Best European Alternatives to Cloudflare

Why people leave Cloudflare

Cloudflare is the hardest tool in this directory to argue with on price, because for most of its users the price is zero. A free plan with a CDN, a certificate, DNS and DDoS mitigation that nobody meters is not a loss leader that European providers have failed to match; it is a different business model, funded by the enterprise contracts underneath it.

So the case for moving is not that somebody undercuts free. It is that free comes with two conditions written down elsewhere.

The self-serve terms let Cloudflare limit your use of the CDN if you serve video or a disproportionate share of pictures, audio and other large files without buying the paid products for that traffic. And the only control over which data centres are allowed to decrypt your HTTPS traffic is the Data Localization Suite, which the documentation describes as an Enterprise-only paid add-on.

Put those together and the shape of the problem appears. If your traffic is mostly HTML, Cloudflare is close to unbeatable. If it is media, or if somebody in compliance has asked where TLS is terminated, you are on the wrong plan and the right plan is not on the pricing page.

• European processing is gated behind a contract Regional Services is the feature that decides which Cloudflare data centres may decrypt and process your HTTPS traffic; Customer Metadata Boundary is the one that keeps logs and analytics in your chosen region. Both sit inside the Data Localization Suite, and that suite is sold only to Enterprise customers as a paid extra. A Pro subscriber at $20 a month has no dashboard toggle for this and no price to pay for it. The answer to "can we keep inspection in Europe" is a sales call.
• The unmetered plan has a clause instead of a meter Cloudflare does not bill you per gigabyte on Free, Pro or Business, which is why the comparison spreadsheets always favour it. The service-specific terms reserve the right to disable or limit CDN access where it is used to serve video, or a disproportionate percentage of images, audio files or other large files, without the paid services intended for that. Media sites therefore have an unpriced risk rather than a bill, and unpriced risk is harder to plan around than four cents a gigabyte.
• The remedy you assume you have starts at $200 a month The 100% uptime SLA appears on the Business plan, at $200 a month billed annually. On 18 November 2025 a permissions change in a database produced an oversized bot-management configuration file; the first errors on customer traffic appeared at 11:28 UTC, the main impact was resolved at 14:30 and all services were declared normal at 17:06. Every Free and Pro customer sat through that with no contractual remedy, because they had not bought one. That is a fair deal, and it is worth knowing you have taken it.
• One company sees an unusual share of the web Cloudflare terminates TLS for a very large number of sites, which means it holds the decrypted request stream for a very large number of visitors. That concentration is what makes its threat intelligence good and also what makes it a single point of legal and operational exposure. Spreading that layer across several smaller European operators is a worse deal on threat data and a better one on correlation.

What you have to replace, not just match

Cloudflare arrives as one switch and leaves as four products, so list them before you price anything.

There is caching and delivery, which everything on this page does. There is DNS, which Cloudflare runs well and gives away. There is the security layer — WAF rules, bot mitigation, Turnstile, rate limiting — which is what most people actually mean when they say they are "on Cloudflare". And there is the developer platform: Workers, KV, R2, Pages.

Bunny.net and Gcore can take the first two and a reasonable share of the third. Gcore is the only one here that answers the fourth. Nobody replaces Turnstile with a like-for-like product, and if your login pages depend on it, budget for a separate captcha before you move anything else.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to Cloudflare

What actually breaks when you switch

The origin firewall is what takes sites down. Plenty of servers only accept connections from Cloudflare's published IP ranges, which is good practice right up to the moment the traffic starts arriving from Ljubljana instead. Add the new provider's ranges before you move the DNS, and keep both allowed until the old records have expired everywhere.

The second trap is TLS at the origin. If you were running Flexible SSL, the connection between Cloudflare and your server was never encrypted and your server may have no valid certificate at all. The moment another provider fronts it, browsers see whatever the origin actually presents. Issue a real certificate first and test it directly, bypassing the CDN.

