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Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Cloudflare 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Connected Cloud (Lin...
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (7th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (12th)
Cloudflare
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) and Cloudflare aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) is designed for Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) and holds a mindshare of 9.2%, down 12.8% compared to last year.
Cloudflare, on the other hand, focuses on Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection, holds 18.8% mindshare, down 19.4% since last year.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Julio Graham - PeerSpot reviewer
Helpful automation scripts, good documentation, responsive support, easy to use and manage
The ability to fire up a virtual machine, use it, and then kill it, is quite a valuable feature for me. They have a lot of startup scripts, I think they are called stack scripts, whereby you can install something at a click of a button. For instance, you can install a whole server at the click of a button. Linode gives the users a lot of control. Another thing that I use quite a lot is their documentation. They have documentation on how to perform tasks and often, I use that to educate a client on how to do something or on how to maintain something, et cetera. This is because a lot of customers are used to simpler systems like an iPhone, where if you want an app then you just download it from a store, press a button and it installs, or press a button and it updates. The truth of the matter is that with servers and things like that, whilst people like the push button idea, it's a lot more complex than that. With these stack scripts, the people at Linode have thought about all of the things that a new user would not think about. They do all of that stuff and then walk you through it, and that's where Linode's documentation is really good. They walk you through what you have to do to secure a server, what you have to do to run a patch, or whatever. They've got all those sorts of knowledge bases of information, which I think is invaluable, especially for clients who are uneducated in these things. It's extremely important to me that Linode offers worldwide coverage via multiple data centers, for various reasons. One is that because we live in this global world, our customers are everywhere. Secondly, for people who need geo-redundancy, with for example a server in China and one elsewhere as a backup, it's great. It's also nice because if they were just US-based, I wouldn't be able to use them because I would need to go through a whole process of trying to certify the data integrity in other regions. I'm sure that most people wouldn't bother with this because of all of the EU laws and the UK laws around data privacy. The US's data privacy laws are far more relaxed than what they are on my side of the world. The fact that I can have a server in London means that I don't have to bother with all of that. My physical location of that server is in London and to me, it is really important. When you compare Amazon, they claim to have infrastructure all over the place but I think that the bulk is centered in Germany. Even if it is in a few different places, everything gets backed up to the US, which is a problem for a lot of people.
Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has helped to minimize the risk and scale services at large in virtually no time."
"The most valuable feature is that they are flexible and easy to get ahold of if I need something."
"We can scale up and down as we require."
"The fact that you can do any Linux distribution is great. You can try out any Linux distribution, even some of the more obscure ones, and they are always keeping them up-to-date. As soon as a new distribution comes out, it is on the platform pretty much the same day, which I find really helpful."
"When it comes to the Linode Kubernetes Engine and the amount of automation it provides, it's awesome, it's a game-changer. If a process randomly dies, it could take me a while to notice that it has died, if I haven't set up monitoring. With Kubernetes, it will just restart itself using Heartbeats."
"For small businesses and people who have some technical skills and are good with Linux command line, this solution is great. I love Linode because it is very fast. Whereas, the same configuration on Azure and AWS will be so slow. The best thing is that their pricing and speed are great."
"It is also important that Linode offers worldwide coverage via multiple data centers. The ability to deploy on multiple servers, worldwide, allows us to have distributed services and failover and redundancy."
"Linode has many other cloud servers across the globe."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"The technical support is good."
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
 

Cons

"I've had some difficulties with some of their IP addresses being banned by certain mail servers."
"The product must improve its security."
"There is room for improvement regarding customer support."
"Its cost can be improved."
"They are already working on the firewalls and VLANs, which need improvement, and are now in beta. I am on the beta program for the firewalls, but I can't use it yet because they are only in Mumbai and Australia, and I am not in those data centres. This is the one thing that I have been waiting for almost since the day that I joined them, so it is nice that they are doing that. The VLANs will be an improvement as well, and I am keen and waiting for that."
"There is no notification from the company regarding upgrades."
"Before they changed the dashboard, I found some of the more granular options easier to find."
"The suitability of this solution depends on the features that you need. If you're an Uber-sized company then you're probably not going to want to start using Linode. If you are a large-sized organization then you're going to want to start using one of the bigger providers that gives you the scalability and the feature set that you are probably going to be needing in the future."
"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."
"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."
"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."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model is very simple. I like the simplicity of it, starting at $5, then doubling as it goes up from there. That is a brilliant idea, and it is not complex at all. It is about as dead simple as you can imagine. So, if you want to double what you have, then you double your price, pay the money, and reboot. It is done. It's that simple. You can't beat that."
"One key difference is that pricing is very hard to come by and to understand with all the bigger companies. Their pricing models are so weird and it's hard to figure out exactly how much I am going to pay for this kind of service. Everything is piecemeal. With Linode, it's simple and straightforward. You know exactly what you will have to pay at the end of the day."
"It is quite affordable, which makes it a great choice."
"There might be something a little bit cheaper but I find it very fair and competitive, and nothing to complain about."
"The solution is neither cheap nor expensive."
"The monthly cost depends on your requirements."
"Currently, we are at $40 a month but they have costly solutions as well."
"Pricing is very good and flexible, according to the resources required."
"The price is reasonable."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"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."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 6, 2013
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
University
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Linode?
When I started using Linode, I found its functionality easy to navigate, user-friendly and responsive to my needs. It provides clear reminders about services I'm not using, like DNS zones, which I ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Linode?
The pricing is competitive, rated an eight out of ten. Despite a recent price increase due to inflation, the value is commendable.
What needs improvement with Linode?
The Cloud Manager interface sometimes feels slow, particularly when accessed from Asia. Compared to the previous non-React interface, the current version could be more responsive.
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 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.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Best Buy, Panasonic, Giphy, Marco Polo, World Health Organization, Font Squirrel
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