A Quiet Rivalry Turns Loud
Zero trust networking was supposed to be Zscaler’s territory. The company spent years building its reputation as the go-to architecture for enterprises ditching legacy VPNs, and its cloud-native approach won over security teams at some of the largest organizations in the world. But Cloudflare has been chipping away at that position methodically, expanding its Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) offering under the Cloudflare One umbrella – and the competitive pressure is starting to show in how both companies are pitching, pricing, and positioning themselves to buyers.
What makes Cloudflare’s push notable is not just the product expansion, but the entry point. While Zscaler typically lands inside large enterprise security budgets after a formal procurement cycle, Cloudflare arrives through the developer and networking side – often already embedded in a company’s infrastructure before the security team even evaluates it. That asymmetric approach gives Cloudflare a structural advantage that is difficult for Zscaler to neutralize through product roadmap alone.
How Cloudflare One Keeps Growing Its Footprint
Cloudflare One bundles secure web gateway, ZTNA, cloud access security broker (CASB), and data loss prevention into a single platform sold alongside Cloudflare’s existing network services. For organizations already running Cloudflare for DDoS protection or CDN services, the step toward Cloudflare One is a relatively short procurement conversation. That existing relationship – sometimes costing just a few hundred dollars a month at the lower end – becomes a natural expansion path into five- and six-figure annual contracts once security workloads move onto the platform.
The real friction for Zscaler is that Cloudflare’s global network, which spans well over 300 cities, means latency performance is genuinely competitive with Zscaler’s own infrastructure. Zero trust solutions live and die on user experience, because if a secure proxy slows down browsing or application access noticeably, employees route around it. Cloudflare’s network density largely neutralizes that complaint before it can be used as a displacement argument by Zscaler’s sales teams.
Where Zscaler Still Holds Ground
Zscaler is not standing still. Its platform depth in areas like inline SSL inspection, advanced threat protection, and its established integrations with identity providers gives it credibility in regulated industries where compliance documentation and audit trails are non-negotiable. Financial services firms and healthcare organizations with complex data sovereignty requirements often find Zscaler’s dedicated focus on security – rather than a broader network platform – reassuring during procurement reviews.
Zscaler’s professional services ecosystem also carries weight. A large network of certified partners has built deployment practices specifically around Zscaler’s architecture, which matters when an enterprise is migrating away from a legacy Cisco or Palo Alto perimeter setup. That migration complexity is real, and buyers tend to favor vendors who have demonstrated they can manage the transition without extended downtime or configuration errors that expose the network.
There is also the question of depth versus breadth. Cloudflare One is growing rapidly, but security professionals sometimes note that Zscaler’s individual modules – particularly Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler Private Access – carry more granular policy controls than Cloudflare’s equivalents at this stage. For security architects who need to define highly specific traffic inspection rules across thousands of users, that granularity still matters in competitive evaluations.
Still, the gap is closing faster than Zscaler’s investors probably want to admit. Cloudflare’s engineering velocity is high, and product updates to Cloudflare One have come at a pace that suggests the company is treating the enterprise security market as a priority rather than a side benefit of its network infrastructure business.
The Pricing Pressure Is Real
Cloudflare’s pricing model creates a structural challenge for Zscaler in mid-market deals. Cloudflare One for Teams starts at a price point designed to capture organizations that would never have entered Zscaler’s traditional deal range, and once those companies grow or their security requirements increase, they are already inside Cloudflare’s ecosystem. Zscaler has historically focused on larger enterprises where deal sizes justify its sales motion, but that middle market is where the next decade of security spending growth is concentrated.
Some organizations are also running both platforms simultaneously – using Cloudflare for specific use cases like securing remote developer access or protecting internal tools, while keeping Zscaler in place for broader enterprise traffic inspection. That coexistence arrangement sounds neutral on the surface, but it typically resolves in one direction over time: whichever platform handles more of the day-to-day workflow becomes the one that gets expanded at renewal, while the other gets consolidated away.
What the Market Reads From This
Cloudflare’s stock performance and revenue growth in its network services segment have drawn attention from buyers who look at vendor financial health as part of long-term procurement decisions. A vendor that is growing quickly across multiple product lines is generally perceived as lower risk for a multi-year security commitment than one whose growth is concentrated in a single market that now faces more direct competition.
Zscaler’s revenue numbers remain strong, and its customer retention rates suggest that enterprises already on the platform are not fleeing. But the more pointed question is about new logo acquisition – specifically, whether Zscaler is winning net-new deals in the mid-market segments where Cloudflare is actively recruiting, or whether those opportunities are going elsewhere. That answer will show up in how both companies report their customer count trajectory over the next several quarters.
The sharpest tension in this rivalry may actually be philosophical. Zscaler was built from the ground up as a security company, and that identity shapes how it sells, hires, and develops product. Cloudflare built security onto a network that already touched a significant portion of global internet traffic. Neither origin story is objectively superior, but when a CISO sits down with both vendors, the question of which company thinks about security as its core reason for existing – versus one important revenue line among several – tends to surface somewhere in the conversation.
