NitroPack Vs Cloudflare Comparison 2022 – Which is Good For You?

If you are confused between NitroPack Vs Cloudflare, this post will give you a clear picture.

Here is the summary:

NitroPack Vs Cloudflare – Introduction

NitroPack is the all-in-one performance optimization service to improve your Google PageSpeed Score with caching, CDN, and image optimization combined into a single platform. Founded in 2011, NitroPack speeds up 29000+ websites every day across the globe.

Cloudflare is a web performance and security company that offers your websites CDN, DNS, and DDoS protection. Founded in 2009, Cloudflare is widely known for its free CDN services that power millions of sites.

NitroPack Vs Cloudflare – Features

NitroPack and Cloudflare have their own unique features. While NitroPack is solely focused on speed optimization, Cloudflare focuses on speed and security. In detail, NitroPack provides you with a complete page speed optimization service that comes with caching, CDN, Image Optimization, and script optimization and guarantees 90+ Desktop PageSpeed Score. 

On the other hand, Cloudflare does provide caching, image optimization, etc. but requires manual configuration to attain a high score in Google PageSpeed Insights.

NitroPack Features

Advanced Caching Mechanism: Uses its own proprietary caching mechanism that ensures a high cache hit ratio with advanced features like smart cache invalidation, auto cache warmup, device and cookie-aware caching, etc.

Image Optimization: Provides lossy and lossless image compression, advanced lazy load including background images defined in CSS, adaptive image delivery, etc.

All Other Features: Comes with built-in CDN powered by Amazon Cloudfront, HTML, CSS, JS minification, DNS prefetching, script delaying, etc.

Cloudflare Features

Cloudflare features vary based on plans.

Global Content Delivery Network: Extended global network of data centers to cache and deliver your content closer to users. 

Image Optimization: Provides Lossless and lossy image optimization for your website images.

Automatic Mobile Optimization: Based on the user’s network speed, it delivers the content strategically, thus improving the load time.

Summary:

NitroPack is the clear winner when it comes to speed optimization features. While Cloudflare offers basic features like CDN, Caching, and Image optimization, it lacks the advanced features to speed up the site. For example, NitroPack provides complete image optimization features like Preemptive image sizing, adaptive image delivery, etc. The Image Resizing in Cloudflare requires you to have a Business or Enterprise plan that costs $100 and $200 per month.

Likewise, NitroPack offers many features like JavaScript delaying, Font optimization, and DNS Preconnection, which can primarily improve the PageSpeed score, and Cloudflare doesn’t have such features.  

NitroPack Vs Cloudflare – Performance

I’ve installed two demo WordPress sites on my SiteGround hosting to test their performance with Site 1 using Cloudflare and site 2 using NitroPack.

Both the sites are using Neve Theme with Elementor installed. Let's have a look at the scores.

Site 1: SiteGround + Cloudflare

Site 2: SiteGround + NitroPack

Site 1: SiteGround + WP Rocket + Cloudflare

Site 2: SiteGround + NitroPack 

Results: It’s no wonder, NitroPack is the undisputed winner here. Whether the combination is Cloudflare or WP Rocket, NitroPack blows them with its results.

Remember, both the sites are hosted in the same GoGeek plan, using the same theme with Elementor installed, and the server is located in the United States. Since NitroPack improves PageSpeed score, your sites will eventually get a “Pass” in the search console’s Core Web Vitals score.

NitroPack Vs Cloudflare – CDN

NitroPack uses Amazon Cloudfront CDN, which consists of 200+ global POP locations. Cloudflare, too has 200+ server locations globally, but there is a catch. 

Cloudflare POP delivery depends on your plan, and only their Enterprise plan $200/month gets access to all their POP locations, while if you’re on Pro ($20/mo.) or Business ($100/mo.), you won’t get the priority of all locations.

However, there are no such restrictions on Amazon Cloudfront, and it uses the nearest POP location to reduce the initial server response time.  

Apart from that, Cloudfront has a low latency network compared to Cloudflare; thus, NitroPack delivers better performance. You can also check my NitroPack Review for more exciting information.

NitroPack Vs Cloudflare – Pricing

NitroPack plan starts at $16.62/month, and the plan differs based on the PageView limit. Their starter plan comes with 50,000 PageViews per month. There is also a free plan which you can use on low-traffic sites. One can try the new NitroPack Discount by using our coupon code mentioned in the above link.

Cloudflare Pro plan starts at $20 per month, with no page View limits and it's more of a Performance and security service; it comes with many useful features like DDoS protection.

Summary: NitroPack is the winner when it comes to pricing. Although Cloudflare provides unlimited bandwidth, some of the essential features like Image Resizing are available only on their $100 per month plan.

Summary

In the end, If your ultimate aim is to improve the PageSpeed score and get ready for Core Web Vitals rankings in May 2022, NitroPack is the top choice.

On the other handCloudflare can be a good choice ifIf your site already got a 90+ score and just requires CDN support to improve the scores furthce. However, it doesn’t offer guaranteed improvements on the score.