Bunny Stream vs Cloudflare Stream

The real split: two ways to bill the same raw delivery

These two are the closest pair on this site, because they are the same kind of product. Both are developer video infrastructure: upload a file through an API, they encode it, store it and stream it to a global audience with a built-in player or one of your own. Neither is a marketing tool. Neither has an in-video call to action, a lead-capture form, a split test or a single metric that ties a play to a sale. If you are choosing between these two, you have already decided to build the selling and the tracking layer yourself, and you are really deciding who delivers the bytes.

So the comparison comes down to how they bill, how they protect the video, and how they run day to day. Bunny Stream bills per gigabyte, the way a CDN does. Cloudflare Stream bills per minute of video watched, the way a broadcaster does. That one difference decides most of what follows, and for the low-bitrate video this audience serves it decides it hard.

Where they actually differ

What comes in the box. They are near-identical here, and that is the point. Both give you resumable upload, automatic adaptive-bitrate encoding, HLS and DASH output, a customizable HTML5 player or the freedom to bring your own, and live streaming over RTMP and SRT through the same API. Cloudflare adds Media Transformations for on-the-fly image and video manipulation; Bunny sits inside the wider Bunny platform, so its storage, CDN and edge scripting are one account away. Both expect you to write code. If you want a dashboard where a non-technical marketer drops a CTA onto the timeline, neither is that tool, and that is by design.

What you pay for, and how. This is the sharpest line, and the two make opposite bets. Bunny charges for the storage and delivery you actually use, on a $1 monthly minimum, so a small or spiky audience costs a few dollars and a launch scales with its own traffic. Cloudflare charges $5 per 1,000 minutes stored and $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered, with encoding and bandwidth included, so the bill is legible and flat per minute no matter the file. The catch for this audience is that Cloudflare's per-minute meter ignores bitrate: a 480p talking-head VSL costs the same per delivered minute as a 4K film. That is the exact profile most selling video fits, low bitrate watched by a large audience, and it is where Bunny's per-gigabyte model is dramatically cheaper. The full worked example is in the pricing section below; the short version is that Bunny bets your files are light, and for a VSL or a webinar recording they are.

Keeping the video protected. Both protect video, and here Bunny has the edge for premium content. Bunny bundles signed token authentication, anti-hotlink protection and optional DRM into its usage price rather than selling them as add-ons; you wire them up, but you do not pay extra. Cloudflare Stream relies on signed URLs and token authentication, not studio DRM like Widevine or FairPlay, and forum users report that shared signed links get handed to third-party players. For casual gating either is fine. For course video that genuinely must not leak, Bunny's bundled DRM is the stronger base and Cloudflare will have you building more of the protection yourself.

Reliability and reach. Cloudflare's advantage is its network. Stream runs on the same infrastructure that carries a large share of the world's web traffic, so playback holds up globally and under load without you managing a CDN, and developers on Hacker News call it an honest, well-run paid platform, if a touch expensive for on-demand. Bunny is also fast and well-liked for the price, but long-term users call its dashboard and API still maturing next to the biggest platforms, and there are scattered reports of slow playback in some regions plus one serious storage-loss complaint. Whichever you pick, keep your own master files and test playback where your buyers actually are before you migrate.

Selling features, and the thing to be clear about. Neither of these does any of it. There is no CTA in the player, no email capture, no retargeting pixel and no report that connects a view to revenue on either product. That is not a knock; it is what infrastructure is. It only matters because it means the moment your video's job is to sell, not just to play, you are adding a layer on top of whichever of these you choose, and it is worth knowing that a purpose-built tool for that layer exists.

If the video's job is a direct-response sale: TrackPlay

There is a third situation neither of these was built for. If your video is a VSL running on cold paid traffic, and the only number that matters is whether the play produced a sale, TrackPlay is aimed straight at that job. Where Bunny and Cloudflare confirm the file was delivered, TrackPlay hosts the video behind one embed and ties every second watched to who actually bought, then posts the cart-verified sale back to Meta, TikTok and GA4 server-side, onto the play that earned it. It is built to tell you which ad, which play and which cut of the video produced revenue, which is a different job from moving bytes.

