What is Cloudflare? A complete guide to features, pricing, and use cases

Cloudflare is one of the most widely used infrastructure platforms on the internet, sitting invisibly between millions of websites and the users who visit them. But if you're encountering it for the first time, whether you're setting up DNS for a domain, evaluating a CDN, or trying to understand what Cloudflare actually does, the product surface can be hard to map. This guide covers what Cloudflare is, what it does, how it works, and what it costs. If you're already using Cloudflare and want to automate your operations, we'll also show you how IFTTT connects Cloudflare to the rest of your stack: alerting you when SSL certificates are expiring, logging DNS changes, routing zone alerts to Slack and Discord, and triggering security actions automatically.

IFTTT is an automation platform that connects over 1000 apps and services, so instead of manually checking your Cloudflare dashboard for DNS changes or certificate status, you build the alert once and it runs automatically.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a global network platform that provides DNS management, CDN, DDoS protection, SSL/TLS, and web application security for websites and internet services. It acts as a reverse proxy and network intermediary, sitting between your origin server and your visitors, routing traffic through its global network to improve performance and filter threats before they reach your infrastructure.

Founded in 2010, Cloudflare started as a web security and performance company and has expanded into a broad infrastructure platform used by more than 20% of all websites on the internet. Its network spans over 300 data centers worldwide, making it one of the largest distributed networks in existence. Cloudflare serves everyone from individual bloggers on the free plan to some of the largest enterprises on the internet.

What does Cloudflare do?

Cloudflare covers several distinct infrastructure functions, most of which work together as part of a single platform once your domain is pointed to Cloudflare's nameservers.

DNS management is the foundation. Cloudflare manages the DNS records for your domain, mapping your domain name to the IP address of your server, and does so faster than most registrar DNS providers. Cloudflare's DNS is one of the fastest authoritative DNS services globally.

CDN (content delivery network) caches your website's static assets: images, CSS, JavaScript, at Cloudflare's edge locations around the world. When a visitor loads your site, the cached content is served from the nearest Cloudflare data center rather than your origin server, reducing latency and load on your infrastructure.

DDoS protection absorbs and mitigates distributed denial-of-service attacks at the network edge. Cloudflare's scale means it can absorb extremely large attacks, measured in terabits per second, that would overwhelm most origin infrastructure, and it does this automatically on all plans including free.

SSL/TLS manages HTTPS for your domain. Cloudflare provisions and renews SSL certificates automatically, handles the TLS handshake at the edge, and can connect back to your origin over HTTP or HTTPS depending on your configuration. This means you can serve HTTPS to visitors even if your origin server doesn't have its own certificate.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) filters web traffic for known attack patterns: SQL injection, cross-site scripting, credential stuffing, based on Cloudflare's threat intelligence across its network. The WAF is available on paid plans.

Cloudflare Workers is a serverless compute platform that lets you run JavaScript, Python, and other code at Cloudflare's edge, close to users. It's a separate product from the core security and CDN features, used for building edge applications, custom routing logic, and API infrastructure.

How does Cloudflare work?

When you add a domain to Cloudflare and update your nameservers, your domain's DNS is now managed by Cloudflare. When someone looks up your domain, Cloudflare returns its own edge IP addresses rather than your server's IP. Incoming traffic flows through Cloudflare's network first.

At the edge, Cloudflare applies the rules and settings you've configured, serving cached content where available, filtering traffic that matches WAF rules or rate limits, terminating TLS, and forwarding legitimate requests to your origin server. Your origin server only ever receives traffic that has passed through Cloudflare's network.

Zones are how Cloudflare organizes domains. Each domain you add to Cloudflare is a zone with its own DNS records, security settings, and configuration. You can have multiple zones in one Cloudflare account, useful for agencies or businesses managing infrastructure across multiple domains.

Security levels control how aggressively Cloudflare challenges potentially suspicious traffic. At the "High" security level, Cloudflare presents a challenge page to more visitors; at "Essentially Off," almost all traffic passes through unchecked. You can change the security level globally or per zone, and automate those changes, which is where IFTTT integrations become particularly useful for responding to threat events.

SSL/TLS modes determine how Cloudflare communicates with your origin. Flexible mode encrypts between the visitor and Cloudflare but uses plain HTTP between Cloudflare and your origin; Full mode requires a certificate on the origin; Full (Strict) requires a valid, trusted certificate. For most production sites, Full (Strict) is the recommended configuration.

Is Cloudflare free?

Yes, Cloudflare has a genuinely capable free plan that includes unlimited DNS management, CDN, automatic DDoS mitigation, free SSL certificates, and basic security features for any number of domains. The free plan is sufficient for most personal sites, small businesses, and developers exploring the platform.

