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Akamai Edge DNS vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Edge DNS
Ranking in Managed DNS
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Domain Name System (DNS) Security (8th)
Cloudflare
Ranking in Managed DNS
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Akamai Edge DNS is 1.3%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 35.2%, up from 34.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS
 

Featured Reviews

JF
High availability ensures robust protection against DDoS attacks
The high availability of Akamai Edge DNS is impressive due to their numerous POPs, which help in supporting all attacks, including DDoS counterattacks. It offers scalability, which allows me to improve and manage various DNS zones efficiently. The deployment process is very easy and straightforward for our organization. Akamai provides support in Portuguese, which is crucial for me.
Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I haven't had any problems with the stability of Akamai Edge DNS in the past five years."
"The high availability of Akamai Edge DNS is impressive due to their numerous POPs, which help in supporting all attacks, including DDoS counterattacks."
"I recommend Akamai Edge DNS because it is distributed globally and prevents DDoS attacks."
"It is a very stable solution since it has a security feature that allows you to recover zone files if you accidentally delete them."
"We can maintain control of the configuration, and it seems to be covering the use case that we need."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"The UI is good."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
 

Cons

"CNAME flattening is a feature that Akamai does not support."
"Akamai Edge DNS is expensive, and the pricing is higher compared to Infoblox."
"The only area that needs improvement is the pricing for DNS zones. The price is higher than competitors, and Akamai should offer a better pricing model."
"The only area that needs improvement is the pricing for DNS zones."
"The solution has a fairly complex setup with our cloud vendors, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"Technical support is not well developed. While there are good engineers, Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Since Akamai is the industry leader, I imagine the solution would be a little more expensive than some other vendors."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 accidentally delete them.
What needs improvement with Akamai Edge DNS?
The only area that needs improvement is the pricing for DNS zones. The price is higher than competitors, and Akamai should offer a better pricing model.
What is your primary use case for Akamai Edge DNS?
I have experience with all Akamai products because I use all of them, including Edge DNS, API Security, and App and API Protector. I use Akamai Edge DNS to protect against DDoS attacks and to enhan...
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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
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.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Akamai Fast DNS
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Otto Group
Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Edge DNS vs. Cloudflare and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
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