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Cloudflare vs Managed DNS Services comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

Cloudflare
Ranking in Managed DNS
1st
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 (2nd), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th)
Managed DNS Services
Ranking in Managed DNS
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 25.9%, down from 34.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Managed DNS Services is 0.8%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare25.9%
Managed DNS Services0.8%
Other73.3%
Managed DNS
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Vijay Muddu - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager server admin and security at Vivaconnect
Cost-effective and helpful in the updation of DNS records
I improve the uptime of my company's website by opting for free DNS-related services offered by Google and other vendors, which are available in the market. You need services like Amazon Route 53, AWS, or DNS Made Easy when you want fast resolutions and updates. I can use some free DNS services like GoDaddy if terms of request come into my website, but its resolution is slow. DNS Made Easy helps me with the DNS query in a very fast manner. DNS Made Easy works very fast if any changes I want to make, especially in scenarios where I change my server ID in the DNS records in GoDaddy. Within a fraction of a second, it globally updates the DNS records so that my new server can reach everywhere. The valuable feature of the product to manage high traffic volume stems from the fact that the DNS resolution part is good and very fast. The DNS updation part is also very fast. The DNS records are very quickly updated. The tool also provides a failover option. With the automatic failover option, users can configure the DNS automatic failover to multiple DNS records, where if one of my nameservers fails, it is possible to switch to another nameserver. I can add multiple IPs to my single domain, and if one of my IPs fails, it can use the automatic failover for my present IP. The product provides help during failovers and helps add multiple nameservers. The tool updates DNS records very fast while also serving the DNS queries at a fast rate. The GoDNS feature of the product has impacted my company's global website performance since it works at a very fast rate. As soon as you update any of the IPs, the GoDNS feature works at a drastically super fast speed. If I want to change my website's IP right away, the GoDNS feature takes only 10 seconds to update the IPs at a global level. The API integration is not an area I used to streamline our company's DNS management process since I prefer to use the dashboard manually. The product is very cost-effective compared to other products in the market, like AWS or Amazon Route 53. The transition time offered by the product is super fast. Those people who don't want to spend much money on cloud services offered by AWS or opt for other third-party services that may be very expensive can opt for DNS Made Easy since it is a fast and cost-effective solution. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"Their free account offers an awful lot of functionality and savings alone, before you get on to the minimal $20 a month for a Pro account which comes with its own great list of features."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."
"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"For businesses that don't have a dedicated security team, I think it's a better product; it's more intuitive for people like us."
"The API gives us the ability to remote control our DNS settings."
"Cloudflare is very straightforward."
"It is a very robust and stable solution."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Honestly the product has not really improved the way of my organisation."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"Technical support is not well developed. While there are good engineers, Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model."
"I rate technical support quite badly."
"We had to do a lot of digging and back-and-forth with technical support for specific use cases, and it might be helpful to have more screencasts or screenshots for common situations."
"The tool fails to offer load-balancing options compared to products like Azure or Amazon Route 53."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"We are using the free version."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"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."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The tool offers paid services at a very cost-effective rate."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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 DNS?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.
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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), BlueCat and others in Managed DNS. Updated: May 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.