QUIC.cloud vs Cloudflare - 5 key differences

The feud of QUIC.cloud vs Cloudflare has already begun especially after the release of Cloudflare APO. This makes the competition even stronger. The choice is going to be difficult but worthwhile in the end. Keep reading to find out the winner specifically for you.

If I was making a comparison between QUIC.cloud and Cloudflare without considering the new Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) for WordPress feature of Cloudflare, the choice was easy. I mean extremely easy.

It would have been like this: if you use WordPress, go with QUIC.cloud otherwise go with Cloudflare. But the APO brings WordPress optimization to Cloudflare and this changes everything. Now you need to know more about them to make the right choice.

What Is QUIC.cloud?

quic cloud banner

QUIC.cloud is mainly a WordPress optimized reverse proxy CDN provider. So, besides offering its core CDN, QUIC.cloud does a lot of other speed optimizations for WordPress sites like image optimization, critical CSS generation, Low Quality Image Placeholder generation, and others.

It has been developed by LiteSpeed Technologies which is a big name in the website performance and speed optimization industry. They are the most famous for their LiteSpeed web server which is arguably the best web server for hosting websites. They have also earned a lot of reputation because of their extremely popular WordPress optimization and caching plugin called LiteSpeed Cache.

QUIC.cloud is part of the LiteSpeed Cache package. This package is even better with their LiteSpeed web server but it isn't required to use QUIC.cloud. But LiteSpeed Cache plugin is a must use if you want to use QUIC.cloud.

LiteSpeed Cache and QUIC.cloud together do complete optimization of WordPress sites without. But the most important thing it does is dynamic HTML caching. Where most CDN providers don't even offer this, QUIC.cloud does pretty well at dynamic HTML caching. In fact, it does it without giving you the pain of constantly worrying about delivering the right website contents to the right visitors.

Here is a complete review of QUIC.cloud including how it helps your WordPress site.

What Is Cloudflare?

cloudflare banner logo

Cloudflare is extremely popular. So much so that over 20 million websites use this platform which makes up about 10% of all the websites. They are so much popular mostly because of their unlimited free offering of CDN and DNS services. These services may be free but they are constantly ranked as one of the best services in the industry. As a matter of fact, their DNS has the fastest response time according to the testing of DNSPerf. Their CDN is also among the fastest as per the testing of CDNPerf. They just earn by providing additional services on top of these core ones.

Cloudflare has been providing its services for many years. These years of experience working with so many websites have given them a lot of edge over anyone else. So, they are very good at optimizing the delivery of websites so that they load extremely fast. This has also helped grow their popularity as a reliable and go to provider in the website industry.

Cloudflare provides many different services but they can mainly be divided into two different products which are reverse proxy CDN and DNS. But because this is a comparison with QUIC.cloud which doesn't offer DNS, I will talk about only the CDN of Cloudflare in this article.

QUIC.cloud vs Cloudflare

Let's get one thing out of the way.

QUIC.cloud and Cloudflare are similar services in that they both are Reverse Proxy CDN providers. But that just isn't enough to describe them. They are a lot more than that, in their different ways. That's where their comparison comes to live.

Here are the most important things where Cloudflare vs QUIC.cloud comes into play.

CDN

QUIC.cloud and Cloudflare both are reverse proxy CDN providers. It is different from regular CDN providers in that they can only cache static files (images, CSS, JS, etc.) but can't cache dynamic HTML files where reverse proxy CDN providers can cache both static and dynamic files. However, there is some difference between how they cache these dynamic files which have been discussed in the dynamic caching section later section in this article.

The biggest difference in terms of CDN in QUIC.cloud vs Cloudflare is their total number of available Point of Presence (PoP). PoPs are the individual data centers from where CDN providers deliver websites to the visitors.

Because of being very new, QUIC.cloud has only over 40 PoPs/nodes around the world. But this is still a very large number of PoPs for a new provider. Here is a list of all the node locations of QUIC.cloud.

