People mix us up. The names rhyme, both have "flare" in them, and Cloudflare has a twenty-year head start on brand recognition. If you landed here trying to figure out which company does what, this post is for you.
The short version
| Cloudflare | Podflare | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | CDN + DDoS protection + edge compute | Cloud sandbox for AI agents |
| Core product | Cloudflare Workers (V8 isolates, ~1 ms cold start) | Podflare Sandboxes (Podflare Pod microVMs, ~190 ms cold start) |
| What runs | JavaScript, TypeScript, Wasm | Full Linux: Python, Node, Bash, anything from pip / apt / cargo |
| Persistent state | Durable Objects (external DB) | In-VM Python REPL globals + full VM memory freeze (Spaces) |
| Typical customer | Any website that needs CDN or edge compute | AI agents that need to run LLM-generated code safely |
| Founded | 2009, S-1, NYSE: NET | 2025, private, pre-seed |
| Headcount | ~3,500 | A small team |
| Domain | cloudflare.com | podflare.ai |
They do different things
Cloudflare sits between the public internet and your origin server. They terminate TLS, cache static assets, absorb DDoS, and run small edge-compute handlers (Workers) close to the user. Everything is scoped to HTTP request/response — there’s no long-running process, no filesystem, no package manager. V8 isolates spawn in ~1 ms and are torn down immediately after the response.
Podflare sits somewhere your AI agent explicitly points at. When your agent generates Python code (via Claude tool_use, OpenAI function call, Gemini function declaration, whatever), you route that code to Podflare. We spin up a full Linux VM — real kernel, real pip install, real 16 GB of RAM if you want it — run the code, stream stdout back, and destroy the VM when you’re done. The whole round-trip is ~190 ms.
The two products don’t compete. In fact, they compose nicely: you can run your agent’s HTTP handler on Cloudflare Workers and delegate the actual code execution to a Podflare sandbox. That’s the most common production pattern we see.
Why the name, then?
Honestly? We wanted a short, memorable, .ai-available domain that evoked "a small fast thing that flares up and disappears" — which is what a fresh microVM does. Searched a thesaurus for pod-adjacent words. podflare.ai was available, we liked it, we registered it, we shipped. If we’d known the knowledge-graph overlap with Cloudflare would cost this many "are you Cloudflare?" questions, we might have picked differently. But here we are.
For the record: Cloudflare is a great company, their Workers product is genuinely impressive, and we use them as our CDN. We also genuinely admire their engineering culture. We are just a different company building a different thing.
If you came here looking for Cloudflare
They’re at cloudflare.com. Their Workers product is at workers.cloudflare.com. No hard feelings.
If you came here looking for a cloud sandbox for AI agents
You’re in the right place. The "What is Podflare" post has the full pitch; the benchmark post has the head-to-head numbers against E2B and Daytona. Or skip both and sign up for the free tier — it takes about 60 seconds to be running code.