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