European Cloudflare alternatives: 10 EU-based CDN, WAF and DDoS providers compared

02How we chose the providers

Every provider had to pass the same tests, GuardX included:

• Headquartered in the EU, with an EU company named in its legal notice or terms
• Sells a CDN or reverse proxy that sits in front of a website, with DDoS mitigation or a WAF, not only network scrubbing for operators that own IP ranges
• Publishes prices or a clear sales route, which we date
• States how attack traffic is billed, or we record that it does not
• Certifications count only where we could read them on its own pages

03Comparison: company, jurisdiction and audits

Certifications are as each provider states them. "Not verified" means we could not read a list, not that none exists.

04Comparison: products, attack billing and entry price

Entry price is the cheapest published starting point, excluding VAT, as of 24 October 2026 (Gcore: archived pages, 30 September to 13 October 2026).

05Self-serve alternatives: Bunny.net, Gcore, WEDOS and GuardX

Bunny.net (Slovenia) is built around low, usage-based prices. Bunny Shield's free tier includes WAF rules, rate limits and 25 million requests a month, requests it blocks are not billed, and DNS is free for up to 500 domains. It states ISO 27001 certification since September 2024, and its Routing Filters can restrict a pull zone to its 24 EU locations, which then also serve visitors outside Europe. Good for: developers and price-sensitive sites. Not for: buyers who need a provider on the BSI DDoS list.

Gcore (Luxembourg) runs a large global network with generous free tiers: 1 TB of CDN traffic a month and a free WAAP tier for one domain; its layer 3 and 4 service bills on clean traffic. Good for: global audiences that want a free start. Not for: teams that need to know whether blocked requests count towards the WAAP quota, which its pages do not say.

WEDOS Protection (Luxembourg headquarters, Czech operator) has a free plan with CDN, unmetered layer 3 and 4 protection and a managed WAF, and WEDOS GmbH is BSI-listed. Good for: small European sites wanting a free plan from a BSI-listed provider. Not for: buyers who have not checked which group company they contract with; the group also has UK and Singapore entities.

GuardX (Germany) publishes this page. It is a small German business under German law with no US parent. On every plan, including the free one, TLS termination, request inspection and caching for customer sites happen on GuardX's own servers in the Netherlands, request logs are stored in the EU and deleted after 90 days, and a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR is part of the terms of service; see DDoS protection and the WAF. Good for: EU-based processing without an Enterprise contract, and email contact with the people who run the platform. Not for: anyone who needs more than one location (Frankfurt is planned, without a date), an SLA or certifications today. Paid plans are not on sale, proxied hostnames are IPv4-only, and the guardx.to website, panel and nameserver address records are still served by Cloudflare.

06For regulated and business-critical sites: Myra, Link11 and Transparent Edge

Myra Security (Munich) aims at banks, public bodies and critical-infrastructure operators. It lists a broad audit set, including BSI C5 Type 2 and PCI DSS, and states that TLS is decrypted only in data centres in Germany. Good for: organisations that must show auditors German processing. Not for: small sites; prices start at EUR 399 a month plus a setup fee, via a sales call.

Link11 (Frankfurt) is BSI-listed, stores data in Europe by default, and lets you onboard yourself, from EUR 490 a month billed annually with a 90-day money-back guarantee. It is backed by Pride Capital Partners (Netherlands) and owns DOSarrest and Reblaze. Good for: mid-sized businesses that want an audited German provider without long procurement. Not for: sites that cannot plan around fixed traffic allowances.

Transparent Edge (Madrid) offers CDN, WAF, anti-DDoS and bot management and holds Spain's ENS certification at the highest category. Good for: Spanish public-sector and regulated buyers. Not for: anyone who wants to sign up online; there is no public price list.

07Cloud-platform options: OVHcloud, Scaleway and IONOS

These fit best when your origin already runs on the same cloud. OVHcloud (Roubaix) includes anti-DDoS on every product at "no additional cost, regardless of the volume of attack" and sells a standalone CDN from EUR 10.99 a month with 1 TB included and further bandwidth prepaid; its cheaper CDN options, including the one with a WAF, require OVHcloud web hosting. Scaleway (Paris) Edge Services start at EUR 0.99 a month but work only in front of Scaleway Object Storage buckets and Load Balancers. IONOS Cloud CDN accepts any origin and includes layer 7 DDoS protection, with an optional WAF, from EUR 99 per 30 days; its points of presence are in Germany, Spain, the UK and the US.

Good for: teams consolidating on one European cloud. Not for: origins hosted elsewhere with Scaleway or OVHcloud's hosting options; IONOS accepts them, from EUR 99 per 30 days.

08What Cloudflare still does better

If those matter more than jurisdiction, staying is reasonable; for a head-to-head, see GuardX vs Cloudflare.

• Network size: 348 cities on its network page and 500 Tbps of stated network capacity (April 2026)
• Free-plan depth: CDN, WAF, unmetered DDoS protection, DNS and Turnstile at no cost
• Audit evidence: ISO 27001, 27018 and 27701, SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS Level 1, Germany's C5:2020 and the EU Cloud Code of Conduct
• A 100% uptime SLA with service credits on Business and Enterprise
• A developer platform and Zero Trust products on the same account
• Detailed public post-mortems and a half-yearly transparency report

09How to migrate off Cloudflare without downtime

The order matters more than the destination.

• Export your DNS as a BIND zone file (DNS, Records, Import and Export). Proxied records export with their origin addresses, so trust this file, not a lookup of live DNS
• If DNSSEC is on, remove the DS record at your registrar and wait for its TTL to expire before you change nameservers, or validating resolvers return SERVFAIL
• Domains on Cloudflare Registrar can only use Cloudflare nameservers: transfer the domain out first, which is blocked for 60 days after registration or a previous transfer
• Cloudflare Origin CA certificates are trusted only by Cloudflare: install a publicly trusted certificate before another proxy validates your origin
• Allow the new provider's edge addresses in the origin firewall next to Cloudflare's ranges, and keep it closed to everyone else (how to hide your origin IP)
• Check how the origin reads the visitor's address: Cloudflare sends CF-Connecting-IP, many proxies use X-Forwarded-For or X-Real-IP, and the header must only be trusted from the proxy's addresses
• Rebuild WAF rules, rate limits, redirects and cache rules; Workers, Turnstile and R2 stay at Cloudflare until replaced
• Switch nameservers at the registrar and keep the Cloudflare zone until traffic has moved; check progress with a DNS lookup