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Akamai vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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
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
Cloudflare
Ranking in CDN
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
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) (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Akamai is 12.0%, down from 16.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 15.8%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare15.8%
Akamai12.0%
Other72.2%
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

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.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Our primary use case for this solution is data transfer, and we deploy the solution on private cloud."
"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."
"Akamai is leveraged by many top-level businesses, ensuring reliability and support in case of outages or issues."
"Akamai has a very established network of PoPs globally."
"Akamai support is excellent because they have great debugging tools, and they are highly competent, with proactive and responsive engineers whenever we have issues, so everything is pretty smooth."
"Akamai has been providing this service for 20 years and they have never had a substantial outage, they even have some products that have an uptime of over 20 years, the stability is very good."
"The most valuable feature in managing web traffic has been the ability to handle vertical scaling effectively."
"The stability and efficiency of Akamai have enhanced our network's performance significantly."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"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."
"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."
"I have used it to bring enterprise-grade features to my small business clients at low or no cost."
"Cloudflare is very straightforward."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"Local connectivity would be great linked to our own telecom/Cablevision CDN, as we are a key player for Internet access in Argentina for final users of mobile, DSL, cable, and FTTH users."
"Akamai's configuration part is an area of concern where improvements are required to make the process easy."
"I'd like to see improvements in log files and data visualizations within the interface."
"Their support is very slow. If you file a support ticket, it takes a long time before it gets resolved."
"Akamai could improve by providing its own cloud services. We have to use third-party cloud services at this time, such as Amazon AWS. The offering becomes a lot easier for an SMB if everything was in one single platform to be used for the services."
"The user console is quite overloaded, sometimes it's hard to find your way around."
"It would be better if we could be notified about specific attacks."
"The price of Akamai could be less expensive."
"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"The Always Online feature has room for improvement. It seems to work sometimes and not others even with the pro version."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"CloudFlare doesn't provide the cache flush history. I am not able to find out the URL information of those I have recently flushed."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"Access to the solution's dashboards is not intended for a service company. You are practically blind, and to validate a problem, you must view the customer's screen."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution can be one of the more expensive options, reflecting their established market position."
"The price of the solution depends upon its usage."
"The pricing of Akamai is moderate, in my opinion. My company makes yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to Akamai. There are no additional costs besides the licensing costs for the solution."
"This is a very expensive solution but it works well."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's pricing is based on bandwidth."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The price is reasonable."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"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."
"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 price of the solution is expensive."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
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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
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
 

Questions from the Community

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 could make some cases less complex to set up. There could be improvements in ho...
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 where AWS is one of the targets. We are building up websites that we are pointing to...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai?
The pricing is good, with no complaints about costs, which is essential when deciding to have Akamai in your network.
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
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 vs. Cloudflare and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.