Cloudflare, on the other hand, as an already established provider has over 200 nodes. This gives Cloudflare an unmatched advantage for faster delivery of websites anywhere in the world.

However, for websites with very low traffic, this large number of nodes can actually result in poorer performance compared to a CDN provider with a less number of nodes. That’s because it will take more visitors for your website to get cached in all the Cloudflare nodes than in the QUIC.cloud nodes.

In short, if your website has less than a few thousand visitors every month, you may be better of using QUIC.cloud otherwise Cloudflare will give you better results.

See why Cloudflare may not be the best solution for low traffic websites in this article.

Dynamic Caching

Caching dynamic/private content is one of the most challenging things for reverse proxy CDN providers. It takes a lot of considerations otherwise visitors will end up seeing contents that aren't meant for them.

For instance, when browsing any website, you may have seen your name in a corner of that website. But when someone else visits that same website, they see their name instead of yours. This type of user-specific content is dynamic/private content. If dynamic caching isn't done properly, people may see others' names on their screen instead of their own names. They will even see items in their shopping cart that were added by someone else.

QUIC.cloud can easily handle caching for dynamic HTML pages on your WordPress sites. Inside the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, you will have controls over many things like whether you want to turn on or off caching for logged in users, add a list of cookies that shouldn't be cached, and many other things. So, you won't have to worry about serving wrong cached copies of your site to the visitors when using QUIC.cloud.

Though Cloudflare will give you the option to cache HTML files in all its plans using the Cache Everything page rule, it won't give you the option to bypass cache on cookies unless you upgrade to its Business or Enterprise plan. However, if you use the Cloudflare Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) for WordPress, you will get the feature of bypassing cache for logged in users as well as bypassing cache based on cookies. This will help with serving the right content to the right visitors on your site. However, cache bypass on cookies is dependent on the selected list of cookies by Cloudflare and you can't add to this list yourself. So, you can check if your plugin works well with Cloudflare APO before starting to use it.

Tip: you can achieve pretty much the same caching behavior in Cloudflare without upgrading to any of their paid plans by using this WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache plugin.

WordPress Optimization

QUIC.cloud only works with WordPress websites, at least for now. And the only way to use QUIC.cloud is from the LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress plugin. As you guessed, this is a complete optimization solution for WordPress. From optimizing everything in WordPress using the LiteSpeed Cache plugin to delivering those optimized files using QUIC CDN is the main idea behind this setup.

So, you get everything needed to optimize WordPress sites like modification, combination, image optimization, critical CSS generation, server push, async, defer, and a lot of other optimizations. This gives QUIC.cloud an unmatched edge over Cloudflare that isn't specifically optimized for WordPress sites but for every type of website as a whole.

Though Cloudflare does minification, image optimization, and some other optimizations from their CDN, they aren't tailored towards WordPress sites and so lacks a lot of the features that are offered in QUIC.coud and LiteSpeed setup.

You can, however, use LiteSpeed Cache together with Cloudflare which will allow you to use all the optimizations offered by QUIC.cloud with the CDN of Cloudflare. In short, best of both worlds.

But if you use this setup, you won't get the seamless integration between WordPress and CDN that is provided by QUIC.cloud and LiteSpeed Cache. For instance, if LiteSpeed Cache purges its cache, QUIC.cloud CDN will also purge its cache. In fact, almost all the settings of QUIC.cloud is located inside the LiteSpeed Cache plugin and not in the QUIC.cloud dashboard. So, you won't ever need to worry about managing your WordPress and CDN separately which can't be said for any other providers.

Though Cloudflare provides automatic cache purging, dynamic caching with cache bypass on cookies, and some other features that try to make WordPress and CDN work together, the integration of QUIC.cloud with LiteSpeed Cache is something totally different, it may be called LiteSpeed Ecosystem.

Non-WordPress Optimization

So far the biggest difference between QUIC.cloud and Cloudflare is in non-WordPress optimization.

