Cloudflare vs. BunnyCDN vs. Fastly

Most people start looking at CDNs because something on their site feels slow. Pages load fine from your own network, but visitors in other states are waiting. Product images drag. The origin server gets crushed every time you run a promotion. If any of that sounds like your situation, you’re in the right place.

Cloudflare, BunnyCDN, and Fastly all do the same fundamental thing. They serve your content from servers that are physically closer to your visitors. But the way they’re built, what they cost, and how much control they give you are very different. Cloudflare runs a massive network across 330+ cities with bundled security, DNS, and edge compute. BunnyCDN keeps things lean with 110-120 POPs and some of the lowest per-GB pricing in the industry. Fastly operates around 60+ high-density POPs built for programmability and sub-200ms cache purging.

I’ve worked with all three on different projects, and the differences become obvious fast once you move past the marketing pages. Here’s what actually matters when you’re picking one.

What should you actually compare?

A CDN isn’t going to magically fix everything. It helps the most when you’re caching the right stuff and keeping the wrong stuff out of cache. Get it wrong and you end up with a “faster” site where checkout is broken for everyone.

Before you even think about picking a CDN, figure out what’s happening on your origin server. If you’re still deciding between shared hosting, a VPS, or a dedicated box, our breakdown of types of web hosting will help you sort that out. CDN performance still depends heavily on how your origin handles cache misses, so getting the foundation right makes a real difference.

Once that’s squared away, the CDN comparison boils down to a few real questions. How fast can you cache and purge content? If you’re updating prices or publishing articles regularly, you’ll care about purge speed. Fastly can purge globally in roughly 150ms. Cloudflare and BunnyCDN are slower but still reasonable for most use cases. Do you need security features at the edge, things like DDoS protection, bot filtering, and WAF rules? Or are you mostly trying to speed up delivery of images and static files? And how hands-on do you want to be? Some people want a simple dashboard with a few toggle switches. Others want to write actual code that runs at the edge.

Keep those questions in mind and you can make a smart call without getting lost in vendor hype.

Cloudflare: The all-in-one pick

Cloudflare tends to be the default choice, and there are good reasons for that. It bundles CDN, DNS, WAF, DDoS protection, and edge compute into one platform. You can put it in front of your origin, cache static assets, tighten up security, and move on with your life. For a lot of sites, especially content-heavy ones and marketing pages, that’s all you really need.

The network is massive. Cloudflare handles roughly 30% of global internet traffic across POPs in 190+ cities, with their marketing claiming presence in over 330 cities. For US traffic, that kind of coverage means your visitors are almost always hitting a nearby edge server. The free tier alone gives you CDN, basic DDoS protection, and limited WAF rules, which is pretty generous. Paid plans start at about $20/month per domain for Pro and $200/month for Business, and add stronger WAF, more page rules, and custom SSL options.

Where Cloudflare gets interesting is the developer platform. Workers lets you run serverless JavaScript at the edge with sub-5ms cold starts, and you can pair it with R2 for storage, D1 for SQL, or Workers AI for inference. If you’re building an edge-first application, staying inside the Cloudflare ecosystem keeps latency low and operational overhead minimal.

That said, the “all-in-one” approach has a flip side. Pricing for advanced features like Workers, R2, and bot management can get complex and usage-dependent pretty quickly. And if you only need a bare-bones CDN to speed up image delivery, the sheer size of the Cloudflare ecosystem can feel like more than you signed up for. You can absolutely do advanced cache key configurations and request routing on Cloudflare, but plenty of teams pick it specifically because they don’t want to deal with that level of complexity every day.

BunnyCDN: Fast delivery, low cost, no bloat

BunnyCDN is the most no-nonsense option of the three. If your performance issues boil down to images, CSS/JS bundles, downloads, or media files, and you want a CDN you can wrap your head around in an afternoon, BunnyCDN is hard to beat on value.

The pricing model is what grabs most people’s attention. It’s pure pay-as-you-go with per-GB rates that start around €0.01/GB on the Standard tier and drop to roughly €0.005/GB on the High Volume tier. There are no request fees, and the monthly minimum is just $1. To put that in perspective, 5 TB of traffic in North America/Europe costs about $50 on BunnyCDN. The same volume on Fastly would run you north of $600. That’s not a typo.

Beyond just the CDN, BunnyCDN has some useful add-ons. Bunny Storage gives you edge-accelerated object storage replicated globally. Bunny Optimizer handles on-the-fly image optimization and CSS/JS minification. And Bunny Stream covers video ingest, transcoding, and delivery. You can build a full media pipeline without stitching together three different vendors. The dashboard uses Edge Rules for controlling caching, headers, redirects, and routing at the edge, all without writing code.

The trade-off? Security is more basic. You get DDoS protection, token auth, geo-blocking, and hotlink protection, but there’s no full WAF or Zero Trust platform. If you’re running a sensitive application that needs a deep security stack at the CDN layer, you’ll probably need to pair BunnyCDN with something else. The network is also smaller than Cloudflare’s, with around 110-120 POPs in 50+ countries. Performance is still solid for most workloads, but there’s less of a “platform” story if you need more than CDN plus media delivery.

Fastly: Bbuilt for engineers who want control

Fastly is the CDN you pick when you want to treat your edge as programmable infrastructure. If you have complex caching requirements, lots of content variants, or strict needs around header manipulation and cache keys, Fastly is where those conversations tend to end up.

