Gcore

What Gcore actually is

Gcore is a Luxembourg-incorporated edge platform — G-Core Labs S.A., registered in Contern — that grew out of gaming infrastructure and now sells CDN, managed DNS, WAF, video streaming, edge compute (FastEdge), and S3-compatible storage. For this review we're focused on the CDN, since that's the product most buyers come for, but the surrounding stack matters when you're deciding whether to standardize on the platform.

The network is the headline: Gcore reports 210+ points of presence on six continents, over 200 Tbps of network capacity, roughly 30 ms average worldwide latency, and an 85% average cache hit ratio. Those are vendor-reported figures — we haven't benchmarked Gcore's network ourselves — but the shape of the company behind them is checkable. Third-party reporting puts Gcore at around $140 million in revenue at the end of 2025, cash-flow positive, with CDN revenue growing over 50% year on year, having taken outside funding only in 2024 after years of growth on revenue. That's a different profile from the typical venture-subsidized CDN challenger, and it matters for anyone worried about a supplier pricing themselves into a market and then repricing once customers are locked in.

Where Gcore genuinely differs from the US-headquartered giants is regional coverage. Its footprint is strong across the CIS, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa — regions where Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai have thinner PoP density. If your audience is in Astana, Lagos, or Dubai as much as in Frankfurt, that's a concrete routing argument. On the sovereignty question, Gcore markets an EU legal base, EU data-processing regions, and ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certifications. We'd treat the Luxembourg incorporation as a real procurement advantage for GDPR-sensitive buyers while still advising anyone with strict data-residency requirements to read the current processing terms rather than the marketing page — that's our standing policy for every provider, not a specific suspicion here.

Pricing: what you really pay

Gcore recently replaced its old Free, Start, and Pro tiers with a single pay-as-you-go (PAYG) CDN plan, and the new structure is one of the more straightforward ones in the category. There is no subscription fee and no card required to start. The first 1 TB of CDN traffic per month is free on the full 210+ PoP network. Beyond that, pricing is progressive: €0.01/GB from 1 TB up to 500 TB per month, €0.008/GB from 500 TB to 1 PB, €0.0065/GB from 1 PB to 2 PB, and €0.005/GB above 2 PB. Each usage tier is charged at its own rate — moving into a cheaper tier doesn't retroactively discount what you already used. Requests beyond the included volume (1 billion) cost €0.75 per million, and image optimization includes 10,000 requests per month at €1 per 10,000 after that. Prices exclude VAT.

For comparison, the retired plans billed overage at €0.03/GB on Free, €0.023/GB on Start, and €0.02/GB on Pro, with Start at €35/month for 1.5 TB and Pro at €100/month for 5 TB. So the PAYG change is a real price cut for small-to-mid usage: the overage rate dropped about 66% versus the old Free tier, and the free allotment now gets you the entire network rather than standard routing on a subset of PoPs. Existing Free/Start/Pro customers are not migrated automatically and can switch themselves.

Enterprise is the second track: custom traffic volumes, on-demand PoPs, private network interconnects (PNI), BYOIP or dedicated IPs, custom L3/L4 DDoS terms, and 24/7 phone support alongside email and chat. On PAYG, support is 24/7 email and chat; a free SSL certificate is included on every plan, and L3/L4 DDoS protection plus basic WAF are in the plan rather than sold back as add-ons. WAAP, live streaming, and log viewing are available on demand. The free trial for the paid experience is 14 days or 300 GB.

One editorial note: Gcore's own marketing pages still show fragments of the retired Free/Start/Volume lineup in some places, so if you're comparing quotes, anchor on the PAYG announcement and the edge-network pricing table.

Performance & infrastructure

On raw network facts, Gcore stands up well against /benchmarks expectations for a mid-size CDN: 210+ PoPs, 200+ Tbps capacity, 14,000+ peering partners, and a reported 14 Tbps daily peak bandwidth. The 85% cache hit ratio claim is the number we'd most like to see independently tested, because it's the one that turns network size into actual origin offload.

