After several years using Imperva's CDN for our primary SaaS product, we recently completed a migration to BunnyCDN. The primary driver was cost, but we were naturally concerned about performance trade-offs. To our surprise, our cache hit ratio has remained effectively identical, hovering around 94-96% for our static asset workload.
Our monthly bill, however, dropped by approximately 40%. The pricing model is just simpler and more predictable for our specific traffic patterns. We're not handling petabytes, but for a few hundred TB a month, the savings are substantial. The migration itself was straightforward—mostly a DNS change and some cache rule replication.
I'm sharing this not to bash Imperva, which served us reliably, but to highlight that the CDN market is evolving. For use-cases that are primarily cache-and-deliver, some newer entrants are offering compelling value. Has anyone else here made a similar switch, or perhaps evaluated and decided against it? I'm particularly interested in experiences with more complex security or edge logic requirements, where the comparison might be different.
—Helen (mod)
I'm a community lead for a mid-market B2B SaaS company where we manage several knowledge bases and community platforms, and we've been running BunnyCDN for our static assets, docs, and user-uploaded images for about three years now.
**Core Comparison:**
1. **Cost Structure & Predictability:** Imperva operates on a more traditional enterprise quote-based model, often bundling CDN with security and DDoS services. BunnyCDN is usage-based with published per-TB rates. For our static traffic of around 80TB/month, Bunny costs us just under $500, whereas a comparable Imperva setup in our previous role was easily $800+. The hidden cost for Imperva is the sales cycle and negotiation overhead; for Bunny, it's the potential lack of committed use discounts at very high volumes.
2. **Deployment & Rule Configuration:** Bunny's dashboard is simpler and geared toward cache-and-deliver logic. Defining cache rules, edge redirects, and token authentication is a 5-minute task. Imperva's configuration is far more granular and powerful, but it's also nested within a complex security policy interface, which can make simple cache TTL adjustments feel heavy. Migration for us meant recreating about a dozen cache rules manually.
3. **Performance & Hit Ratio:** For purely static content, we observed no meaningful difference in cache hit rates (ours sits at 92-95%). The performance win for Imperva would be for dynamic content or advanced image optimization, where their edge logic is more sophisticated. Bunny's PoP count is smaller, but for our North American and European user base, we saw no change in 95th percentile latency.
4. **Support & Escalation:** With Bunny, support is ticket-based and can take several hours for a non-urgent issue. You are not getting a dedicated account manager or a 24/7 phone line. With Imperva, at our previous scale, we had a technical account manager and could escalate via chat. For a business where CDN is critical infrastructure, that difference is significant.
My pick would be BunnyCDN if your primary use case is caching and delivering static assets, you have predictable traffic patterns, and you don't require integrated WAF/DDoS or hands-on vendor support. If your stack relies on complex edge logic, or if CDN is part of a larger security procurement, the integrated nature of Imperva is worth the premium. To make the call clean, tell us your annual budget for this service and whether you manage DDoS separately.
Let's keep it constructive
That's a solid result. We saw similar cache performance when we moved a client's marketing site assets from Akamai to a simpler provider. The rule replication is often the trickiest part, especially if you've built up a complex set of cache behaviors over the years.
For complex security or edge logic, I'd be more hesitant. Bunny's pull zone rules are decent, but they're not a full-featured edge compute platform. If you're just doing cache-and-deliver with some basic geo-blocking or token authentication, you're probably fine. Once you start needing to run custom logic at the edge or have very specific WAF rulesets, the calculus changes.
Did you have to adjust any of your cache invalidation workflows or purge patterns post-migration?