Cloudflare Pages vs Cloudflare Workers
Pricing
Cloudflare Pages: Free tier (500 builds/mo, unlimited bandwidth), Pro from $20/mo
Cloudflare Workers: Free tier (100,000 requests/day), paid from $5/mo
Description
Cloudflare Pages: Fast, secure hosting for static sites and Jamstack apps with unlimited bandwidth
Cloudflare Workers: Serverless platform for running JavaScript, TypeScript, Python or Rust code and full-stack apps on Cloudflare's global network
Pros
- Unlimited bandwidth on free tier: no surprise bills if you hit the front page of Hacker News
- Global CDN with 300+ edge locations means fast load times everywhere
- Built-in DDoS protection and SSL at no extra cost
- The free plan includes 100,000 requests a day, and requests to static assets are free and unlimited
- The paid plan starts at $5/month with 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds included
- No cold starts, and you pay for CPU time, not for time spent waiting on network calls
Cons
- Cloudflare now recommends Workers, not Pages, for new projects
- Build times are slower than Vercel and Netlify
- Smaller ecosystem: fewer one-click integrations and community templates
- Workers/Functions development experience is less polished than Vercel's
- Only a subset of Node.js APIs is supported, so some npm packages won't run
- The free plan allows 10 ms of CPU time per request
Details
Cloudflare Pages is the “set it and forget it” hosting option. Unlimited bandwidth on the free tier means you never worry about traffic spikes: if your blog post goes viral, you do not get a surprise bill. The free plan includes 500 builds a month, and Cloudflare’s Pro plan ($20/mo billed annually, $25 monthly) raises that to 5,000. The site you are reading right now runs on Cloudflare Pages.
Cloudflare’s documentation now says “Start new projects with Workers”, describing Workers as its primary platform for building applications and noting that it supports most Pages use cases with a broader feature set. Pages is still offered, and Cloudflare publishes a guide for moving a Pages project to Workers. The tradeoff is developer experience: Vercel and Netlify have smoother workflows, faster builds, and more integrations. But if your priority is reliable, fast, cheap hosting that does not punish you for success, it is hard to beat free-with-unlimited-bandwidth.
Workers runs your code in Cloudflare’s data centres in more than 330 cities, close to your users. It handles APIs, full-stack apps built with React, Vue or Next.js, scheduled jobs and webhooks, and it connects to Cloudflare’s databases, storage and queues through bindings.
Cloudflare’s documentation for Pages now says to start new projects on Workers, and calls Workers its primary platform for building applications.
The paid plan is $5 a month plus any usage beyond the included amounts, and requests for static files are never charged. Check that your dependencies run on the Workers runtime before you commit, since it is not a full Node.js environment.
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