping all that junk traffic before it hits our infrastructure, it saves on bandwidth costs and means we aren't wasting time investigating thousands of useless alerts. It essentially acts as a highly effective first line of defense, letting us focus on real, sophisticated threats. ### 40. Robust Security and Performance with Some Integration Challenges **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consulting | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 19, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I appreciate Cloudflare Application Security and Performance for its robust security features like DDoS protection and the advanced web application firewall. It's also very strong in bot mitigation, which is crucial for keeping sites secure from automated threats. Additionally, it boosts performance through a global content delivery network and smart routing. I find it really effective in securing the whole application from threats and attacks. Another thing I like is the ease of setup since it's a SaaS solution—it's straightforward to configure, and the UI-based admin part is quite easy. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The main challenge I've noticed with Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is related to integration. When integrating with solutions like managed detection response systems, it's not as straightforward as expected. Most of the times, it doesn't work the way we are expecting, and it often creates duplicate events. Even though the integration methods are supposed to follow Cloudflare's documentation, these issues still occur. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Cloudflare Application Security and Performance to keep my sites secure from automated threats and attacks, while boosting performance with DDoS protection, a web application firewall, and bot mitigation. ### 41. Secure and Speedy with Room for Support Improvement **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** MATOVU C. | FOUNDER & CEO, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I use Cloudflare Application Security and Performance because it offers a ton of free features that other platforms usually charge for. The global edge network helps my customers access the website super fast with almost no lag, which is a huge benefit. Cloudflare also caches websites to make it faster for users, and I appreciate the easy-to-navigate dashboard that provides a single point to access security and insights without needing to switch between multiple tabs. Setting up Cloudflare was easy and simple, with clear rules on what to do, which made the initial setup process smooth. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The customer support for non-enterprise users is hard to access. The Cloudflare dashboard needs improvement due to the service-bloat that hides important features. I suggest adding an AI bot for initial queries and routing to support assistants for complex issues. Additionally, personalized dashboards would be helpful to prioritize important features. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Cloudflare to secure my website from malicious activities, improve speed, and manage security and bot access with ease. ### 42. Exceptionally Fast, Secure, and Scalable with Cloudflare **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Scott G. | Chief Financial Officer, VC Investing, Strategy, & Corporate Development Advisor , Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 07, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Cloudflare is exceptionally fast, secure and scalable and works very well. Unforuntately they have recently run into some issues with network reliability which is obviously a really big problem for a compnay like them. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Cloudflare has recently over the past two years experience some performance issues where their network, and by extsnion, ours has gone down. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Secure the network, enterprise and application stack in the cloud. ### 43. Plenty of Free-Tier Features to Get Your Site Started **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paradigm Pro C. | President, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** They have a lot of free tier features to get your site started. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** It was kind of complicated to set everything up by myself initially but I got there by just lightening the load. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's helping me slow down the bot traffic which sometimes can overrun your server and leave you with an inflated bill with no actual consumer purchases. ### 44. Effortless Security with Trustworthy Performance **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I use Cloudflare Application Security and Performance as the first line of defense against DDoS attacks for my applications, which means I don't have to reinvent the wheel with IP blacklisting. I really appreciate the out-of-the-box experience that doesn't throw me into configuration hell. It just works without me needing to do anything special. Plus, I trust the technology because it's by Cloudflare. It's easy to set up with no or low code required. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I like trusting that I will not be adversely impacted by attackers, but it's less clear how it works internally. