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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
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
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 7.2%, down 13.5% compared to last year.
Cloudflare, on the other hand, focuses on Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection, holds 19.4% mindshare, up 19.2% 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

"The ability to fire up a virtual machine, use it, and then kill it, is quite a valuable feature for me."
"Linode has many other cloud servers across the globe."
"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."
"The management of different DNS domains is beneficial due to the user-friendly interface that provides all necessary options."
"Service availability is the most valuable feature. It gives every user 100 percent uptime."
"I very much like the support that you get, and I think that it's excellent."
"The most valuable feature is that they are flexible and easy to get ahold of if I need something."
"The most valuable feature is the static IP address, which has been very helpful for being able to log into the same address over the course of more than a decade."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"The UI is good."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
 

Cons

"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."
"Everything is up-to-date for a small business. But for big business, they need to improve certain things. For example, there should be better security."
"One thing that I'd really like to see is auto-scaling node pools for their Kubernetes. I don't think that they have that. That's a huge one and would be very helpful. Specifically, what I would like is auto-scaling node pools that would scale down to zero nodes, which is tricky. That's very important for certain use cases."
"There is room for improvement regarding customer support."
"It would be helpful if they provided the additional Linux distributions that I prefer using. But there is still a workaround. I can do it without direct support. It's a bit more complicated, but it can still be done."
"It's not really an issue with Linode itself but upgrading Linux major versions can be challenging. It would be be fantastic if Linode developed a way to ease transitioning to a major new Linux upgrade."
"Before they changed the dashboard, I found some of the more granular options easier to find."
"I don't know how all of their services work, but my understanding is that they're not offering the entry-level machine for someone who just wants to own their own web page."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"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."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"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."
"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model is very simple. If you have very small applications, you can use the plan which costs $5 per month. That gives you 50 GB of memory and almost 1 GB of RAM. If you need more than you have to select the next plan which is $10 per month, which has about 70 GB of data and 2 GB of RAM."
"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."
"is a little cheaper than Google or Amazon, more or less on par with the other competitors."
"There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees to include things like extra public IPs and backup services."
"Compared to other service providers, like AWS and Google, the cost of services are much less and more affordable. We are saving about 90 percent by going with Linode versus other cloud providers."
"Currently, we are at $40 a month but they have costly solutions as well."
"At this point, I'm paying more like $35 per month for a slightly bigger machine, and the backup, and the object service."
"The pricing model is simple."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"The price is reasonable."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"A free version of the solution is available."
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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
18%
University
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
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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