Akamai Edge DNS vs Cloudflare comparison

Akamai and Cloudflare are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. Akamai is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.5, while Cloudflare is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.4. Additionally, 100% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Cloudflare users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 29, 2024

Cloudflare and Akamai Edge DNS are leading providers in DNS services. Based on user reviews, Cloudflare has the upper hand in pricing and support, while Akamai offers more robust features despite higher costs.

Features: Cloudflare is known for its speed and security features, streamlined dashboard, and easy integration. Akamai Edge DNS offers advanced security, extensive customizability, and superior performance in handling high traffic.

Room for Improvement: Cloudflare could improve its advanced configuration options and support responsiveness. Akamai can enhance ease of use and provide clearer documentation. Cloudflare needs more advanced settings, while Akamai should focus on usability and support documentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudflare has a straightforward deployment process supported by an intuitive dashboard and responsive customer service. Akamai Edge DNS has a more complex deployment due to its higher customizability but is balanced by strong customer support.

Pricing and ROI: Cloudflare has affordable pricing models and delivers good ROI, especially valued by smaller businesses. Akamai, while more expensive, justifies its cost with high performance and extensive features, appealing to larger enterprises seeking premium services.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai Edge DNS vs. Cloudflare Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Edge DNS vs. Cloudflare

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM NS1 Connect

Featured Reviews

Michael Wills

Senior Network Systems Engineer at McKesson

Jun 8, 2022

Balances cost and functionality, speeds up provisioning, and reduces the DNS maintenance work drastically

The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS. It is great as an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management. It is very simple to use. It allows us to rapidly provision and deprovision things. We are all around happy with the solution. From a metrics standpoint, the solution that we came from had no metrics. So, it has been great. Their service team is excellent in taking the time to provide reports for both growth and strategic planning. It has been great.

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reviewer2248722

Ecommerce Architect Manager at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 22, 2024

Protects against troublesome bots, hackers, and different kinds of attacks

Integrating the tool into our existing network's architecture is a matter of redirecting from the Akamai instance over to a different cloud solution. Our security team is happy with the solution's infrastructure. Some security policies we have with Akamai control the overall configuration there. I've always been impressed with Akamai's overall approach and their suite of offerings. It's definitely a key player in the industry. Akamai is generally pretty innovative in terms of technologies, security level, web application firewall, and bot management. I can't really compare Akamai Edge DNS with other vendors, but I know Akamai does a good job. Akamai Edge DNS is a useful component in our infrastructure, hosting, and application side. I think it's just one of those must-have things. I think Akamai has some of its AI technologies plugged into the overall ecosystem. I haven't read up on it lately, but I'm sure it has some kind of offering for adapting to some of the attacks and keeping track of all the approaches. Akamai is a good vendor that comes up with a lot of innovations to protect against troublesome actors such as bots, hackers, and different kinds of attacks. They generally provide performance hosting and the Edge service to make the user experience for a site perform well and be efficient. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

Dec 1, 2022

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS."

"The fact that it's an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management is one of the reasons we looked into NS1. We use it for a lot of automation and metrics gathering and it's been great."

"Monitoring is really important for us. We really care about reliability, and we want to make sure that we can remove some points of presence in our sector and in our edge network really fast when we experience any problems. So, monitoring that NS1 provides for DNS is really important for us."

"For starters, it integrates with Terraform and a lot of our infrastructure is effectively built out using Terraform. That makes all this stuff extremely easy... when we deploy, all the entries are created and configuration is done."

"Their Pulsar filters allow us to collect RUM metrics from our users so that we can determine the best paths for our users to take. That has been very useful in providing the best user experience, and for responding to and recovering from downtime of our multiple CDNs."

"We find that the low latency access to DNS queries has a direct effect on the customer experience. Visiting a site, whether it's an AdTech-based solution or marketing tech, the fact that whatever we're rendering on a page can be rendered better than the industry standard, in terms of time, ensures a better user experience."

"Everything we download into our observability platform so that we can also track any changes in traffic behavior or things like that is also something that we use quite a lot. I'd say traffic management, the speed of updates, and observability are the top three things that we use."

"The Filter Chain is one of the most valuable features, for geo-load balancing and geo-fencing. The Filter Chain is the most useful because it allows us to do several things. With geo-fencing we can redirect a particular user to a particular answer. That's very valuable for us. Filter Chains with monitoring is our strategy to provide redundancy."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

"We can maintain control of the configuration, and it seems to be covering the use case that we need."