QUIC.cloud only works on WordPress sites. So, there is no comparison here with Cloudflare. But QUIC.cloud is a very new product, so new that it is still in beta. This means they are yet to evolve a lot and it is especially true for QUIC.cloud as a LiteSpeed product. That's because LiteSpeed has already caching plugins for Mageno, Joomla, OpenCart, Drupal, and some other platforms so it indicates that they will take initiatives to start supporting these platforms in QUIC.cloud if they haven't started already.

Cloudflare on the other hand is optimized for all sorts of websites. You can throw away any website, and it will do just fine.

Pricing

QUIC.cloud and Cloudflare both have different pricing strategy. For instance, all QUIC.cloud features are available to everyone with different free tier usage limits but only selected Cloudflare features are available to people in different Cloudflare plans.

QUIC.cloud Pricing

QUIC.cloud has free tiers that lets you use their services for free on a monthly limit basis. After the limit is used up, you can wait for the next month or buy from them.

Here is the free tier usage limit per month:

Free TiersCDNImage Optimization*Critical CSSLQIP
Basic1GB1,000100100
LiteSpeed Server5GB5,000500500
LiteSpeed Enterprise10GB10,0001,0001,000
QUIC.cloud Partner20GB20,0002,0002,000
* Image optimization quota in the free tiers is applicable for Fast Queue only. Unlimited image optimization is available for everyone in the Standard Queue.

Here is the pricing after the free tier usage limits are used up:

Pricing PlansCDNImage OptimizationCritical CSSLQIP
Monthly Subscriptions500GB/$420,000/$5N/AN/A
8,000/$2
4,000/$1
Pay as You Go100GB/$110,000/$35,000/$33,000/$2
* These rates are discounted by 50% as introductory pricing. But after July 1, 2021, these are supposed to go back to the regular rate.

To understand these pricing and different tiers, see this QUIC.cloud pricing section.

Cloudflare Pricing

Cloudflare has 4 main pricing plans that includes a free one. Then there are add-ons that can be used on top of specified plans. Here are the pricing plan of Cloudflare with focus on speed optimization features.

 FreeProBusinessEnterprise
Price/month$0$20$200N/A
DNS
CDN
Lossless Image Optimization
Image Resizing
Automatic Mobile Optimization
Cache Bypass On Cookie
Automatic Platform Optimization$5/m
Argo Smart Routing$5/m + $0.10/gb$5/m + $0.10/gb$5/m + $0.10/gbN/A
✱ Available as part of Automatic Platform Optimization (APO)

Conclusion

QUIC.cloud is only for WordPress sites but Cloudflare is for all kinds of sites including WordPress. So, Cloudflare is still your best shot if you don't use WordPress. But if you do use WordPress, QUIC.cloud will be better for hassle-free CDN management where Cloudflare will be better for more reliable CDN performance.

With the new APO of Cloudflare, the CDN of both Cloudflare and QUIC.cloud work pretty similarly for WordPress. But QUIC.cloud gives better optimization for WordPress and it takes away the hassle of managing WordPress and CDN separately. But you can still take advantage of the optimization of LiteSpeed Cache and QUIC.cloud with the CDN of Cloudflare.

More specifically, QUIC.cloud wins at optimization and integration with WordPress. But Cloudflare wins at CDN. If your website gets under a few thousand monthly visitors and if you want a completely free solution, QUIC.cloud will be the best choice. But if your website has a lot of monthly traffic and you want the fastest CDN response time, Cloudflare may be the best choice.

Let me know which one suits you the best and why. And, if you think I can improve this comparison by including something, updating something, or by doing something else, give me a heads up in the comments. User remarks always help with making better content.

33 comments on “QUIC.cloud vs Cloudflare - 5 key differences”

  1. Very accurate comparison you have done here.
    Have you noticed that QUIC have started DNS services which makes it even much more easier to add the naked and www subdomain to the CDN?
    Regards

    1. Yes, I have noticed that.
      In fact, before they added their DNS service, I wrote the QUIC.cloud review where I added Anycast DNS as a feature suggestion for their CDN. Seems they took a different path and went for offering a completely new DNS service. This was expected but I would still like to see Anycast.