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Cloudflare Application Security and Performance as a first line of defense against DDoS attacks, avoiding the need for IP blacklisting. It just works out of the box without complex configuration, and I trust the technology because it's by Cloudflare. ### 45. A Unified Approach to Application Security and Performance **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ricardo R. | Fraud anaylts, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 10, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Hey Hey I like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is how integrated and frictionless it is—security, reliability, and speed all work together without adding operational complexity. A few highlights: Security baked in by default: WAF, DDoS protection, bot management, and rate limiting are tightly integrated, so protecting apps doesn’t feel like bolting on extra tools. Performance at global scale: The global Anycast network, smart caching, and Argo routing noticeably reduce latency and improve availability for users everywhere. Ease of use: The dashboard, rules engine, and APIs make it easy to deploy changes quickly, iterate on policies, and troubleshoot issues without slowing teams down. Strong visibility and control: Detailed analytics and logs help teams understand traffic patterns, attacks, and performance bottlenecks in real time. Developer-friendly: Features like Workers and flexible rule customization let teams tailor behavior without sacrificing security or speed. Overall, Cloudflare does a great job of simplifying app security while actively improving performance, which is a rare and valuable combination. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** A few things I dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance—while still recognizing it’s a strong platform overall—are: Learning curve for advanced features: The basics are easy to get started with, but configuring more advanced WAF rules, bot management, and rate limiting can become complex and sometimes feels unintuitive. Limited transparency in some detections: It isn’t always clear why certain requests are blocked or challenged, which can slow down troubleshooting and make tuning harder. Pricing complexity: Some of the more powerful security and performance features are locked behind higher tiers, and it’s not always obvious what’s included without digging through the documentation. Rule debugging can be tedious: Testing and validating rules in production-like scenarios takes time, especially when changes have unintended side effects. UI inconsistencies: Some settings are spread across different areas of the dashboard, so navigation can feel fragmented at times. Overall, the biggest downside is that the platform’s power and flexibility come with added complexity—especially for teams that want fine-grained control without deep Cloudflare expertise. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare Application Security and Performance addresses the core challenges of application exposure, reliability, and speed at internet scale. That directly benefits me by reducing risk and operational overhead while improving the user experience. In practice, it helps in a few key ways. First, it protects applications from attacks by mitigating DDoS attempts, malicious bots, abuse, and common web exploits at the edge. As a result, my applications stay available and secure without constant manual intervention or emergency response. Second, it simplifies security operations by unifying security and performance tools under one platform rather than spreading them across multiple vendors. This means less tool sprawl, fewer misconfigurations, and easier day-to-day management. Third, it handles traffic spikes and scale by absorbing sudden surges in traffic—both legitimate and malicious—without degrading performance. The benefit for me is that applications remain stable during peak usage or unexpected events. Finally, it provides visibility and control through real-time analytics and configurable rules that offer insight into traffic patterns, threats, and performance issues. This lets me make faster, data-driven decisions and fine-tune protections without slowing development. Overall, Cloudflare helps me spend more time building and improving applications, while it takes care of the heavy lifting around security, availability, and performance at the edge. ### 46. Reliable Bot Protection with Flexible Rule Control **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Steve E. | Technical Project Manager, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 10, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Cloudflare makes it easy to create and manage security rules with a lot of flexibility. The firewall rule setup is powerful but still intuitive, and the DNS firewall is fast, reliable, and gives great visibility into traffic. It’s a solid balance of performance and security, and once configured, it runs quietly in the background doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Overall, the platform is excellent, but some advanced features require an Enterprise plan, which can be a higher cost barrier for smaller teams or growing businesses. While the value is there, the pricing jump to access certain capabilities (around $2,400 per year) may feel steep if you don’t need everything at that tier. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare helps control and mitigate abusive bot traffic through bot detection and throttling, which reduces unnecessary server load and protects site performance. By filtering and rate-limiting non-human traffic, it improves reliability, prevents resource exhaustion, and ensures real users and critical APIs aren’t impacted. ### 47. Effortless Setup, Seamless Operation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** I like that Cloudflare Application Security and Performance is easy to set up and doesn't require a lot of tweaking. It runs seamlessly without much intervention from our team, and it takes care of what we need without requiring a lot of bandwidth. This was a big reason we switched from Akamai, as Cloudflare provided a simpler solution that required less maintenance. The initial setup was very straightforward, which was highly appreciated. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The commercial model can be complex and deceptively expensive. We did not understand initially how it was built, and it uses a lot more units than we were expecting. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare Application Security and Performance simplifies our work by running seamlessly and meeting critical needs with minimal effort, freeing up our team for other tasks. ### 48. Effortless, Automatic Connection with Cloudflare **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospitality | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** The upside of using this platform is that I don't have to use two-factor authentication. With our previous security platform we did and it was time consuming. With Cloudflare I am connected automatically, and it is easy to troubleshoot if ever needed. