R2 vs Backblaze B2

Cloudflare R2 and Backblaze B2 are both positioned as affordable alternatives to AWS S3. R2 wins on egress and edge integration. B2 wins on storage price. The right choice depends on whether your cost is dominated by storage or by data transfer.

Pricing Analysis

Storage-Heavy Workloads

For 100 TB of data accessed rarely:

• R2: $1,500/month storage
• B2: $600/month storage

B2's 60% storage price advantage makes it the clear winner for cold storage, backups, and archives.

Egress-Heavy Workloads

For 10 TB of data served to users monthly:

• R2: $0 egress (free)
• B2: $100 egress (or $0 via Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance)

R2's zero egress is simpler. B2 achieves free egress through Cloudflare, but only through the Bandwidth Alliance — direct downloads still cost $0.01/GB.

The Cloudflare Ecosystem

R2's integration with the Cloudflare ecosystem is its biggest differentiator. Workers can process R2 objects at the edge. Cache rules control how R2 objects are cached across 300+ PoPs. Page Rules, Transform Rules, and other Cloudflare features work natively with R2-served content.

B2 benefits from the Bandwidth Alliance partnership with Cloudflare — free egress from B2 to Cloudflare — but the integration stops there. There is no edge compute or native CDN feature integration.

Use Case Matrix

The decision is straightforward:

• Serving content to users (media, downloads, assets): R2 wins with zero egress and Cloudflare CDN
• Storing data cheaply (backups, archives, data lakes): B2 wins at $0.006/GB
• Both storage and delivery: Consider R2 for hot data and B2 for cold data

In system design interviews, articulating this cost trade-off demonstrates practical infrastructure thinking. See also: storage architecture and CDN patterns.