  2. It would be good to specify the date it was written, because as technology advances, I do not think that Quic is left with 40 nodes.

    1. Thanks for pointing that out.
      I have added a link to their current node locations so you can always check the most updated number. This is a fairly new article but I am still being pretty generous with their node numbers. Their website shows only about 20 node locations as of now. But total IPs of their nodes are way more than that so I wrote this number after considering that they may not have updated the list in a while. Here are the node IPs of QUIC.cloud if you are interested.

    1. Hi, Bidyut!
      Recommendation varies for your individual website as it depends on factors like whether you are using WordPress and if you are willing to go for Cloudflare APO. You can get my concise view on this from the conclusion section.

  3. Hola,

    tengo un blog en WordPress y hasta ahora había utilizado Cloudflare. Hace un par de dias configuré Litespeed y decidí probar Quic.cloud, así que configuré Quic.cloud y desactive Cloudflare.

    Con Cloudflare las solicitudes diarias eran unas 80.000 y unas 500 las visitas individuales.

    Ahora que desactive Cloudflare y configuré Quic.cloud, este primer día de cambio de CDN, las visitas se han reducido hasta las apenas 25 diarias.

    Otro problema que tengo es que en Cloudflare es muy fácil de ver las solicitudes y visitas y sin embargo en Quic.cloud no sé cómo ver estas estadísticas.

    También me gustaría saber si se pueden utilizar Cloudflare y Quic.cloud conjuntamente y, en caso de serlo, si activar al mismo tiempo las 2 CDN es beneficioso o contraproducente para el desempeño del blog.

    Gracias

  4. Thanks a lot for this comparison between Quic.Cloud and Cloudflare. I can conclude that both of them are best amongst other CDNs, but I will like to use the two of them at the same time to maximize loading speed.

  5. Thank you very much for your post. Is the first time that I saw a post objective like this! After reading, I understand that Quic is better for us. Please update us when you have news!

  6. Worth mentioning may also be that Cloudflare offers much more features in terms of network and header configuration, making it the better choice as of now (Sep 21) if you need HSTS, for example.

  7. Excellent write up. I have been very impressed with Litespeed and Quic. Cloudflare has served me well, but having more options is a great thing.

  8. Hi! I just wanted to share that in the year or so since this article was written, QUIC.cloud has nearly doubled its number of PoPs (70, as of this comment, and counting), added Anycast Authoritative DNS service, and added a Free Plan.

    Thanks for sharing your comparison and your honest thoughts!

  9. Hi. Thanks for sharing this. Right now I have a woocommerce site, in the beginning, around 3k unique users per month. I’m using cloudflare free tierwith APO. It works amazingly fast, but i dont have image optimization (webp and image sized correctly) nor css critical. Quic.cloud pricing is hard to understand, it seems that you o ly know how much you will pay once you start using. Can you give some estimations of price for let say a 100gb per month bandwidth and 1k images ? Thanks again

  10. hello, thanks for your valuable article. I have a woocommerce site where I watch my digital designs. I just opened my website. Therefore, the number of visitors is not even 500 per day. My target audience is the whole world. So people all over the world can buy my designs, so I would like to have a fast website in every country, which option do you think would be right?

  11. we have 30k visits every day. and i had connect quic cloud after few hours Bandwidth finish and it showing error. so in cloudflare we did not face this type of issue. SSL also stop working but in cloudflare no ssl problem
    so i am bit confuse we have very large traffic so where we have to go . please guide us

  12. Thank you so much for al this information! I needed a basic outline of quic.cloud vs Cloudflare to understand if I needed one or both or ... This article explained exactly what I needed plus ideas on which is better suited to my needs.

    To set up quic.cloud (and probably Cloudflare, I haven't tried that!) is it right that I need to change my name servers? It feels like I would be skipping my host then and that seems wrong!

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