Feature-wise, the CDN covers the expected modern surface: HTTP/2 (and HTTP/3 in current generations), prefetch, origin groups and origin shielding (basic shielding on PAYG, custom on Enterprise), cache rules, content protection, purge API, and IPv6 support. Image optimization is built in, and Gcore sells video encoding with free encoding up to 1080p and a built-in web player. For teams that want one invoice, Gcore's S3-compatible storage (Standard and a faster tier) and managed authoritative DNS on 210+ anycast servers round out the stack — useful, though each is billed as a separate product.

Reliability reporting: Gcore's CDN page states a 99% platform uptime SLA, while third-party SLA trackers list a 99.9% credit-backed commitment and other Gcore products advertise 99.95%. We've entered the first-party figure and flagged the discrepancy in our notes; enterprise buyers should get the credit schedule in their contract. On the company side, the revenue and profitability profile noted above is more reassuring than a typical challenger's burn rate.

On the operational side, cache management is API-first: purges, cache rules, and origin groups are all configurable through the portal and the API, and the log viewer gives you visibility into what's actually being served from edge versus origin. Teams migrating from another CDN will find the origin-group model familiar; the migration itself is mostly a DNS change plus cache-rule translation, which we've seen take an afternoon for a mid-size static site and a few days for a dynamic application with complex cache keys.

Where it falls short

Brand familiarity is the practical problem. In Western Europe and North America, Gcore is a second-tier name, and that shows up in the ecosystem: fewer third-party guides, fewer prebuilt integrations, and less community troubleshooting than Cloudflare. Your team will read Gcore's own docs more often than Stack Overflow.

The self-serve tooling, while functional, is younger than the market leader's. The WAF is a separate product, and the basic tier is basic — bot management and API security live on Enterprise. If you need a mature application security suite on day one, Gcore will feel thin and you'll be negotiating.

Documentation friction is real: the pricing page resists automated reading, plan transitions have left stale pages in circulation (the retired Free/Start/Pro tiers still appear in third-party listings and on some Gcore pages), and the SLA percentage is stated inconsistently across channels. None of these are dealbreakers, but each one adds a support ticket or a sales call to what should be a self-serve decision.

Finally, coverage claims deserve scrutiny per region. "210+ PoPs" is a global average; what matters is PoP density where your users are. Gcore publishes its network map — check your target metros before you commit.

Who should pick this

Our pick for teams whose audience sits substantially outside the North America–Western Europe corridor — CIS, Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa — where Gcore's PoP density beats what the US-headquartered leaders offer. It's also a strong candidate for cost-conscious operators who want predictable, published per-GB pricing with a genuinely useful free tier: 1 TB a month with SSL and DDoS included is enough to run a real production pilot, not just a demo.

Sovereignty-minded EU buyers get a Luxembourg legal entity and EU data-processing regions as a bonus. Enterprises wanting PNI, BYOIP, or negotiated DDoS terms should go the Enterprise route. Teams that need the largest possible integration ecosystem and don't care about CIS coverage are still better served by Cloudflare — we say that plainly in our /category/cdn-providers comparison.

Key takeaways

• Luxembourg-based (G-Core Labs S.A.), founded 2014, grown largely on revenue; reported ~$140M revenue at the end of 2025
• 210+ PoPs, 200+ Tbps capacity, ~30 ms reported average worldwide latency — strong CIS, Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa coverage
• PAYG pricing: no subscription, first 1 TB free per month, then €0.01/GB falling to €0.005/GB above 2 PB; requests €0.75 per million over the included volume
• Free SSL and basic L3/L4 DDoS included on every plan; WAF, WAAP, and live streaming on demand
• SLA stated inconsistently (99% first-party, 99.9% per trackers) — get the credit schedule in writing
• Best for non-US-centric audiences and EU sovereignty requirements; thinner ecosystem and security tooling than the market leader

Sources

• https://gcore.com/cdn
• https://gcore.com/cdn-vol2
• https://gcore.com/pricing/edge-network
• https://gcore.com/developers/pay-as-you-go-cdn
• https://docs.gcore.com/storage/how-storage-is-billed
• https://www.g2.com/products/gcore-cdn/pricing
• https://www.cdnworld.com/providers/gcore
• https://sla.directory/vendors/gcore