Centinel vs Cloudflare Bot Management
Already on Cloudflare? Centinel adds AI-specific detection your Bot Management plan misses. Not on Cloudflare? Centinel works with any stack.
Cloudflare Bot Management is a general-purpose bot detection system that scores all automated traffic — DDoS bots, credential stuffers, scrapers — using a single threat score. It identifies roughly 100 AI-specific crawler signatures. Centinel is purpose-built for AI crawler detection and maintains over 1,600 AI crawler profiles, each mapped to a specific company and data collection purpose. Centinel offers per-crawler policies: block GPTBot, allow GoogleBot, charge Bytespider a licensing fee. It also includes a monetization layer that lets site owners set data access pricing for individual AI companies. Cloudflare does not offer per-crawler AI policies, content licensing, or public crawler profile pages. Centinel works with any infrastructure — Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Akamai, Nginx — without requiring a CDN migration, and offers a free tier with transparent public pricing.
Why teams add Centinel alongside Cloudflare
Cloudflare catches known threats. Centinel specializes in stealth AI crawlers that bypass WAFs at a different protocol layer. Deploys alongside your stack. Free tier to evaluate.
Try Centinel freeFrequently asked questions
- Can I use Centinel with Cloudflare, or must I replace Cloudflare?
- You keep Cloudflare. Centinel runs as middleware alongside your existing CDN — Cloudflare, Fastly, AWS CloudFront, Akamai, Nginx — and validates each request before it reaches your origin. There is no CDN migration, no DNS cutover, and no origin re-routing. Many Centinel deployments sit directly on a Cloudflare Worker and inherit Cloudflare's edge network while adding AI-specific detection.
- What does Centinel detect that Cloudflare AI Crawl Block misses?
- Cloudflare AI Crawl Block covers roughly 100 named AI crawler signatures. Centinel maintains 1,600-plus AI crawler profiles, each mapped to a specific company, training purpose, and compliance posture. The gap is where spoofed user agents, residential-proxy scraping, and retrieval agents built on open-source Chromium forks live. Cloudflare catches the compliant case; Centinel covers the rest through TLS and HTTP/2 fingerprinting.
- Does running Centinel alongside Cloudflare add latency?
- No measurable latency for real users. Validation runs at the edge in under 2ms, in parallel with Cloudflare's own checks, so the critical path is unchanged. Blocked bot requests never reach your origin, which reduces origin load and typically improves p95 response time for legitimate traffic. Flowlane measured a 78% reduction in origin load after deploying Centinel on top of their existing edge.
- Is Centinel cheaper than Cloudflare Enterprise Bot Management?
- For AI-specific coverage, yes. Cloudflare Enterprise Bot Management is priced as part of a full enterprise bundle and is not sold standalone. Centinel publishes pricing, has a free audit tier, and scopes the bill to validated requests. Teams who only need AI crawler detection usually add Centinel to their existing Cloudflare plan instead of upgrading the entire Cloudflare contract.
Pick the next step that fits where you are
Demo, self-serve check, pricing, or a quiet email. Whichever maps to your stage.