# Backblaze B2 vs Cloudflare R2

> Cloudflare R2 has a score of 78.4 (A) against Backblaze B2's 75.4 (BB). Both do storage object. The largest gap is reliability, 22 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-05

Cloudflare R2 has a score of 78.4 (A) against Backblaze B2's 75.4 (BB). Both do storage object. The largest gap is reliability, 22 points.

- Backblaze B2: grade BB, 75.4/100, rank #35 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/backblaze-b2.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/backblaze-b2.json
- Cloudflare R2: grade A, 78.4/100, rank #14 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/cloudflare-r2.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/cloudflare-r2.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Backblaze B2 for security & auth (+7), payments & pricing (+10).

Pick Cloudflare R2 for reliability (+22), agent ergonomics (+5).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Backblaze B2 | Cloudflare R2 | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 60 | 82 | Cloudflare R2 +22 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 89 | 92 | Cloudflare R2 +3 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 85 | 90 | Cloudflare R2 +5 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 90 | 83 | Backblaze B2 +7 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 30 | Backblaze B2 +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 90 | 87 | Backblaze B2 +3 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 74 | 75 | Cloudflare R2 +1 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **75.4 · BB** | **78.4 · A** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Backblaze B2 | Cloudflare R2 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Backblaze | Cloudflare |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://s3.us-west-004.backblazeb2.com` | `https://<account-id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com` |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio, Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT | Apache-2.0 or MIT (wrangler) |
| Tools exposed | 40 | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| MCP registry | `io.github.backblaze-labs/b2-mcp` | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-29 | 2026-09-24 |
| Popularity | 1 stars, 150 npm/wk, 112k PyPI/wk | 4.5k stars, 27M npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.8/5 (8) | 3.5/5 (8) |

## Verdicts

**Backblaze B2.** $6.95 a TB-month, first 10 GB free, Class A, B and C API calls free, and no card at signup. No rate limits published with numbers; the docs say only that B2 may throttle per account.

**Cloudflare R2.** Free egress and a free tier of 10 GB-month plus 1 million writes a month. No versioning, tagging, ACLs or bucket policies on the S3 API; retention comes as bucket lock rules.

## Before you call either

### Backblaze B2

1. Take the region from the key's S3 endpoint (the second label of s3.<region>.backblazeb2.com) and pass it as the SDK region
2. Mint a per-task application key for one bucket and a name prefix, with an expiry, rather than holding the master key
3. Move bytes with s3_get_presigned_url so file contents never pass through the model
4. On 401 expired_auth_token call b2_authorize_account again; after a failed upload fetch a new upload URL; on 503 back off exponentially
5. Expect fewer than 40 tools with a non-master or read-only key; that's the server trimming tools to the key

### Cloudflare R2

1. Set region to `auto` and the endpoint to https://<account-id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com. `us-east-1` also works, other region names fail
2. Ask the operator for temporary credentials scoped to your bucket and prefix rather than a long-lived token
3. For public reads put a custom domain or an r2.dev subdomain on the bucket; presigned URLs only sign the S3 hostname
4. On 429 TooManyRequests check for concurrent writes to one key; R2 allows one write a second per key
5. Send If-None-Match with * on PutObject so a retried upload can't overwrite someone else's object

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