# Cloudflare Load Balancing

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/load-balancing/cloudflare-load-balancing/

Cloudflare's load balancer, sold as a monthly add-on and the only one here that balances across clouds it does not own.

## Who it suits

Balancing across clouds you do not own. It is the only member here that markets balancing between AWS, GCP, Azure and on-premise servers, and at $5 a month it is also the cheapest entry.

Consider something else if You need to know what it costs at your volume. The price is quoted only as a starting figure on a plans page, and it is an add-on to a Cloudflare plan rather than a service you can buy on its own.

## iScore

49 / 100 (80% interval 40–59), rank 3 of 4 in load-balancing — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every load-balancing peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/load-balancing/cloudflare-load-balancing/alternatives/

- Price: 31 (25–38), weight 36%, 2 of 2 criteria scored
- Capacity and limits: 50 (17–83), weight 29%, 0 of 1 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: regions
- Trust and compliance: 50 (44–56), weight 21%, 0 of 1 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: uptime_sla
- Evidence: 92 (92–92), weight 14%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Credit card to start: Yes ([source](https://developers.cloudflare.com/load-balancing/get-started/enable-load-balancing/), read 2026-09-15)
- Entry paid plan: From $5 a month, sold as an add-on activated on an existing Cloudflare plan rather than as a standalone service. The cheapest entry in this category. ([source](https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/), read 2026-09-15)
- Pricing model: A monthly add-on price on top of a Cloudflare plan, not a meter. Nothing here is billed per hour, per rule or per node — the distinction from the three cloud-native balancers, all of which charge for the resource existing. ([source](https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/), read 2026-09-15)

### Caching

- Multi-region replication: Vendor-neutral by design: traffic is balanced between AWS, GCP, Azure and on-premise servers, with origin health monitored from multiple points across Cloudflare’s network. The other three members balance traffic only inside the cloud that sells them. ([source](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/load-balancing/), read 2026-09-15)

## Compared with

- [Cloudflare Load Balancing vs AWS Elastic Load Balancing](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-elb-vs-cloudflare-load-balancing/)
- [Cloudflare Load Balancing vs Google Cloud Load Balancing](https://inetgeek.com/compare/google-cloud-load-balancing-vs-cloudflare-load-balancing/)
- [Cloudflare Load Balancing vs DigitalOcean Load Balancers](https://inetgeek.com/compare/cloudflare-load-balancing-vs-digitalocean-load-balancer/)