Oh exactly that.

Or if caching is your biggest priority then Fastly or Akamai will shine too.

But if you're balancing all considerations and want the cheap "good enough" caching with the DDoS protection, free TLS certs, and unmetered (assuming you aren't imgur or something)... then Cloudflare does a great job at being good enough. And for those sharp edges... drop in a proxy of your own, or layer your CDNs.

I don't understand, what is the advantage of Cloudflare over Fastly or Akamai if caching is not your biggest priority? Does Cloudflare have better DDoS protection, or something else?

Yes among other things. Also edge compute, etc.

Fastly comes close on a lot of fronts (and does better at a few things) but unless you are godlike with Varnish scripting it's a lot harder to make it do what you want than Cloudflare.

Thanks this is really helpful, I'm planning a delicate migration to a CDN and it's a tough choice. Cloudflare just seems like "an everything machine" from their marketing website, I'm struggling to understand how I would actually use it for a monolithic website + API.

It is pretty much an "everything machine". I think they are positioning themselves as a platform alternative to having a separate origin + CDN. i.e you develop your entire application with Workers + Durable Objects + R2.

As a CDN it's pretty great though, I have managed very very large properties behind Cloudflare and they have always gone above and beyond for us when big DDoS have came our way.

OPs use case is a couple giant zip files. Edge compute is real cool, but not something a lot of people need when they think of CDN.

I interpreted the question as "if caching -isn't- your biggest priority". i.e what does it do better assuming giant zip files isn't the main thing you are interested in.

So I'm not really responding to OP but rather the commenter I replied to. :)

In this scenario are you saying

AWS/Azure > BunnyCDN > Cloudflare?

Or just straight AWS/Azure > Cloudflare?

Will BunnyCDN reliably keep an 18gb file in cache without hitting origin? I use and like Bunny, but relying on that to not get a massive bill in the mail scares the shit out of me.

they also have storage feature, so they could

Azure has its own CDN. If one wants to do Cloudfare -> CDN -> Azure Storage, then at least let it be Azure CDN in the middle, not another cloud provider in the mix. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or simply run everything on your own server. All those middlemen are going to kill any latency improvements you get from anycast edge servers.