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** There is currently nothing I dislike about Cloudflare. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** The biggest problem it solves is the removal of two-factor authentication from my day to day. It saves time and means I don't have to have my phone glued to my side while also working at my computer. ### 49. Reliable Application Security and Performance Made Simple with Cloudflare **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dhruv K. | Junior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 05, 2026 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Cloudflare stands out for its user-friendly interface, featuring an intuitive dashboard that simplifies the management of security and performance settings. One of its key strengths is the ease of implementation, allowing users to enable protection rapidly with minimal setup required. The platform offers a comprehensive set of features, such as DDoS protection, WAF, CDN, and performance optimization tools, which encourages frequent use for daily monitoring and traffic management. Additionally, Cloudflare integrates smoothly with existing infrastructure and cloud services, making adoption straightforward. The combination of responsive customer support and thorough documentation further assists in resolving any issues efficiently. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** Although the platform offers a broad range of features, some of the more advanced configuration options can make it less user-friendly, particularly for those who are new to security platforms. While setting up the system is usually straightforward, adjusting and fine-tuning security rules may involve a learning curve. Frequent use of the platform can reveal some shortcomings in its reporting and analytics capabilities, especially when seeking more detailed insights. Additionally, certain integrations and features are only available in higher-priced plans, which can affect how easily the platform integrates with other tools. Customer support response times also tend to vary depending on the level of service plan chosen. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cloudflare Application Security and Performance addresses key challenges related to security, performance, and availability by safeguarding applications against threats like DDoS attacks, bots, and harmful traffic, all while enhancing content delivery. By improving site reliability and reducing latency, it ensures users experience consistent performance. For me, this translates into less downtime, a better user experience, and lower operational overhead, which allows teams to dedicate more time to development instead of managing infrastructure and security concerns. ### 50. Effortless Infrastructure Management with Centralized Control **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Komal W. | Project Manager, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2025 **What do you like best about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** From an infrastructure management perspective, Cloudflare is relatively easy to deploy and manage. DNS management, traffic routing, and security rules are centralized in a single dashboard, making changes quick and auditable. The visibility provided through logs, analytics, and security insights helps the IT team monitor traffic patterns, identify threats, and make informed decisions without deep manual investigation. **What do you dislike about Cloudflare Application Security and Performance?** There are areas where Cloudflare could be improved from an admin perspective. Some advanced security and performance features require careful configuration to avoid false positives or unintended blocking. Additionally, deeper analytics and log retention options are often tied to higher-tier plans, which can be a consideration for budgeting and long-term monitoring needs. **What problems is Cloudflare Application Security and Performance solving and how is that benefiting you?** The primary problem Cloudflare solves for us is the need for strong, scalable security without adding operational complexity. Features such as web application firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, and bot mitigation provide an essential security layer in front of our applications, reducing exposure to common attacks and minimizing the risk of service disruption. From an admin standpoint, this significantly lowers the burden of constantly tuning and defending individual servers. ## Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Discussions - [Is there an additional cost for DDoS protection?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/pricing-522ccf8a-8fb9-4099-9cfa-a2930298f242) - 2 comments, 2 upvotes - [How good is Cloudflare DNS?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-good-is-cloudflare-dns) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [What does Cloudflare cost?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/pricing-ec1e95d6-3c27-4402-94be-fb8aefc84b95) - 2 comments, 1 upvote - [What is Cloudflare Spectrum used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-cloudflare-spectrum-used-for) - 1 comment - [Does Cloudflare provide hosting?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/does-cloudflare-provide-hosting) - 2 comments - [View Cloudflare Application Security and Performance pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/cloudflare-application-security-and-performance/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-31+16%3A32%3A17+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=9dba3a2c-85eb-4187-be30-82993e485a49&secure%5Btoken%5D=554e568a51e7dadb140500043841a52c58292bcaf309cfbccdfa28898374793c&format=llm_user) ## Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Integrations - 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[Microsoft PowerPoint](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-powerpoint/reviews) - [Microsoft Sentinel](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-sentinel/reviews) - [New