Cloudflare vs Cloudflare R2
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Cloudflare and Cloudflare R2.
Quick Verdict
4.3/5
Cloudflare
0 reviews
4.4/5
Cloudflare R2
0 reviews
Cloudflare R2 is rated higher (4.4 vs 4.3). Global network that speeds up and protects websites with CDN caching, DDoS protection, free SSL and DNS. Free plan; Pro costs $20/month billed annually ($25 monthly). Cloudflare R2 is S3-compatible object storage with zero egress fees — ever. $0.015/GB/month storage, no data transfer costs. Tightly integrated with Cloudflare Workers and CDN.
Cloudflare Global CDN and DDoS protection with object storage | Cloudflare R2 Zero egress S3 storage on Cloudflare's network | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.3 (0 reviews) | 4.4 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium (free tier plus usage-based pricing) |
| Starting price | From $20/mo | Free tier available✓ |
| Best for | Websites and SaaS front ends that want a free or flat-priced global CDN with DDoS protection and TLS included — and can accept proxying all traffic through one vendor. | Teams serving media, assets, downloads or backups where egress dominates their current object storage bill — especially those already building on Workers or Pages. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | Global — 300+ cities | Global — Cloudflare network |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiers3 compatibleddos protectioneu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi accessipv6terraform provider | free tiers3 compatibleeu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi access |
| Visit Cloudflare → | Visit Cloudflare R2 → | |
Cloudflare
Pros
- + Unmetered bandwidth and requests on every plan, including Free
- + Free managed WAF ruleset, Universal SSL and unmetered DDoS protection by default
- + 330+ city network with Anycast routing and no region pricing
- + Flat per-domain pricing is easy to budget; no egress surprises
- + Terraform provider and full API for configuration as code
Cons
- - No uptime SLA below the Business plan
- - Per-domain billing gets expensive for domain portfolios
- - Advanced WAF tuning and rate limiting are plan-gated
- - Proxy architecture is a concentration risk during network-level incidents
- - Large feature surface means caching misconfigurations can go unnoticed
Cloudflare R2
Pros
- + Zero egress fees on all storage classes — no data transfer bill at all
- + Standing free tier: 10 GB-month storage, 1M Class A and 10M Class B ops monthly
- + S3-compatible API works with existing SDKs and migration tooling
- + Published durability (11 nines) and a 99.9% monthly uptime SLA with credits
- + Binds directly to Workers, Pages and public buckets with no cross-product egress
Cons
- - S3 feature surface is thinner — no replication topology, simpler lifecycle tooling
- - Class A operations at $4.50/million make write-heavy workloads pricier than storage-only math
- - Infrequent Access has a 30-day minimum storage duration and retrieval fees
- - Real lock-in sits in Workers-based processing around buckets, not the storage itself
- - Not suited to analytics-style scans or small-object high-churn data
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