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Cisco OpenDNS vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco OpenDNS
Ranking in Domain Name System (DNS) Security
15th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cloudflare
Ranking in Domain Name System (DNS) Security
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (3rd), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Domain Name System (DNS) Security category, the mindshare of Cisco OpenDNS is 3.2%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 4.6%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Domain Name System (DNS) Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare4.6%
Cisco OpenDNS3.2%
Other92.2%
Domain Name System (DNS) Security
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1678521 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead - Global IT Networks at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees
A stable solution that can be used for upgrades, vulnerability remediation, configuration, and standardization
I am using the latest version of Cisco OpenDNS. Users should prioritize the challenges that they have before implementing the solution. They need to be very clear about what they are looking for. Those parameters need to be defined, success criteria need to be checked, and then they can proceed with the solution that meets the requirements. Overall, I rate Cisco OpenDNS a nine out of ten.
M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The platform is highly stable."
"We use Cisco OpenDNS for upgrades, vulnerability remediation, configuration, and standardization."
"The technical support on offer is excellent; they are very helpful and responsive, and we are quite happy with the level of service they provide to their customers."
"From a technical point of view, Cloudflare is the best CDN."
"If it was not for CloudFlare, I would have to hire a dedicated resource to manage all this for me."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"Cloudflare has positively impacted our organization by giving us flexibility to manage the DNS part, being quite fast, and allowing us to manage everything from a single dashboard, which is quite handy."
"The technical support is good."
 

Cons

"The platform's DNS database area needs improvement."
"The solution’s dashboard could be improved."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution."
"The product is expensive yet cost-effective. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?
The tool's pricing is moderate. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Netflix 2. IBM 3. Deloitte 4. Airbnb 5. Pinterest 6. Box 7. LinkedIn 8. Adobe 9. Spotify 10. Uber 11. Twitter 12. Cisco Systems (the parent company) 13. The New York Times 14. Verizon 15. Coca-Cola 16. General Electric 17. Microsoft 18. Facebook 19. Apple 20. Amazon 21. Google 22. Intel 23. Oracle 24. AT&T 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Salesforce 27. Cisco Webex 28. Cisco Umbrella 29. Cisco Talos 30. Cisco AMP for Endpoints 31. Cisco AnyConnect 32. Cisco Stealthwatch
Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco OpenDNS vs. Cloudflare and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.