Relic](https://www.g2.com/products/new-relic/reviews) - [Resend](https://www.g2.com/products/resend/reviews) - [Scaleway](https://www.g2.com/products/scaleway/reviews) - [Splunk](https://www.g2.com/products/splunk-2025-01-30/reviews) - [WordPress.com](https://www.g2.com/products/wordpress-com/reviews) ## Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Features **Content** - Static Content Caching - Dynamic Content Routing - Cache purging **Administration** - Content Delivery - Dashboard & Reporting - Alerting **Protect** - Login - Data Injections - Code - Certificate Exploitation - Advanced Awareness - Digital Content **Analysis** - Logging and Reporting - Issue Tracking - Security Monitoring **Administration** - Integrations / APIs - Administration Console - Availability Control - Traffic Management **Management** - IT Alerting - Network Capacity - Logging - API / Integrations **Administration** - Notifications - Warranty - Server License - Free Reissues **Protection** - Quarantine - Continuous Monitoring - Off-Network Protection - Guest Network Protection - BYOD Protection - Native DNS over HTTPS (DoH) **API Management ** - API Discovery - API Monitoring - Reporting - Change Management **Functionality** - Certificate Discovery - Expiration Monitoring - Automated Certificate Operations - Policy And Role-Based Access Controls - Workflow - Protocol Support - Reporting And Search - Audit And Enforcement - Key Storage **Generative AI** - AI Text Summarization **Threat Detection and Protection - Client-Side Protection** - Continuous Scanning - Signature-Based Detection - Threat Protection - Risk Prioritization - Heuristic Analysis **Usability - Load Balancing** - User Interface Design - Setup Simplicity - Platform Integration - Container Support **Agentic AI - Content Delivery Network (CDN)** - Proactive Assistance **Agentic AI - Enterprise Content Management (ECM)** - Autonomous Task Execution - Natural Language Interaction - Decision Making **Traffic Management & Performance - AI Gateways** - Token-Aware Rate Limiting - Semantic Caching - Multi-Model Routing & Fallbacks **Bot Detection & Classification - Bot Detection and Mitigation** - Bot Traffic Analytics - Good Bot Identification - Malicious Bot Detection **Security** - SSL - Custom SSL **Orchestration** - Asset Management - Security Workflow Automation - Deployment - Sandboxing **Cloud Visibility** - Data Discovery - Cloud Registry - Cloud Gap Analytics **Risk Analysis** - Blacklist and Whitelist - Vulnerability Assessment - Security Auditing **Execute** - Environment - Compliance - Cross-Platform Implementation **Controls** - Application-Layer Controls - Traffic Controls - Network Controls **Media Delivery** - Video Delivery - Software Distribution - Static Content Caching - Dynamic Content Routing **Protection** - DNS Protection - Website Protection - Infrastructure Protection **Functionality** - Multi-Domain Support - Browser Support - Site Seal - AI Features **Functionality** - DNS Lookups - Threat Intelligence - Advanced Traffic Filtering **Security Testing** - Compliance Monitoring - API Verification - API Testing **Data Security - Client-Side Protection** - First-Party JavaScript Obfuscation - Browser Security - Encryption - Obfuscation - Data Loss Prevention (DLP) - Third-Party Security - Endpoint Security **Performance Optimization - Load Balancing** - Global Load Balancing - Dynamic Resource Allocation - Server Health Monitoring - Disaster Recovery **Governance & Observability - AI Gateways** - Data Privacy - Cost Tracking - Centralized API Key Security **Protection & Mitigation - Bot Detection and Mitigation** - Automated Bot Mitigation - API Abuse Protection - Account Takeover Protection **Management** - Dashboard - Reports - Logs **Information** - Proactive Alerts - Malware Detection - Intelligence Reports **Security** - Data Security - Data loss Prevention - Security Auditing **Threat Protection** - Firewall - DDoS Protection - Malware Detection - Malware Removal **Functionality** - API / Integrations - Extensibility - Bot Traffic **Security and Performance** - Patch Deployment - Monitoring - Firewall **Resolution** - Attack Mitigation - Network Monitoring - Security Monitoring - Anomoly Detection - Resolution Automation **Security** - Domain Validated SSL - Issuance Speed - Encryption Strength - Extended Validation SSL - Organization Validated SSL **Administration** - Whitelisting - Policy Enforcement - Incident Reports - Domain Categorization - Multi-Network Management **Security Management** - Security and Policy Enforcement - Anomoly Detection - Bot Detection **Logging and Monitoring - Client-Side Protection** - Event Logging - Reporting - Real-Time Monitoring **Security & Compliance - Load Balancing** - SSL/TLS Termination - Application Firewall Integration - DDoS Mitigation - Access Control - IP Whitelisting/Blacklisting **AI-Powered Detection & Intelligence - Bot Detection and Mitigation** - AI-Powered Bot Detection - AI Agent & LLM Traffic Management - Adaptive AI Threat Response **Integration** - API - CMS Integration **Personalization** - Endpoint Intelligence - Security Validation - Dynamic/Code Analysis **Identity** - SSO - Governance - User Analytics **Generative AI** - AI Text Summarization **Generative AI** - AI Text Summarization **Agentic AI - Enterprise Content Delivery Network (eCDN)** - Proactive Assistance **Generative AI** - AI Text Summarization - Generate Attack Scenarios - Generate Threat Detection Rules - Generate Threat Summaries **Agentic AI - Threat Intelligence** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **File Management** - File Type Support - Metadata - OCR Scanning - Versioning - Collaboration - Document Assembly - Form Creation - Portals and Sites - Disposition - Search - Web Interface - Mobile Apps **Workflow** - Process Automation - Conditions - Activities - Records Management - Case Management **Platform** - Internationalization - Performance and Reliability - Reporting and Auditing - System of Record Integration - APIs ## Top Cloudflare Application Security and Performance Alternatives - [HAProxy](https://www.g2.com/products/haproxy/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (897 reviews) - [Bunny CDN](https://www.g2.com/products/bunny-cdn/reviews) - 4.8/5.0 (502 reviews) - [Akamai Cloud Computing](https://www.g2.com/products/akamai-cloud-computing/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (387 reviews)