"It is a very stable solution since it has a security feature that allows you to recover zone files if you accidentally delete them."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

More Cloudflare pros

Cons

"The reporting metrics are great from an API standpoint, but it would be a little bit nicer if there was some type of dashboard around that. There should also be some type of reporting that's more executive-level focused."

"I would like to see the UI updated to allow me to do finer searches. I would also like to have the ability to get reports that can sort based on various metrics. For example, I would like to be able to say, "Show me the top 10 records by total queries" in an easy-to-digest format."

"The Filter Chain simulation is really good in the UI, but it would be nice to have something similar in the API so that we could simulate and test things before we deploy them."

"We care about monitoring and telemetry work, and NS1 provides a pretty good system for monitoring. We can monitor our endpoints and points of presence around the world. If there are any issues, we can easily remove them from our network, but this area needs some improvement because it is not always reliable in NS1. In the past, we had a number of false-positive cases when the monitoring system told us about some problems in our infrastructure that were not true. NS1 is improving the system, and we are constantly talking about this with them. I know that they are releasing a new version of their monitoring system, which is really important for us, but this is a different area where we would expect them to improve."

"We would really like them to become a DNS registrar."

"There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution."

"We use our client in our infrastructure to communicate with NS1. This client is a bit complex in the way that it is set up. NS1 has their own client solution that you can deploy into your platform to do this, but even that is a bit complex. So, I would like a very simple, thin, light API agent that we can deploy into our platform to communicate with NS1. That would be welcome."

"I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide. They have a simulate-filter feature so that you can simulate how your traffic would flow, based on their Filter Chains. I believe that was shut off for quite some time. Having that as a way to test our load-balanced CDN structure would be fantastic."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

"The solution has a fairly complex setup with our cloud vendors, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle."

"CNAME flattening is a feature that Akamai does not support."

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."

"Support response time could be improved."

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."

More Cloudflare cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Everything can always be cheaper, but as it is today the pricing is fair."

"From a cost standpoint, it's certainly not the most expensive out there, and it's also not the cheapest, but it does well to balance the cost and the functionality/reliability."

"NS1's pricing is much more aggressive than its competitors in the market and you get more value out of what you pay for it."

"We pay about $30,000 a month. We used to pay about $20,000 with Dyn every month, for lower volume than we're doing right now, but it had none of the features that we have available with NS1, so it was worth it for us. It seems competitive for us, given that we're doing 4.5 billion requests."

"The cost of this product is one of the reasons that we chose it."

"Since Akamai is the industry leader, I imagine the solution would be a little more expensive than some other vendors."

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"We are using the free version."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user68487

Security Expert with 51-200 employees

Nov 6, 2013

CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall

CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

University

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Government

Retailer

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about NS1 Managed DNS?

For starters, Managed DNS from NS1 is an easy way to get the job done. Whether you're a novice or a pro, Managed DNS ...

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What do you like most about Akamai Edge DNS?

It is a very stable solution since it has a security feature that allows you to recover zone files if you accidentall...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Akamai Edge DNS?

The solution has a fairly complex setup with our cloud vendors, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Akamai Edge DNS?

Some of the use cases we looked at are site forwarding for the root domain to another record so we can maintain contr...

See all answers

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 19% of the time

Neustar UltraDNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 7% of the time

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

Infoblox DDI vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 4% of the time

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Amazon Route 53 vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 15% of the time

Infoblox DDI vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 10% of the time

Azure DNS vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 7% of the time

Quad9 vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 5% of the time

More Akamai Edge DNS Competitors

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

October 2024

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Buyer's Guide

Managed DNS

September 2024

Download Akamai Edge DNS product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

October 2024

Download Cloudflare product report

Also Known As

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

Akamai Fast DNS

Cloudflare DNS

Learn More

IBM

Akamai

Cloudflare

Overview

Why

In a 24/7 world, customers demand applications, websites, and content that load instantly and are always on. When those connections are unreliable or slow, businesses don’t meet customer expectations, causing customers to leave. When that occurs, revenue may suffer.

What

IBM NS1 Connect delivers the high-performance, reliable, secure network connectivity that businesses need to meet increasingly sophisticated customer expectations. Leveraging a global network with a 100% uptime SLA, IBM has the capacity and scale to meet the needs of any business. IBM NS1 Connect takes performance to the next level, powering the sophisticated needs of enterprises with complex network infrastructures.

