Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Akamai
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Akamai Technologies, headquartered in Boston, offers a Akamai: a content delivery network (CDN).N/A
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Cloudflare, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, provides DDoS and bot mitigation security for business domains, as well as a content delivery network (CDN) and web application firewall (WAF).
$20
per month
Pricing
AkamaiCloudflare
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Pro
$20
per month
Business
$200
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AkamaiCloudflare
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AkamaiCloudflare
Considered Both Products
Akamai
Chose Akamai
CloudFlare is much easier to use. It is much cheaper and from our experience, it works so much better. The support staff at CloudFlare has always been helpful and will get on the phone when we need help. Also, CloudFlare helped us get set up on their platform in about an hour …
Chose Akamai
CloudFlare and CloudFront are good for small sites where budgetary costs are the primary concern but Akamai Ion provides a new level of quality and performance.
Chose Akamai
I haven't had much experience with other CDNs and to be honest I haven't heard of many more other than Akamai which just goes to show which one is the most trusted and proves to be the best. There are others out there, such as CloudFlare, that claim to provide a similar service …
Chose Akamai
We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more …
Chose Akamai
I don't have any direct experience with any of the other CDNs, so it's hard to say. Like any solution out there, each service will have its pros and cons. Some will fit your business needs more than others. Akamai is amongst the best and meets our business needs.
Cloudflare
Chose Cloudflare
CloudFlare is always innovating fast and adding new interesting solutions to the CDN, DNS, and DDoS problems that keep appearing as the internet grows and matures. Due to network effects, using CloudFlare is easier, faster, and more reliable than the competitors, and their …
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare is easier to setup with free plans available to get started. Secondly, Cloudflare is a proven and trusted solution used by leading technology organizations around the globe which can also scales better to cater for indefinite workloads. Akamai provides lesser free …
Chose Cloudflare
Akamai and Edgecast/Verizon are way over-priced, and also require hassling sales people to negotiate prices, and cloudflare just has their prices posted, and don't require a multi-year contract, etc.
StackPath is a regular CDN provider, and is probably cheaper than Cloudflare …
Chose Cloudflare
We Previously used Akamai for Website Security, and the price wise very high we are a startup company for Online business, we can't send that. we tried a similar product for Web security then finally we got the Cloudflare.
Chose Cloudflare
we are more suited with Cloudflare schemes compared to Akamai, as they are aim for the larger enterprise business. I like that Cloudflare has a much more general and neutral approach, while trying to get closer to us each time. In region like southeast Asia, locality is very …
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare is less expensive and has more features than Akamai. It has many more points of presence and is faster and more robust than Limelight/Edgio. It was the clear winner when we selected them six years ago, and maintains its leadership in this space.
Chose Cloudflare
It's much cheaper even has free version, easy to use and integrate with our current system, it has so many features in the dashboard that I need.
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare outperforms in majority of the categories such as Ease of Use, Pricing Transparency, Security & Edge computing capabilities with global network reach. Cloudflare is known for providing a seamless onboarding experience for users of varying technical expertise in …
Chose Cloudflare
Cloudflare proved to be the winning choice over its competitors because it was the only solution that's so complete. The other solutions we analyzed were convincing for the caching/CDN aspect but had gaps in other aspects such as security or DDoS protection. Cloudflare also …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
AkamaiCloudflare
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
BIG-IP
BIG-IP
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Score 8.5 out of 10
BIG-IP
BIG-IP
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AkamaiCloudflare
Likelihood to Recommend
7.6
(16 ratings)
9.0
(156 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(4 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(8 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(2 ratings)
8.8
(125 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(2 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
AkamaiCloudflare
Likelihood to Recommend
Akamai
Akamai is a well-established brand name with a great product. It meets and many time exceeds the needs for global content delivery and security management layer at the edge. Fine grain security tuning seems cumbersome as the definition of the app keeps changing. It also requires an investment of time for the setup which doesn't necessarily make sense for smaller scale scenarios. Some products offered by AWS, Azure or the Google Cloud can be more tightly integrated with cloud provider offerings thus easier to configure.
Read full review
Cloudflare
It is easy to set up, and within 10 minutes it is up and running. You can add many domains in one dashboard. So no need for a separate Cloudflare account. I can access all my domain DNS, and customize/add it further. For example by adding the Google Webmaster DNS key or my email provider.
Read full review
Pros
Akamai
  • Content offloading - once rules are set up within Akamai you don't need to even think about how many images or large JavaScript or CSS files (for example) are being served from your own estate, Akamai takes care of it all via rules that are quick, easy and flexible.
  • Page caching - for pages that don't change very often Akamai allows you to set up rules, quickly and easily, to serve up your page content for you, which takes even more load away from your origin servers.
  • Quick rollback - the Akamai system allows easy testing of rules and changes via a staging system, and also offers a quick rollback option, which is perfect for the rare occasions when something has been set up incorrectly.
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • Registrar and DNS services are impeccable, with registrations done at cost and without ADs. DNS services setting standards for speed of resolution.
  • DDOS protection. With their content distribution network to back them they have the bandwidth and tools to be both proactive and reactive to bad actors.
  • WAF - Their Web Application Firewall helps mitigate common site vulnerabilities and has active zero-day protection running for breaking exploits
Read full review
Cons
Akamai
  • The interface in their control centre could be a bit more user-friendly with some of the settings in places that you wouldn't expect them to be. The search offsets this problem to an extent but it's still sometimes slower than you'd like to find what you are looking for.
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • 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.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Akamai
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
lower cost
Read full review
Usability
Akamai
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
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.
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Reliability and Availability
Akamai
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.
Read full review
Performance
Akamai
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.
Read full review
Support Rating
Akamai
Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.
Read full review
Cloudflare
We really like to talk to a person on the phone or using chat. But the system is very slow and sending to much email to get the issue solve. Something we don't like to spend time writing on the community forum our issue because we don't want to share detail information of our POC.
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Implementation Rating
Akamai
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Akamai
We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more likely to suggest CloudFlare (which has a free tier) or an integrated offering from a cloud provider, like Cloudfront.
Read full review
Cloudflare
Firebase can be a good starter for basic projects but as I scaled up, I found it lacking the maturity Cloudflare has. Naturaly, I opted for Cloudflare for bigger projects. I still use Firebase, but for small scale hobby projects only.
Read full review
Scalability
Akamai
No answers on this topic
Cloudflare
They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Akamai
  • Akamai RoI improved over a period of times since it comes with heavy costs, however global deliveries in over 100 counties and global web platforms usage helps improve RoI
  • With the complex UI challenges, ROI could be impacted negatively when you have to invest in operations and time.
Read full review
Cloudflare
  • A lot of requests are cached and so egress costs from downstream providers are mitigated.
  • DDoS protection has also managed to keep our site up and our cloud computing bill down.
  • Setting up a proxy with a worker made putting various Google Cloud Functions running behind a single URL very easy and performant. Plus they offer API Shield on top of this.
Read full review
ScreenShots