It backs that with a player made for cold traffic, sound-first autoplay, timed CTA cards and watch gates, per-second retention split into buyers versus non-buyers with the pitch moment marked, and split tests decided on real sales with statistical significance rather than on views. Billing is on plays, not bandwidth or minutes, every feature ships on every paid plan from $29 a month, and there is a no-card free plan of 1,000 plays a month, watermarked, plus a 14-day trial of the paid features.

The catch is real, and it is the flip side of that focus. TrackPlay is narrow by design: built for paid-traffic VSL conversion, it is not a general video host or a B2B content library, so it has none of the channels, SEO pages or webinar tooling of a marketing platform like Wistia, and it is a poor fit if the video's job is content marketing rather than a direct-response sale. If you are serving course lessons, running a live event or delivering a large public media library at the lowest possible cost, Bunny or Cloudflare is the right home and TrackPlay is not for that work. It is also a very new product with thin outside proof: the testimonials are on its own site, there is little third-party review footprint yet, and signup is currently invite-only, which is what you would expect of a platform this recent. Weigh it when the sale, not the view, is the goal.

Read our full TrackPlay review for how the attribution and split testing hold up.

Which one for you

Choose Bunny Stream if you host low-bitrate selling video, VSLs and webinar recordings, for a large audience and you care most about cost and a clean bill. Its per-gigabyte pricing is far cheaper than a per-minute meter for that exact content, the security layer is bundled rather than sold as add-ons, and there is no plan-cap gamesmanship. You trade a slightly less polished dashboard for a bill you can read to the gigabyte.

Choose Cloudflare Stream if you want one API on the world's largest network, live streaming that scales without you touching a CDN, and a per-minute price that stays flat no matter the bitrate. It suits high-bitrate content, teams already inside the Cloudflare ecosystem, and anyone who values predictability over the lowest number. Just do the per-minute math against your view count first, because for light files served to a big audience it adds up fast.

Choose TrackPlay if the video is a VSL on paid traffic and you are measured on sales: you want the play tied to the cart and the conversion fired back to the ad platforms, not a delivery log or a minute counter.

Pricing, compared

Neither runs a permanent free tier, and the two meter completely different things, which is the whole decision.

Bunny Stream charges per gigabyte, on a $1 monthly minimum, with a 14-day trial that needs no card. Encoding and the HTML5 player are free. Storage runs from $0.01 per GB a month and delivery from $0.005 per GB, cheaper in some regions. You pay for exactly the data you store and move, so a small or spiky library can cost a few dollars a month.

Cloudflare Stream has no free tier for Stream itself and meters two dimensions only. Storage is $5 per 1,000 minutes of video held per month, prepaid, so once you store anything you are buying at least one $5 block. Delivery is $1 per 1,000 minutes watched, post-paid, with encoding, ingest and bandwidth all included and no separate egress line. Its Media Transformations bill $0.50 per 1,000 operations after a free 5,000 a month.

Put a number on it. Take a 45-minute VSL at about 480p, roughly a 0.4 GB file, and 10,000 people who watch it in full. On Bunny that is around 4 GB stored and about 4,000 GB delivered, so roughly $20 for the month. On Cloudflare that is 45 minutes stored (one $5 block) plus 450,000 delivered minutes at $1 per 1,000, so roughly $450 for the same views. Your real numbers will vary with watch-through and region, but the ratio holds: the per-minute model charges the same for a light file as for a heavy one, and light files are what this audience serves. Shift to high-bitrate 4K and the two move much closer, because now Bunny is moving far more data per minute watched.

Prices checked September 2026. Verify on the vendor site before you buy.