These two are priced on opposite principles, which makes the comparison unusually clean. Cloudflare sells a plan per zone with delivery bandwidth bundled in and features gated by tier. bunny.net sells bytes, publicly and cheaply, with every feature switched on at every level. Neither model is better in the abstract; the right one is decided almost entirely by what you serve and where your audience sits.
Side by side
Positioning. Cloudflare: a consolidated platform — delivery, authoritative DNS, WAF, DDoS mitigation, bot management, edge compute and object storage — sold as one relationship across a network spanning hundreds of cities. bunny.net: a delivery-first platform from Slovenia that sells its network by the gigabyte, with storage, video, image optimisation, DNS, a WAF and edge scripting attached, and a published rate card for all of it.
Pricing posture. Cloudflare: a real free tier, then a per-zone subscription ladder — roughly $25 and $250 a month at monthly billing, about 20% less annually — with enterprise negotiated and typically starting in the low thousands per month. Delivery bandwidth for standard web assets is not metered, but developer platform products are billed by usage on top of whichever plan you hold. bunny.net: pay-as-you-go above a $1 monthly minimum, region-weighted on the standard network from around $0.01/GB in North America and Europe, several times that in Africa, the Middle East and South America, with a flat global volume tier from roughly $0.005/GB for bulk delivery.
Best for. Cloudflare: teams who want security, DNS and delivery from one vendor, whose traffic is predominantly HTML and standard web assets, and who value a single control plane over per-byte optimisation. bunny.net: teams shipping large files, video, images or software downloads, who want the invoice to be a function of measurable bytes and who can accept a lighter enterprise wrapper.
Where Cloudflare is strong
- Unmetered delivery for standard web content on every plan, including free — the cost model that makes traffic spikes financially uneventful.
- Unmetered DDoS mitigation at every tier, and a security portfolio deep enough to be the reason for the purchase rather than an add-on to it.
- One vendor for authoritative DNS, delivery, WAF, bot management and edge compute, with a mature API and Terraform story behind it.
- The largest self-serve feature surface in the market: what an enterprise elsewhere negotiates for, a small team here switches on in an afternoon.
Worth considering: plans are priced per zone with no self-serve volume discount, so a portfolio of forty domains costs forty times one domain. The step from the mid tier to enterprise is an order of magnitude, and the self-serve agreement restricts using the service primarily to serve video or other large non-HTML files — the clause that most often ends the “free CDN” plan for media-heavy sites.
Where bunny.net is strong
- The most transparent rate card in the industry: every price is published, and modelling your bill needs no sales conversation.
- Every feature on every account — token authentication, instant purge, geo-blocking, HTTP/3, edge scripting — with no tier gate to climb.
- Region-level control: disable expensive regions and pay the rate for the geography you actually serve, granularity most providers will not offer.
- Storage that feeds the CDN without internal transfer charges, which restructures the economics of a media library compared with a hyperscaler origin.
Worth considering: the headline rate is the North America and Europe figure; Asia-Pacific, South America and Africa price several times higher on the standard network, so a global audience needs a real mix model rather than the sticker. The enterprise scaffolding is lighter — fewer compliance artefacts, thinner formal support tiers, and a smaller security portfolio than a dedicated WAAP vendor.
The pricing reality
The comparison collapses into a single question: is your traffic bundled or metered on the other side? For a site made of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and modestly sized images, Cloudflare’s unmetered model is almost impossible to beat, because the marginal byte is free and bunny.net’s marginal byte, however cheap, is not. For a site made of video, installers, game assets or large media, the same comparison inverts hard: metered delivery at half a cent to a cent per gigabyte is a small, predictable number, while unmetered delivery of exactly that content is the use case the self-serve terms exclude, which pushes you to a negotiated contract at a very different price point.
Then apply geography. Region-weighted pricing rewards a concentrated audience and penalises a dispersed one, so the honest model is your last thirty days of traffic split by region, priced line by line, not a blended average. Teams routinely find the two providers within a few percent of each other on a European audience and a multiple apart on an Asia-Pacific one. The method is the same one in estimating CDN costs; the inputs are yours.
Security is where the models diverge most
This is not a like-for-like fight. Cloudflare’s mitigation, managed rulesets, bot classification and rate limiting are a genuine security product, deepening steeply with plan level; a portion of the subscription is buying protection, not delivery. bunny.net ships a shield product that covers the common cases competently and does not pretend to be an enterprise WAAP. If security is the reason for the purchase, that asymmetry decides it before bandwidth rates enter the conversation — and if it is not, you may be paying a security premium on every zone for something you have already bought elsewhere.
Compute follows the same shape. Cloudflare’s runtime, storage, database and inference products form an ecosystem people build applications inside; bunny.net’s edge scripting handles delivery-adjacent logic well and is not trying to be an application platform. Choosing on delivery price alone and later needing the platform is the expensive order to do this in.
The honest verdict
Cloudflare wins when the purchase is a platform: security and delivery together, a modest number of zones, mostly-HTML traffic, and a preference for one bill and one API. bunny.net wins when the purchase is bandwidth: heavy files, a measurable byte count, an audience concentrated in cheap regions, and a team happy to assemble its own security layer. The failure mode in both directions is buying on the headline — “free” that excludes your content type, or “$0.01/GB” that applies to a region you barely serve.
Choose Cloudflare if: your traffic is standard web content, security is part of what you are buying, and predictable per-zone billing beats per-byte optimisation. Choose bunny.net if: you ship large files or video at volume, want a rate card you can model without a sales call, and can source enterprise security separately. Where the answer is genuinely close, run both for a fortnight against real traffic — the method is in benchmarking CDNs fairly — and let your own numbers decide.