Migrating from Cloudflare to DNSFilter

Fikayo Adepoju

Updated September 21, 2022 18:21

Migration First Steps

Creating Sites on DNSFilter

Sites on DNSFilter are the equivalent of Cloudflare’s Locations. Sites can be created in the DNSFilter dashboard on the Deployments -> Sites page.

Migrating your network policies

Security (threat) and Content filtering categories on Cloudflare differ from the ones on DNSFilter, however; there are relationships between the two.

While Cloudflare’s categories are more elaborate and often include subcategories, DNSfilter’s categories are simpler and encompassing. However, each content/security category in Cloudflare maps to a corresponding content/threat category on DNSFilter.

To see how these two categorization sets relate, we have developed a table where we mapped each category on Cloudflare with the corresponding DNSFilter equivalent. This is useful for you to create new policies in DNSFilter that match your Cloudflare policies.

DNSFilter’s bulk Allow list and Block list CSV import tool within the policy settings can also be used to import Cloudflare Lists.

DNSFilter policies also have features that are similar to that of Cloudflare for performing tasks such as Application Blocking (AppAware) and SafeSearch (per search engine)

For more details on adding a policy on DNSFilter, you can refer to these articles:

Replacing WARP, Cloudflare’s roaming agent

For offsite protection, you need to replace all your WARP installations with DNSFilter’s roaming clients. Do note that you need to uninstall all your Warp agents from all your endpoint devices before you install roaming clients for DNSFilter (do not install/run them side by side).

DNSFilter currently has roaming clients for the following platforms:

Windows
macOS
Android
iPhone/iPad
ChromeOS

DNSFilter supports (and encourages) the use of Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools and Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools for managing and automating the deployment of its roaming clients.

To get started with DNSFilter’s roaming clients and for more information on deploying roaming clients for different platforms, check out our getting started article.

User Management

For organizations with on-prem or cloud-based Active Directory (Azure AD), DNSFilter provides a user management synchronization tool, the Active Directory Sync Tool. This tool helps set up accounts for all your Active Directory users on DNSFilter.

When utilizing the on-prem Active Directory or cloud-based Azure Active Directory, install the DNSFilter sync tool on a domain join machine for on-prem and on any machine for Azure. Also, Active Directory syncing requires DNSFilter’s Windows Roaming Client to be installed on endpoints.

For more details on using DNSFilter’s Sync tool for Active Directory, check out the following articles:

Without Active Directory or for users outside AD, migration of users is still a manual process.