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Akamai vs Cloudflare vs Uplynk comparison

 

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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Akamai is 14.4%, down from 15.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.7%, down from 22.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Uplynk is 3.5%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare18.7%
Akamai14.4%
Uplynk3.5%
Other63.4%
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.
JH
Senior Software Engineer at OmniTier Inc
Improved mobile app development and user experience through optimization and security
The most valuable aspects include the optimization of application performance by optimizing API calls for a smoother user experience and faster load times. Furthermore, I restructured our code base to establish a more efficient development workflow. During my tenure, I integrated various security features for mobile applications, such as JWT tokens for secure authentication and data encryption using AES algorithms. I also focused on secure storage options, secure coding practices, and platform-specific security compliance, like Android's SafeNet and iOS Secure Enclave.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The worldwide reach of the Akamai CDN is one of the key values of this CDN and the agreements worldwide that they keep running."
"We have received excellent support from their team; I have not worked with any other applications where they have delivered professional services as good as them."
"Akamai is leveraged by many top-level businesses, ensuring reliability and support in case of outages or issues."
"The worldwide reach of the Akamai CDN is one of the key values of this CDN and the agreements worldwide that they keep running."
"The solution is very sustainable and flexible."
"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 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."
"All the policies of the CDNs are very beneficial."
"I have used it to bring enterprise-grade features to my small business clients at low or no cost."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"CloudFlare's caching brings the load speed down from 4.32 seconds to 2.45 seconds."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"Without EdgeCast, our website was taking 10 to 15 seconds to load; with EdgeCast, it loads under five seconds and it's a good product."
"The Rules Engine V4 is the most valuable feature."
"The product is easy to use and easy to implement."
"The customer support and service responsiveness were excellent."
"I recommend this solution because, for me, it's one of the most efficient and performant CDN operators."
"It's super easy to use and integrate with."
"The tool's most valuable feature is the Uplynk platform for streaming purposes."
 

Cons

"I'd like to see improvements in log files and data visualizations within the interface."
"I'd like to see more Web 3.0 and IoT solutions."
"The price of Akamai could be less expensive."
"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."
"The product's scalability can be improved since certain shortcomings regarding the security part of the solution currently exist."
"The fact that it is an expensive product is its only shortcoming."
"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."
"Their support is very slow. If you file a support ticket, it takes a long time before it gets resolved."
"I would like to not need a separate server for non-www redirection under the CNAME setup option."
"DNS Management."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"We could not create more than 15 custom rules."
"The tool needs to resolve its lack of innovation."
"The web interface of the Verizon Edgecast portal is very old. It's not user-friendly, slow, and it is missing some valuable features like the ability to make bulk changes."
"The web interface of the Verizon Edgecast portal is very old; it's not user-friendly, slow, and it is missing some valuable features like the ability to make bulk changes."
"The comparable features that we are looking at fits into Cloudflare's free version, as opposed to Verizon EdgeCast, which we are paying for."
"In the next release, I would like to see more global endpoints for their CDN and a lower price."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Quite high in price, but equivalent to other enterprise products on the market"
"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."
"Akamai is an expensive tool. Moreover, we have a pay-as-you-go model for additional features."
"The solution's pricing is based on bandwidth."
"The price of the solution depends upon its usage."
"The price of Akamai could be less expensive."
"This is a very expensive solution but it works well."
"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."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"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."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The price is reasonable."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"Be careful about the options because to have all the features can be very expensive."
"When I modeled it out, we are spending somewhere between $600 to $800 a month with Verizon EdgeCast."
"The product is cheaper compared to other solutions."
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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
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Edgio Global CDN?
The pricing was initially very expensive. However, after improving and restructuring the application, it became more ...
What needs improvement with Edgio Global CDN?
Regarding improvements, I focused on testing and compatibility to ensure reliability across various mobile devices. B...
What is your primary use case for Edgio Global CDN?
I usually use the product for mobile development. At my last company, OmniTier, I worked as a senior principal softwa...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Cloudflare DNS
Edgio, Limelight Content Delivery, Limelight Orchestrate Delivery, Limelight Origin Storage, Global CDN, Verizon EdgeCast
 

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.
TD Ameritrade, Plus500, Solvay Bank, Yahoo, Deckers Brands, and Coach
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Imperva and others in CDN. Updated: March 2026.
885,444 professionals have used our research since 2012.