Akamai Ion vs. Cloudflare vs. StackPath Edge Delivery

• Akamai Ion is excellent if you have the staff to manage the configurations and understand how best to leverage its benefits amidst ongoing Dev work without getting in their way. You'll have to communicate consistently on what the CDN does and does not do as well as drive knowledge sharing sessions on expected behavior or unexpected behavior to help reduce unnecessary troubleshooting from your IT and Dev teams when tickets/issues arise.
• Akamai Ion is best suited for well equipped and well informed IT or Marketing teams that can leverage the delivery benefits of caching and offload. Doing so will increase customer satisfaction, reduce bounce rates, improve conversion rates as well as drive more time on site.

Incentivized

Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.

Incentivized

Well suited to:

1. Startups - Very competitive pricing, better than AWS for object storage and CDN.
2. The less technical - for those looking to implement a CDN, it doesn't get any easier than StackPath
3. The more technical - Well documented API, serverless scripting and container deployments
4. Fast object delivery - StackPath tends to be faster (sometimes much more ) than AWS S3. See below however...

Not so well suited to:

1. Multi-tiered web applications
2. Ultra high bandwidth requirements. Stackpath isn't meant to be a substitute for AWS or Azure when you're looking to push 100s of TBs of traffic.
3. Object storage works well if you don't need fine-grained bucket lifecycle or permissions management.

Incentivized

• Ease of management with good UI for making rules and behaviors.
• There is also an API and Code integration for the advanced Dev-Ops team to use as well.

Incentivized

• The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
• Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
• One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.

Incentivized

• Price competitive.
• Easy to use.
• Good reporting.
• Quick to deploy.
• Start-up friendly.
• Good technical information via blog, FAQ and community discussion.
• I can talk to real person for urgent support.

Incentivized

• The learning curve on using a CDN is steep and requires class time. The initial onboarding and integration with the business' DevOps teams should be a bit closer relationship.
• Global vs. Regional management can be a bit challenging if your account is centralized overseas, and you want a local time-zone account manager on your time.

Incentivized

• In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
• Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
• While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.

Incentivized

• Analytics.
• Many options hidden in API.
• Web console.

Incentivized

lower cost

Incentivized

Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.

Incentivized

In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.

Incentivized

Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.

Incentivized

• Support for tickets has gotten better/quicker over the years.
• Also, there is a wealth of information on the knowledge base, documentation, and there is also a message board too now.

Incentivized

Excellent product, Cloudflare is a true pioneer of the modern Internet, providing tools, services, and expertise that vastly improve the performance and security of web services. Any issues are resolved quickly with detailed RCA and follow-ups published publicly. I'm thankful to Cloudflare and use their services both at work and at home.

Incentivized

Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.

Incentivized

They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.

They have very good reputation.

They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.

Incentivized

When we identified the need for having a Content Delivery Network to improve our website loading performance we researched a bit and found StackPath. Reading its reviews and the info on its website we have found that they had everything we needed so we didn't need to look for other products.

Incentivized

They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.

Incentivized

• Improved conversion rates.
• Reduced page load times.

Incentivized

• Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
• WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
• CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
• DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.

Incentivized

• Easy 25-30% improvement in website performance vs non CDN solution
• Less expensive and faster object storage than AWS
• Aided greatly in maintaining KPIs in terms of performance, availability

Incentivized