The configuration model is historically built on Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), which lets teams build very detailed caching and routing logic. On top of that, Compute@Edge runs Rust and other languages at Fastly’s edge POPs with startup times reported in the tens of microseconds. Teams use it for auth, API shaping, A/B testing, content switching, and pretty much anything you’d normally need a separate middleware layer for. Fastly also pushes into real-time purging harder than anyone else, with global cache invalidation happening in roughly 150ms.

The network is smaller on purpose. Around 60+ high-density POPs are designed to serve more content directly from cache, improving hit ratios. Fastly also has dedicated bundles for WAF, observability, and real-time messaging (Fanout), plus specific packages for streaming and low-latency gaming workloads.

Now for the reality check. Fastly is expensive. The usage-based tier has a $50/month minimum, bandwidth starts around $0.12/GB for the first 10 TB in North America/Europe, and requests are priced separately at about $0.0075 per 10,000 requests. For larger customers, flat-rate packages start near $1,500/month. There is a free tier with roughly $50/month in credit, but it’s really meant for prototypes or very low-traffic testing. If your goal is simply to cache static assets and reduce origin load, Cloudflare or BunnyCDN will be cheaper and simpler. But if you’re dealing with frequent content changes, advanced routing, or you need granular control over every edge decision, Fastly tends to be worth the premium.

Caching rules that won’t break your site

Here’s a dirty secret about CDN “failures.” Most of the time it’s not the CDN. It’s bad caching rules or confusing headers from the origin.

A clean way to think about this is to split your site into three buckets. First, truly static assets like images, fonts, and versioned CSS/JS files. These are safe to cache aggressively. Second, semi-dynamic pages that change occasionally, like product pages or blog posts. Short-lived cache with revalidation usually works well here. Third, sensitive or user-specific paths like login, cart, checkout, and account pages. Those should bypass edge caching entirely, or at minimum use very conservative rules.

The headers your origin sends are what tell the CDN how to behave. Most caching issues come down to the Cache-Control header and how you set directives like max-age and s-maxage. This matters a lot when you’re trying to control CDN-level caching versus browser caching, because those are two very different things in practice.

For a practical primer on how caches decide what’s fresh, what’s stale, and when to revalidate, that resource maps directly to the problems most teams run into when their site starts serving outdated content.

Once your caching rules are sorted, the CDN differences get a lot clearer. Cloudflare is probably the quickest to get a safe baseline going. BunnyCDN is efficient and dead simple for static asset delivery. Fastly gives you the finest control when you need to manage every edge detail.

What this looks like for a US ecommerce store

Picking a CDN gets easier when you think about your actual stack instead of just comparing vendor feature lists.

Picture a US-based online store. The customer-facing side serves product pages, images, and theme assets. The backend manages catalog data, inventory, orders, and refunds. An ecommerce platform like Commerce might handle order state and inventory, while the CDN sits in front to cache product images, serve versioned CSS/JS fast, and keep the origin from falling over during a sale.

The rule of thumb is simple. Cache everything that’s the same for every visitor. Keep the dynamic, user-specific stuff out of edge caching. Product images and static theme assets? Cache aggressively. Cart, checkout, and account endpoints? Bypass edge caching, and make your CDN rules explicit about it. For product pages that get updated, short-lived caching with revalidation tends to work better than leaving everything uncached.

If you run frequent promotions or pricing updates, your purging strategy matters too. You want to invalidate specific paths or URL patterns without flushing your entire cache. This is where Fastly’s 150ms global purge is a real advantage for high-traffic stores. Cloudflare and BunnyCDN handle purging fine for most sites, but if you’re pushing out pricing changes multiple times a day and serving thousands of concurrent users, that speed difference adds up.

Your hosting affects CDN performance more than you think

CDNs reduce origin load, but they don’t eliminate it. Every cache miss still hits your server, and that’s where hosting quality shows up.

If you’re trying to improve performance while keeping costs manageable, pairing a CDN with a solid cloud host is a really effective combo for static-heavy sites. A lot of what people blame on the CDN is actually the origin choking during cache misses. That’s why it helps to understand what cheap cloud hosting can actually deliver under load before you start pointing fingers at the CDN.

On the other end, if you’re running a high-traffic site with lots of dynamic content, your origin probably needs dedicated resources with predictable I/O. The CDN absorbs a lot of the load, but you still need a backend that can handle bursts of revalidation traffic when cached content expires across many POPs at once. If you’re weighing that step up, our explainer on what a dedicated server is covers how resource isolation ties into performance consistency.

The bottom line is that CDN choice and origin choice are connected. A good CDN can make a mediocre origin feel faster, but it can’t fully cover for a server that falls over under load.

So which CDN should you actually pick?

If you need the short version, here it is.

Cloudflare is the best all-around pick when you want quick wins, a full security stack, and a platform you won’t outgrow anytime soon. The free tier is generous enough to start with, and the ecosystem runs deep if you eventually need edge compute, storage, or AI inference at the edge.

BunnyCDN is where you go when you want fast static delivery at a fraction of the cost, without the operational overhead. If you’re moving terabytes of images, video, or downloads and your budget is tight, nothing else comes close on price-to-performance.

Fastly is the right call when you need serious programmability, real-time purging, and an edge platform that can handle complex caching logic. It costs more, but for teams that treat the CDN as part of their application architecture, the control it gives you is worth every penny.

For most US sites, performance improves the fastest when you start with sensible caching rules, keep user-specific paths out of cache, and make sure your origin can handle the misses. Get those basics right and the Cloudflare vs BunnyCDN vs Fastly decision becomes a lot simpler. You’re choosing an operating model, not just picking a logo.