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Akamai Edge DNS vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

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 Edge DNS
Ranking in Managed DNS
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Domain Name System (DNS) Security (10th)
Cloudflare
Ranking in Managed DNS
1st
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), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Akamai Edge DNS is 1.3%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 35.6%, up from 34.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS
 

Featured Reviews

JF
High availability ensures robust protection against DDoS attacks
The high availability of Akamai Edge DNS is impressive due to their numerous POPs, which help in supporting all attacks, including DDoS counterattacks. It offers scalability, which allows me to improve and manage various DNS zones efficiently. The deployment process is very easy and straightforward for our organization. Akamai provides support in Portuguese, which is crucial for me.
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

"I haven't had any problems with the stability of Akamai Edge DNS in the past five years."
"It is a very stable solution since it has a security feature that allows you to recover zone files if you accidentally delete them."
"The high availability of Akamai Edge DNS is impressive due to their numerous POPs, which help in supporting all attacks, including DDoS counterattacks."
"We can maintain control of the configuration, and it seems to be covering the use case that we need."
"The UI is good."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"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."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
 

Cons

"CNAME flattening is a feature that Akamai does not support."
"The solution has a fairly complex setup with our cloud vendors, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle."
"The only area that needs improvement is the pricing for DNS zones."
"The only area that needs improvement is the pricing for DNS zones. The price is higher than competitors, and Akamai should offer a better pricing model."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"Technical support is lacking."
"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"The pricing could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Since Akamai is the industry leader, I imagine the solution would be a little more expensive than some other vendors."
"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."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The price is reasonable."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
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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
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
23%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Akamai Edge DNS?
It is a very stable solution since it has a security feature that allows you to recover zone files if you accidentally delete them.
What needs improvement with Akamai Edge DNS?
The solution has a fairly complex setup with our cloud vendors, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle.
What is your primary use case for Akamai Edge DNS?
Some of the use cases we looked at are site forwarding for the root domain to another record so we can maintain control of its overall management.
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.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Akamai Fast DNS
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Otto Group
Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Edge DNS vs. Cloudflare and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
839,515 professionals have used our research since 2012.