How

IBM NS1 Connect provides network connectivity solutions that give networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect also enables IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.

Details

IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service that provides authoritative, premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience. Revenue-generating applications require authoritative DNS resolution to keep critical applications and websites online. Unless your DNS infrastructure is always-on and resilient, network reliability and user experience will suffer, your network reliability may suffer, resulting in poor user experiences if revenue-generating critical applications and websites are not online. IBM NS1 Connect’s always-on, API-first architecture provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world with premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering. It also enables your IT teams to efficiently monitor networks, deploy changes and conduct routine maintenance.

IBM NS1 Connect uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to ensure that websites and applications are:

Online, all the time: Global network with 100% uptime SLA and DDoS protection
Fast: Top tier response and propagation times, custom traffic steering to optimize connections
Cheaper to run: Far less expensive than self-hosting
Automation friendly: API-first platform with Ansible/Terraform integrations and support for Pliant rapid network automation
Easier to troubleshoot: Unique DNS data insights offering

Designed for enterprises looking to optimize their DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service delivering authoritative DNS and advanced traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience and provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world. NS1 Connect streamlines DNS management by automating both simple and complex DNS configuration tasks via API and preconfigured integrations, so you can spend more time on higher-value work.

IBM NS1 Connect is delivered through our unified delivery platform. The cloud-based platform gives networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect solutions also enable IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.

For enterprises looking to further optimize DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect offers rich DNS data analytics to streamline the identification of the root cause of anomalies within traffic.

IBM NS1 Connect Features

Global anycast DNS network: Enjoy fast connections to consumers around the globe through an anycast network with 26 points of presence (PoPs).
100% uptime SLA on DNS resolution: Maximize uptime and revenue generation with resilient, always-on, authoritative DNS.
API-first architecture: Integrate and automate workflows with NS1 Connect's well-documented API; every line of code starts as an API call, all functionality is available through the API.
Real-time user monitoring (RUM)-based traffic steering: Uses real-time intelligence on network performance and availability to direct DNS connections to the best available application resource; the widest range of filter options and data sources in the industry, not data that is extrapolated from sampling; the most flexible, granular controls for your network.
Built-in resilience: Add a single-tenant, redundant DNS layer and manage it from a single control plane as your primary DNS.
Managed DNS for China: Improve performance for the Chinese mainland by segmenting traffic with NS1 Connect’s Managed DNS for China.
DNS insights: Get a better understanding of DNS traffic patterns by mining your DNS data to identify security issues, misconfigurations and performance issues.
DDoS protection: Cap your query-based spending with protection against unexpected surges in traffic from distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Uptime monitor: Quickly identify issues and automatically adjust DNS traffic steering configurations with native health check alerts.
DevOps tool integrations: Preconfigured integrations with leading DevOps tools including Ansible and Terraform to help automate routine maintenance, manage data sources and feeds.
Propagation speed: fastest propagation in the industry, measured in seconds not minutes; worldwide propagation in under five seconds.
Independence: neutral arbiter between infrastructure services (CDNs, clouds).

IBM NS1 Connect helps enterprises modernize and optimize networking infrastructure to provide customers with faster connections to websites, applications, services and content.

Discover Akamai DNS and its benefits of high availability and performance, and resilience against DDoS attacks backed by a fully guaranteed uptime SLA.

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distribution Denial of Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can use the solution and experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to access Cloudflare highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end-users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD ( bring your own device) access ensure end-users and employees always have the best resources and technology available to them at all times.

Cloudflare Benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

Faster load times
Robust DNS security
Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Free universal SSL
Image Enhancement
Automatic Browser Caching
Next-generation cloud load balancer
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Rate Limiting
Minification
Zero-trust capabilities
Cost-effective
Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from Real Users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” A PeerSpot user who is a Competence Center Manager at a tech services company.

Sample Customers

Avast Software, Bloomberg L.P., BBC, Carfax, CNBC LLC, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Disney Streaming, Dropbox, EBAY Inc, Gannett Media Corp, Salesforce, Wayfair, Workday

Otto Group

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Edge DNS vs. Cloudflare

October 2024

Free Report: Akamai Edge DNS vs. Cloudflare

Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Edge DNS vs. Cloudflare and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

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