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When comparing CloudFlare vs KeyCDN, the Slant community recommends CloudFlare for most people. In the question“What are the best content delivery networks (CDNs)?” CloudFlare is ranked 1st while KeyCDN is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose CloudFlare is:
CloudFlare offers a [free plan](https://www.cloudflare.com/plans) with basic DDoS protection and promises to always provide a free service with at least the feature set that it has today. More advanced DDoS protection is available for the higher plans, which can be added as your needs grow.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Very affordable
CloudFlare offers a free plan with basic DDoS protection and promises to always provide a free service with at least the feature set that it has today. More advanced DDoS protection is available for the higher plans, which can be added as your needs grow.
Pro Works with static and dynamic content
Pro SSL encryption
As of late 2014 Cloudflare offers SSL encryption for all sites using its service.
Pro Automatic IPv6
Pro Handled some of the largest DDoS attacks in history
Cloudflare was able to deflect 2 massive DDoS attacks. During the March 2013 attack on Spamhaus, they were able to absorb a peak 120Gbps attack that lasted 4 days, as well as a 400Gbps attack in February 2014.
Their track record shows their ability to protect against DDoS attacks in practice.
Pro Easy management interface
Pro Highly secure
Pro Anyone can add or update libraries
Pro Has npm auto-update
Pro Site enhancing apps
Cloudflare has a wide selection of app support that allows the user to install the app easily through Cloudflare instead of in their site. This creates ease of use, time saved and less degradation of performance.
Pro Works with other CDNs
Pro Page Rules are powerful
Pro Railgun optimization for Business & Enterprise plans
Railgun allows caching dynamic and personalized sites, allowing for up to 140% performance increase.
Pro Official WordPress plugin
Cloudflare offers an official WordPress plugin that allows for customization through the user panel.
Pro Has tag based cache spoilage for Enterprise plan
Pro Free service is Best
Pro Transparent, pay-as-you-go pricing
Traffic prices are as low as $0.04/GB and volume pricing starts at 10TB/month.
Pro Simple and easy setup
CDN configuration is instantly deployed.
Pro Free Lets Encrypt SSL certificates for custom zone names
Pro HTTP/2 Support
One of the 1st providers to support HTTP/2
Pro Custom SSL for free
Allows uploading own certificate at no extra cost. Shared SSL is also available.
Pro Brotli support
KeyCDN supports Brotli compression for users who have Brotli enabled on their origin server.
Pro POPs in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan at no extra cost
Pro Real-time raw logs available for free
Pro Support SPDY 3.1
KeyCDN supports SPDY 3.1 for even faster secured connections.
Cons
Con Slow support
Even on paid (Pro) account, support often takes several hours per reply. So a single query can take days to resolve.
Con Practices Man-in-the-Middle certificate forgery
Https ("secure") comunications with sites using CloudFlare are intercepted at their servers, decrypted and recrypted with CloudFlare's certificates. This poses huge problem with what users perceive as safe communication - browsers fail to display notice about MitM taking place.
Con Lowers usability of the web for Tor users
Tor users are required to enter captcha at each site using CloudFlare. In some circumstances, this introduces unsolvable roadblock.
Con Relies on intrusive captcha screens to validate visitors
During large attacks, Cloudflare will block users with captcha screens to filter out malicious attacks. Albeit effective, they cause a considerable annoyance to legitimate users.
Con Support doesn't have access to logs
Log access is an enterprise feature and priced at the "contact us" level. So when an error code is returned to the user that wasn't returned from your app, debugging this is impossible at the pro level. Unfortunately these logs aren't available to support personnel either so they have no way of tracking/validating issues.
Con Lack of cache control
If you want to cache all kinds of content (e.g. HTML, JSON), you need the "Cache Everything" setting, and this imposes a long "max-age" directive of 2 hours. It ignores your origin server's value.
Con Layer 7 attacks must be manually identified
In order to enable layer 7 protection with Cloudflare, customers must manually press an "I'm under attack" button.
Con Unreasonable anti-spam policy
Not suitable if you have an association with online advertising. A single email that may include your domain that appears on Spamcop will result in a threat to terminate your account and a requirement to disable the URL -- even if you are not responsible for the production or sending of the email.
Con Config changes take 5-10 minutes
Any config change is queued for several minutes before being applied, without any time estimate. Combined with caching and DNS delays, it can make debugging a bit more difficult.