Paid plans unlock more advanced features:

The Pro plan costs $20/month per domain and adds the Web Application Firewall with managed rulesets, image optimization, mobile optimization, and enhanced SSL features. It's designed for small businesses and developer teams that need protection beyond basic DDoS mitigation.

The Business plan costs $200/month per domain and adds custom SSL certificates, a 100% uptime SLA, advanced WAF rules, PCI compliance support, and priority support. It's aimed at businesses with compliance requirements or high-availability needs.

Enterprise plans are custom-priced and include custom rate limits, dedicated IP ranges, custom security rules, and a dedicated account team. Large-scale deployments and businesses with specific SLA requirements typically operate at this tier.

Cloudflare's Workers, R2 storage, and other developer products have separate pricing based on usage.

Cloudflare vs. Akamai: what's the difference?

Cloudflare and Akamai are both global CDN and security platforms, but they serve very different markets and come with very different experiences. Here's how they compare:

Bottom line: Cloudflare is the right choice for the vast majority of websites and infrastructure teams, it's self-serve, transparently priced, and delivers enterprise-grade CDN, DDoS protection, and DNS out of the box at every tier including free. Akamai is the platform for large enterprises with significant scale requirements, dedicated implementation resources, and budgets to match. Only Cloudflare has IFTTT support, making it possible to automate DNS management, SSL monitoring, and security level changes from your existing toolstack.

What are Cloudflare's limitations?

Cloudflare's reverse proxy model means your origin server's IP address is hidden by default, but if you expose it through other DNS records, email headers, or misconfigured services, determined attackers can bypass Cloudflare and hit your origin directly. Security requires keeping your origin IP genuinely private, which requires care beyond just enabling Cloudflare.

The WAF and advanced security rules require a paid plan. The free plan's DDoS protection handles volumetric attacks well, but application-layer attack filtering, SQL injection, bot management, custom rate limiting, requires Pro or above.

Caching behavior can require careful configuration. Cloudflare caches aggressively by default for static assets, which is usually what you want, but dynamic sites and authenticated areas need explicit cache rules to avoid serving stale or incorrect content to users.

Workers and the broader developer platform, while powerful, have their own pricing model and learning curve separate from the core CDN and security product. Teams adopting Workers need to understand the platform's constraints around CPU time, memory limits, and pricing at scale.

Finally, Cloudflare's breadth: DNS, CDN, security, compute, storage, email, Zero Trust networking, can make it difficult to understand the scope of what you're adopting. It's easy to enable a feature without fully understanding its implications for your setup, particularly around SSL mode, caching, and firewall rules.

How IFTTT works with Cloudflare

Cloudflare monitors your DNS records, SSL certificates, and zone status continuously. IFTTT makes sure that important events, an expiring certificate, a DNS record change, a zone going offline, reach the right people immediately, without anyone manually checking the Cloudflare dashboard.

IFTTT's Cloudflare integration works through five triggers, one Pro+ query, and four actions. Triggers fire on DNS record additions and modifications, zone security level changes, and more. Actions let you create and delete DNS records, update your zone's security level, and pause or resume a zone, all from other apps in your stack.

Log DNS records and track changes

Maintain an automatic audit log of DNS record changes outside of Cloudflare. Every modification to your zone's DNS records can be sent to a spreadsheet or routed to a webhooks endpoint, useful for change tracking, incident investigation, or compliance.

Get alerted before SSL certificates expire

SSL certificate expiry is one of the most avoidable causes of site downtime, and one of the easiest to catch with automation. IFTTT can push a notification or send an email the moment a certificate enters its expiry window, giving you time to renew before anything breaks.

Create DNS records from other tools

Cloudflare's actions let you create and delete DNS records from outside the dashboard entirely. A new row in a Google Sheet can provision a DNS record. A webhooks event from your deployment pipeline can update your zone automatically. DNS management becomes part of your existing workflow rather than a manual task in a separate interface.

Keep your team notified on zone and security events

Route zone status changes, DNS activity, and SSL alerts to Slack, Discord, or Telegram automatically, so your team knows immediately when a zone is paused, a DNS record changes, or a certificate is coming due, without needing to monitor the Cloudflare dashboard directly.

Explore Cloudflare integrations

Slack to Cloudflare

Route zone and DNS activity to Slack automatically. Useful for infrastructure and DevOps teams who want visibility into zone status changes and DNS modifications in the channels where they already work.

• - Post a Slack message when a Cloudflare zone is paused or resumed
• - Alert your team in Slack when an SSL certificate is approaching expiry
• - Notify a channel when a DNS record is added or changed

Set up Slack → Cloudflare

Google Sheets to Cloudflare

Log DNS records and changes to a spreadsheet automatically, or provision new DNS records from spreadsheet rows. Useful for infrastructure teams that track DNS changes as part of a broader change management process.

