In this video I tested CloudFilt as a Cloudflare alternative. It’s basically a CDN plus a web application firewall, but the big angle CloudFilt is pushing is bot management and bot mitigation—things like blocking scraping, malware, DDoS-style traffic, fake accounts, and other suspicious users. Cloudflare’s free plan is great (and I use it all the time), but the bot protection on the free tier is mostly for simple bots, so I wanted to see if CloudFilt actually gives you a real upgrade without jumping into yet another expensive monthly subscription. I compared pricing and network size (CloudFilt claims 340+ points of presence, which is in the same ballpark as Cloudflare), then I set up a basic WordPress site and ran time-to-first-byte tests using KeyCDN. In my test, CloudFilt came out with a modest performance win: about 580ms average TTFB vs 741ms on Cloudflare’s free plan—roughly a 20% improvement. Setup was pretty painless: add the site, pick your SSL option (Let’s Encrypt or CloudFilt SSL), point your DNS to CloudFilt’s IP, and optionally install the WordPress plugin to feed metrics back into the dashboard. After a few days I could already see scraping attempts, bot traffic, and spam submissions being detected, which is exactly the kind of protection WordPress sites need.