Somebody reading this got their WordPress site defaced last week and is now Googling "how do I stop this from happening again." Here's the honest split between the two names that keep coming up.
Cloudflare's free tier already includes CDN, basic DDoS protection and SSL — genuinely useful even at $0. Its Pro plan, $20/month, adds a real web application firewall on top, and because Cloudflare bills flat-rate rather than by traffic volume, the price doesn't move as your site grows, which is the single biggest argument for it over time.
Sucuri starts at $199.99/year (roughly $17/month averaged out, though it's sold annually, with month-to-month plans running $10–42 depending on tier) and takes a different angle entirely: it's not just a firewall, it bundles malware scanning, blacklist monitoring, and hack cleanup. If the reason you're reading this is "my site is already compromised right now," Sucuri's cleanup service is the more direct answer to that specific problem — Cloudflare's WAF prevents the next attack, it doesn't clean up the current one.
| Price | What it's actually built for | |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pro | $20/mo, flat regardless of traffic | prevention: WAF, CDN, DDoS |
| Sucuri Basic | ~$199.99/yr | prevention + malware cleanup, WordPress-focused |
Support model differs too: Sucuri is self-service with ticketed cleanup included in the price, but rule tuning and onboarding are largely on you. Cloudflare's free and Pro tiers are also mostly self-configured, though there's a much larger community and documentation base to lean on given how widely it's used.
If your site is currently infected: Sucuri, because the cleanup is bundled and this is exactly the scenario the product is built around. If your site is clean and you want to keep it that way without paying more as traffic grows: Cloudflare Pro. A lot of WordPress sites end up running both — Sucuri for the malware/cleanup layer, Cloudflare in front for CDN and DDoS — which isn't overkill so much as covering two genuinely different jobs.