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Akamai vs CDNetworks CDN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in CDN
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (10th)
Akamai
Ranking in CDN
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
CDNetworks CDN
Ranking in CDN
11th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.7%, down from 22.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai is 14.4%, down from 15.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CDNetworks CDN is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare18.7%
Akamai14.4%
CDNetworks CDN0.9%
Other66.0%
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
JV
Sr. Strategic Accounts Manager at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Improved security and faster operations with a seamless integration
They are one of the top solution vendors in the market. Premium though, but they're the best. We've worked closely with digital-native customers, not so much from the media segment. Fintechs, financial organizations, banking segment, manufacturing, these are the ones we have worked with. Not much on media because most of the media houses are already covered by Akamai. 95% of media houses are already covered by Akamai. It gives a seamless view of how your infrastructure is, from an attack perspective, from a threat perspective, how your assets are behaving. It gives a very comprehensive view. It depends on the customer's environment. Wherever the customer wants, but mostly it is on the private cloud or public cloud because it's a cloud-based SaaS solution that Akamai has to offer. Implementation is feasible anywhere. The solution is aimed at Enterprise customers because it is on a premium side. On a scale of 1-10, this solution rates at 9.5.
Jakir Shaikh - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Caching content across regions has improved access speed and reduced downtime risks for global users
The best features CDNetworks CDN offers are low latency, improved service performance, and easy accessibility for users from anywhere. The low latency and improved service performance have helped users significantly. For instance, users in India trying to access a data center in the USA would experience a long wait, but with multiple CDNetworks CDN points of presence around India, users are getting the content nearby their country or region, thus eliminating the need to connect directly to the USA data center. CDNetworks CDN has many points of presence and their service is also very good. They are very proactive, and if there is an issue in the backbone network, CDNetworks CDN connects all the points of presence through their backbone, and they have edge swaps which makes it faster for users to get the service. CDNetworks CDN has positively impacted the organization significantly. If CDNetworks CDN is down for a moment, there could be a million dollar loss due to the nature of the work being solely in the financial domain, which highlights the criticality of the financial sector. If CDNetworks CDN goes down or any part of it experiences issues, there is a substantial business-critical impact.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"If someone is looking for a secure and optimized wrapper over an open website, I would suggest CloudFlare services."
"For businesses that don't have a dedicated security team, I think it's a better product; it's more intuitive for people like us."
"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."
"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"This solution has improved the security of our organization."
"Cloudflare improves performance on my websites and is a great partner for cloud infrastructure for anyone who wants to use the security service and other features."
"Akamai provides low-latency throughput."
"The solution's technical support is very prompt and good."
"If an attacker conducts an attack, we can check what query he is running and whether he wants to see our password or any other files."
"All the policies of the CDNs are very beneficial."
"With 300 servers deployed worldwide, it's highly scalable and is the best web application firewall on the market."
"We can see how much traffic can be downloaded on the portal."
"Akamai is leveraged by many top-level businesses, ensuring reliability and support in case of outages or issues."
"As of now, the best thing about Akamai is WAF, and though CDN is a good feature, it comes in second place when compared to WAF. I am very impressed with the WAF offered by Akamai."
"The low latency and improved service performance have helped users significantly, for instance, users in India trying to access a data center in the USA would experience a long wait, but with multiple CDNetworks CDN points of presence around India, users are getting the content nearby their country or region, thus eliminating the need to connect directly to the USA data center."
 

Cons

"Latencies are always a problem."
"We had to do a lot of digging and back-and-forth with technical support for specific use cases, and it might be helpful to have more screencasts or screenshots for common situations."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"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."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
"The solution can be improved by creating a communication pathway with technical engineers because when we open tickets, we have a delay in response times."
"Akamai could improve by having a more robust and responsive support team."
"It would be better if we could be notified about specific attacks."
"One area for improvement with Akamai could be pricing."
"The price of Akamai could be less expensive."
"Their support is very slow. If you file a support ticket, it takes a long time before it gets resolved."
"The product's scalability can be improved since certain shortcomings regarding the security part of the solution currently exist."
"After three or four months from this perspective, I don’t know all the features on the platform yet, so I am still learning about it."
"CDNetworks CDN is currently very good, but there is room for improvement on weekends as some issues occur on Saturdays and Sundays, where there is a little less response from CDNetworks CDN."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is cheap."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"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."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The price is reasonable."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The solution's pricing is based on bandwidth."
"The price of Akamai could be less expensive."
"This is a very expensive solution but it works well."
"It is an expensive product. The licensing costs for the solution are based on the usage. If we need premium support, we need to buy it from Akamai."
"The price of the solution depends upon its usage."
"From the resource component, it's very costly, and Akamai's charges are also high. So, any organization with a high-tech budget can definitely afford it, but companies with 10-15% of their revenue as a technical budget probably won't be able to. That's where they have a lot of room for improvement if they want to onboard those early users."
"Akamai is an expensive tool. Moreover, we have a pay-as-you-go model for additional features."
"Price-wise, I find Akamai's pricing model's inclination to be more towards the expensive side of the spectrum, though I can't say that it is a very expensive product."
Information not available
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Comparison Review

it_user69348 - PeerSpot reviewer
Partner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Nov 17, 2013
Akamai vs. CloudFlare – Simple Stats
In the world of CDNs Akamai is the incumbent 500 pound gorilla, no question. They have a HUGE global presence, super solid technology and networks, and have the most experience with large enterprise clients. However, now there other strong players in the CDN market. One of the most…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
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.
What do you like most about Akamai?
The most valuable feature in managing web traffic has been the ability to handle vertical scaling effectively.
What needs improvement with Akamai?
Other solutions are probably easier to set up, but you have more capability in Akamai. It would be beneficial if they...
What is your primary use case for Akamai?
We are using many of the solutions from Akamai, with the WAF in front of it and distribution to multiple targets wher...
What needs improvement with CDNetworks CDN?
CDNetworks CDN is currently very good, but there is room for improvement on weekends as some issues occur on Saturday...
What is your primary use case for CDNetworks CDN?
CDNetworks CDN is used primarily for Malala, where vendors connect through the networking infrastructure via CDN. CDN...
What advice do you have for others considering CDNetworks CDN?
If someone is looking to implement CDN and has a data center in one part of the world while users are connecting from...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Capital One, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Disney, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Home Depot, HP, IBM, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, LinkedIn, McDonald's, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Oracle, PayPal, Pinterest, Qualcomm, Rakuten, SAP, Spotify, Tesla, Toyota, Visa, Walmart, WeWork
Hostelworld, MailUp, Leader Summaries, Linkstorm, The French Tennis Federation, Oxybul, King Jouet, Thomsons Online Benefits, Calam_o, Yatedo, Wistia, Wacker
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Imperva and others in CDN. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.