If the “500 Internal Server Error” on December 5th was the final straw for you, you aren’t alone. With recent global outages affecting everything from dashboards to APIs, reliability is top of mind. Finding the best Cloudflare alternatives is now a critical step for IT admins and developers who need redundancy.
Best Cloudflare alternatives to use in 2025
While Cloudflare is a giant for a reason—offering a massive free tier and ease of use—it is not the only player in the game. Whether you need a “forever free” plan to replace your hobby project or enterprise-grade security for a banking app, here are the top researched contenders for 2025.
Gcore: The “free tier” champion
If you are leaving Cloudflare because of stability but staying for the price (free), Gcore is your best option. Gcore has aggressively positioned itself as a direct competitor by offering a robust free plan that rivals Cloudflare’s famous offering. Their free tier includes a generous 1 TB of traffic and 1 billion requests per month. Unlike many other providers that strip features from their lower tiers, Gcore includes essential performance tools like Brotli compression and has a network of over 140 points of presence globally.
AWS CloudFront: Best for AWS users
If your infrastructure is already hosted on Amazon Web Services, CloudFront is the most logical step to reduce latency. AWS offers an “Always Free” tier that includes 1 TB of data transfer out to the internet and 10,000,000 HTTP/HTTPS requests every month. While it is powerful, the main trade-off is complexity; unlike Cloudflare’s “one-click” setup, CloudFront often requires manual configuration of cache policies and WAF rules. However, for teams already deep in the AWS ecosystem, the integration with S3 and EC2 is seamless.
Bunny.net: The “budget-friendly” performance king
If you are willing to pay a few pennies to get significantly better performance than a free tier, Bunny.net is the fan favorite. While they have moved away from a permanent free tier in favor of a 14-day free trial, their pricing model is incredibly low, starting at just $0.01 per GB for standard delivery in North America and Europe. The service has a $1 monthly minimum, meaning a small site can effectively run for a dollar a month while enjoying performance speeds that often beat Cloudflare’s global average. It is widely praised for being developer-friendly and having a far simpler dashboard than AWS.
Fastly: The “speed freak” for developers
Fastly is not just a CDN; it is an edge cloud platform designed for developers who need real-time control. It is famous for its “instant purge” capability, which allows you to clear cached content globally in milliseconds rather than the minutes it can take on legacy providers. While it operates on a usage-based pricing model that is generally more expensive than Bunny.net, it offers a free allowance of up to $50 of traffic per month for testing. Fastly excels in dynamic content delivery and gives you granular control over caching rules via VCL (Varnish Configuration Language).
Akamai: The enterprise fortress
If your primary concern is not budget but rather unmatched stability and security, Akamai remains the industry standard. It operates one of the world’s largest distributed networks, making it the closest match to Cloudflare’s “Global Network” scale. Akamai is particularly strong in security, offering advanced DDoS mitigation and bot management that many enterprises consider superior to Cloudflare’s standard offerings. However, this power comes with a price; Akamai generally requires custom enterprise contracts and does not offer a self-service free tier.
Quick comparison matrix
| Provider | Best For | Free Tier? | Key Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gcore | Direct Replacement | Yes (1 TB/mo) | Closest match to Cloudflare Free. |
| Bunny.net | Speed/Value | (14-Day Trial) | Fastest performance per dollar ($0.01/GB). |
| AWS CloudFront | AWS Users | Yes (1 TB/mo) | Deep integration with S3/EC2. |
| Fastly | Dynamic Apps | (Limited credit) | Instant cache purging & programmability. |
| Akamai | Enterprise | No | Unmatched global stability & security. |
