NitroPack Vs Cloudflare – 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. NitroPack is a combination of 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 the web performance and security company that offers CDN, DNS, DDoS protection to your websites. 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 is focused on speed and security. In detail, NitroPack provides you with a complete page speed optimization service that comes with caching, CDN, Image Optimization, script optimization, and guarantees 90+ Desktop PageSpeed Score. 

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

While NitroPack works only with WordPress and OpenCart, Cloudflare can be integrated with any CMS for speed and security.

NitroPack Features

Advanced Caching Mechanism: NitroPack 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. To compare with NitroPack, I’m writing about their paid plan features here.

Global Content Delivery Network: Cloudflare manages an expansive 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, Cloudflare 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, Image optimization, it lacks the advanced features to speed the site. For example, NitroPack provides a complete image optimization suite with features like Preemptive image sizing, adaptive image delivery, are present. The Image Resizing in Cloudflare requires you to have a Business or Enterprise plan that costs $100 and $200 per month, respectively.

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

NitroPack Vs Cloudflare – Performance

To test NitroPack and Cloudflare’s performance, I’ve installed two demo WordPress sites on my SiteGround hosting 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

Some people asked me to use WP Rocket on Site 1 as it offers some advanced speed optimization features, and below is the result.

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 Cloudflare with WP Rocket, NitroPack blows them with their 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 “Pass” in the search console’s Core Web Vitals score.

NitroPack Vs Cloudflare – CDN

Since the significant feature of Cloudflare is CDN, I wrote this section to compare it with NitroPack CDN. As said earlier, 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 got a low latency network when compared to Cloudflare, thus NitroPack delivers better performance than Cloudflare. 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.

Cloudflare Pro plan starts at $20 per month, with no page View limits. Cloudflare is 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. At the same time, it comes with a $16 per month plan of NitroPack.

Summary

In the end, choosing between NitroPack and Cloudflare should be based on your need. If your ultimate aim is to improve the PageSpeed score and get ready for Core Web Vitals rankings in May 2021, NitroPack is the top choice.

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