Top Cloudflare Containers alternatives in 2025

Cloudflare Containers expands on the company’s Workers platform by introducing full container support.

Instead of being limited to JavaScript, TypeScript, or WebAssembly in V8 isolates, you can now run standard Docker images. This means you can deploy applications and services in any language or runtime directly to Cloudflare’s edge network.

The key difference from traditional container platforms is placement. With Cloudflare Containers, your workloads run in the same global edge locations as Workers, giving them low-latency access to users worldwide. You still define and control your container via a Worker, which routes traffic and manages the lifecycle. Deployment is done with the familiar wrangler deploy workflow.

When you deploy a Cloudflare Container, the Worker acts as the entry point and orchestrator. It can start a container, pass it traffic, and shut it down when idle. Containers can be used for on-demand compute, background tasks, or to extend a Worker with capabilities that aren’t possible inside an isolate.

Examples of what Cloudflare Containers enable:

• Running services in languages not supported by Workers
• Porting existing Linux applications to the edge
• Processing jobs with libraries and binaries unavailable in the isolate runtime
• Creating APIs that respond with heavy computation at low latency to the user’s region

Because they run close to users, Cloudflare Containers are well-suited for scenarios like media transformation, low-latency APIs, or localized AI inference.

Cloudflare Containers is billed on a usage basis. The Workers Paid Plan ($5/month) is required to deploy containers. That plan includes:

• 25 GiB-hours of memory/month
• 375 vCPU-minutes/month
• 200 GB-hours of disk/month

Beyond the included amounts, pricing is:

• Memory: $0.0000025 per GiB-second
• CPU: $0.000020 per vCPU-second
• Disk: $0.00000007 per GB-second

Billing is in 10 ms increments, which is efficient for short-lived tasks.

Cloudflare Containers pricing vs Northflank Pricing

Cloudflare Containers has fine-grained billing in 10 ms increments, which can be cost-efficient for short-lived tasks. Northflank offers lower hourly rates for CPU and memory, a free tier without a mandatory base fee, and GPU availability, which Cloudflare Containers does not currently offer.

Northflank’s vCPU pricing is roughly three-quarters cheaper than Cloudflare Containers, and memory is slightly cheaper. Cloudflare has a lower disk rate, but Northflank offers GPUs and avoids the $5/month base fee, making it better value for most continuous or AI workloads.

While Cloudflare Containers adds important flexibility compared to Workers, it’s still in beta and has notable gaps:

• No built-in autoscaling or load balancing, you scale manually in code
• No support for long-running or persistent containers
• Limited orchestration tools for multi-service deployments
• No GPU access for AI workloads
• Early-stage dashboard and tooling

These limitations mean that if you’re planning a production workload with complex networking, stateful components, or high performance AI inference, you’ll quickly need features that Cloudflare Containers doesn’t yet provide.

For teams that like the flexibility of Docker but need more than what Cloudflare Containers offers today, Northflank is the clear choice.

It’s a container-first platform with full orchestration, persistent infrastructure, and the ability to run anything from small microservices to GPU-heavy AI training jobs.

Northflank capabilities compared to Cloudflare Containers:

• Full Linux environments: Any runtime, any dependencies, persistent storage
• Secure sandboxing: Isolated microVMs for untrusted code execution
• Autoscaling: Both horizontal and vertical, with zero-downtime deploys
• AI and GPU support: Run any model with your choice of GPU, including H100s and B200s
• Stateful services: Managed databases, message queues, and caching layers
• Private networking: VPC peering, private service-to-service communication
• Transparent pricing: Pay-as-you-go with no mandatory base fee, starting at ~$0.0038/hour for small containers

Where Cloudflare Containers gives you global edge placement, Northflank gives you everything you expect from a mature container orchestration platform.

Cloudflare Containers is a significant step for the Cloudflare ecosystem, moving beyond serverless isolates into full Docker workloads at the edge. It opens up new possibilities for developers who want to run diverse workloads close to their users. However, as a beta product, it lacks key features like orchestration, autoscaling, and GPU support.

If you need those capabilities today, alongside secure sandboxing and persistent services, Northflank is the most complete and production-ready alternative. You can deploy any container, scale it automatically, and run workloads that Cloudflare Containers can’t handle yet.

Start building on Northflank and see what’s possible when you combine full container freedom with modern orchestration.