• - Log every DNS record change to a running Google Sheets audit trail
• - Create new Cloudflare DNS records from rows added to a spreadsheet
• - Maintain an external record of your zone's DNS configuration

Set up Google Sheets → Cloudflare

Discord to Cloudflare

Keep your team or community updated on zone activity in Discord. Useful for developer teams and open source projects that coordinate in Discord and want infrastructure alerts in the same workspace.

• - Post a message to Discord when a DNS record changes in your zone
• - Pause or resume a Cloudflare zone from a Discord pinned message
• - Alert your server when a zone's security level changes

Set up Discord → Cloudflare

Webhooks to Cloudflare

Connect Cloudflare to your existing infrastructure pipeline via webhooks. Useful for teams whose deployment and CI/CD workflows need to trigger DNS record creation, deletion, or zone pausing as part of automated processes.

• - Create a Cloudflare DNS record when a deployment pipeline fires a webhooks event
• - Send a webhooks notification to your internal systems when DNS changes occur
• - Trigger zone security level updates from your incident response tooling

Set up Webhooks → Cloudflare

8 more ways to automate your development workflow

If you're already connecting Cloudflare with IFTTT, these Applets extend automation to the other tools in your stack. GitHub and Asana are two of the most common platforms developer and infrastructure teams run alongside their cloud tooling, and both are on IFTTT.

Cloudflare and IFTTT: better together

Cloudflare protects and accelerates your internet infrastructure. IFTTT makes sure the events happening inside your Cloudflare zones, DNS changes, expiring certificates, security level shifts, reach the right people and systems automatically, without manual dashboard monitoring.

Ready to connect Cloudflare to your workflow? Get started on IFTTT today, no code required.

Frequently asked questions about Cloudflare

What is Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver?

1.1.1.1 is Cloudflare's public DNS resolver, a free service separate from Cloudflare's domain and CDN product. While Cloudflare's authoritative DNS manages the DNS records for domains you add to your Cloudflare account, 1.1.1.1 is a recursive DNS resolver that anyone can use to resolve DNS queries faster and more privately than most ISP-provided DNS. You configure 1.1.1.1 at the device or network level, not in the Cloudflare dashboard, by setting your DNS server to 1.1.1.1 (and 1.0.0.1 as a backup). It's one of the fastest public DNS resolvers globally and doesn't log your query data for advertising purposes.

Does Cloudflare slow down websites?

No, in most configurations, Cloudflare speeds websites up rather than slowing them down. Cloudflare's CDN serves cached content from edge locations close to visitors, reducing latency compared to requests that travel all the way to your origin server. Its network also handles TLS termination at the edge, which is typically faster than doing so at a more distant origin. In rare cases, particularly with misconfigured caching rules, poorly optimized Workers scripts, or certain SSL mode settings, Cloudflare can add latency. For the vast majority of websites, enabling Cloudflare results in measurable performance improvements, especially for visitors who are geographically distant from the origin server.

Is Cloudflare a hosting provider?

No, Cloudflare is not a web hosting provider in the traditional sense. It doesn't store your website's files or run your web server. Your website still needs to be hosted somewhere, on a VPS, a managed hosting platform, a cloud provider, or a service like Netlify or Vercel, and Cloudflare sits in front of that hosting, handling DNS, CDN caching, DDoS protection, and security. The exception is Cloudflare Pages, which is a static site hosting product within the Cloudflare ecosystem, and Cloudflare Workers, which can serve responses directly from the edge without an origin server. But for most use cases, Cloudflare works alongside your existing host rather than replacing it.

What is the difference between Cloudflare and a VPN?

Cloudflare and a VPN solve different problems. A VPN routes your internet traffic through an encrypted tunnel to a server in another location, masking your IP address from the websites you visit and encrypting your traffic from your ISP. Cloudflare's core product is a server-side infrastructure tool, it protects and accelerates websites and services, and operates on the server side rather than the user side. Cloudflare does offer a user-side product called Cloudflare WARP, which is a VPN-like service that routes your device's traffic through Cloudflare's network for privacy and performance. But the standard Cloudflare product you'd use for a website or domain is not a VPN, it's a reverse proxy and CDN that website owners configure for their infrastructure.

Explore more IFTTT blogs

Cloudflare is one of over 1000 services you can connect with IFTTT. Whether you're automating your development workflow, managing projects, or just trying to cut out the manual work, IFTTT works across the tools you already use. Here are a few more blogs to help you get started.

• - Six automations for a stronger start to 2026
• - Building custom notification automations with IFTTT
• - Small business automation: 7 tasks to automate in 2026 (with workflow examples)
• - How an IFTTTer is automating their project management
• - What your coffee order says about your workflow