Third, make a list of everything bolted on afterwards. Page rules, redirect lists, WAF exceptions for a payment callback, Turnstile on the contact form, Workers doing a rewrite nobody documented. The delivery moves in an afternoon; these take a fortnight, and they fail quietly rather than loudly.

Cloudflare is free. How can a European provider compete with that?

By being cheap enough that the difference stops being a decision. Bunny.net charges $0.01 per gigabyte in Europe and North America with a $1 monthly minimum, so a site shifting 200GB a month pays about two dollars. That is not free, and it is also not a budget line anybody defends in a meeting.

The comparison that actually matters is against the paid Cloudflare plans rather than against the free one. Pro is $20 a month billed annually and Business is $200. At those numbers a European provider is not competing with zero; it is competing with $240 or $2,400 a year, and on that comparison it wins comfortably for ordinary volumes.

The case for staying is real when your traffic is large, plain and unmetered — a busy content site that never touches video can cost Cloudflare far more to serve than it pays. That is the deal on offer, and taking it is rational.

Can I keep Cloudflare and just turn on EU data residency?

Not on the plan you are probably on. The Data Localization Suite is documented as an Enterprise-only paid add-on, and it is the thing that contains both halves of what people mean by residency here: Regional Services, which restricts which data centres are allowed to decrypt your HTTPS traffic, and Customer Metadata Boundary, which keeps the logs and analytics that could identify your visitors inside the region you picked.

Without it, your traffic is inspected wherever the nearest point of presence happens to be, which for a European visitor is usually European and is not guaranteed to be. If a data protection assessment has asked you to state where TLS is terminated, "usually nearby" is not an answer you can write down.

So the choice is an Enterprise contract with an add-on, or a provider whose network is European by construction and where nobody has to sell you the option.

What happens if my site is mostly video or large downloads?

Read the service-specific terms before you build on the free plan. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your CDN access if it is used to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files or other large files without the paid services intended for that traffic. Enforcement is discretionary, which is exactly what makes it hard to plan around.

The Cloudflare-shaped answer is to buy Stream for video and R2 for objects, which is a perfectly good product and a real bill. At that point you are comparing paid products with paid products, and the European numbers look different.

This is the single clearest case on the page for moving. Bunny.net sells video delivery as a first-class product at the same cent-per-gigabyte rate, and CDN77 was built around adaptive bitrate streaming. Neither has a clause asking you to take your media elsewhere.

Does moving off Cloudflare make my site less safe?

In one specific way, probably yes, and it is worth naming. Cloudflare sees an unusual share of the world's web requests, and that scale is what feeds its bot scoring and its managed rules. A smaller European network sees less, so its automatic defences are trained on less.

In another way, no. The DDoS absorption that most sites actually need is a function of network capacity and anycast routing, and Bunny.net, Gcore and CDN77 all have enough of both for an ordinary commercial site. What you lose is the top tier of managed application-layer defence, not the pipe.

If the security layer is the reason you are on Cloudflare rather than the delivery, the honest advice on this page is to look at a European security vendor rather than a European CDN — and to read /alternative-to/aws-shield, which covers that argument properly.

Which one to pick

If you serve video, audio or large downloads, this is the clearest move on the page. Bunny.net prices media as ordinary traffic and CDN77 is built for streaming at volume — either one turns a discretionary clause in somebody else's terms into a line item you control.

If a data protection assessment has asked where TLS is terminated, KeyCDN answers it on its cheapest plan and Bunny.net answers it by being Slovenian. Cloudflare answers it only through an Enterprise contract with a paid add-on, which is a very expensive way to buy a sentence.

If your Cloudflare account contains Workers, Gcore is the only realistic destination here, and you should still expect to rewrite the parts that depend on the surrounding storage products.

And if your site is plain HTML, nobody has asked you about jurisdiction, and the free plan has never complained — stay. That is a genuinely good deal, and swapping it for a metered bill to make a point is not an improvement.