No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in CDN
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (3rd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th)
Akamai
Ranking in CDN
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon CloudFront
Ranking in CDN
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 17.5%, down from 22.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai is 13.4%, down from 16.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 5.9%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare17.5%
Amazon CloudFront5.9%
Akamai13.4%
Other63.2%
CDN
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
JV
Sr. Strategic Accounts Manager at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Improved security and faster operations with a seamless integration
They are one of the top solution vendors in the market. Premium though, but they're the best. We've worked closely with digital-native customers, not so much from the media segment. Fintechs, financial organizations, banking segment, manufacturing, these are the ones we have worked with. Not much on media because most of the media houses are already covered by Akamai. 95% of media houses are already covered by Akamai. It gives a seamless view of how your infrastructure is, from an attack perspective, from a threat perspective, how your assets are behaving. It gives a very comprehensive view. It depends on the customer's environment. Wherever the customer wants, but mostly it is on the private cloud or public cloud because it's a cloud-based SaaS solution that Akamai has to offer. Implementation is feasible anywhere. The solution is aimed at Enterprise customers because it is on a premium side. On a scale of 1-10, this solution rates at 9.5.
Nicolas Forgues - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data & Content at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
Improved web performance has boosted content customization and currently delivers faster user experiences
From my perspective, I see some weaknesses in Amazon CloudFront; I would rate the product something around nine out of ten, but there are disadvantages compared to its competitors. Talking specifically about Amazon CloudFront, I think they could have some additional features in the future, and I believe they may lack certain functionalities.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"There is no service as mature as Cloudflare that is also as easy to use, reliable, and hosted from excellent infrastructure."
"Stability is great; I love their mechanisms, I love their GUI, I love their front end, I love their behind the scenes, algorithms and everything, it all makes sense."
"The technical support is good."
"Using the CDN of Cloudflare improved the speed significantly, reducing the page loading times to appropriate levels."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"The setup and configuration is also easy to perform and their support is excellent."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it."
"The worldwide reach of the Akamai CDN is one of the key values of this CDN and the agreements worldwide that they keep running."
"The most valuable feature in managing web traffic has been the ability to handle vertical scaling effectively."
"The solution's technical support is very prompt and good."
"The stability and efficiency of Akamai have enhanced our network's performance significantly."
"Akamai support is excellent because they have great debugging tools, and they are highly competent, with proactive and responsive engineers whenever we have issues, so everything is pretty smooth."
"The solution's most valuable feature is that it has been quite helpful in our company, especially when it comes to applications needing updates frequently."
"The worldwide reach of the Akamai CDN is one of the key values of this CDN and the agreements worldwide that they keep running."
"All the policies of the CDNs are very beneficial."
"The beneficial feature for the entire AWS community is the presence of edge location servers. These servers are strategically located in multiple locations, allowing efficient content delivery from the nearest server."
"CloudFront provides a common access point, manages routing to different methods, and serves as an access point plus API routing."
"The best feature of Amazon CloudFront is its simplified process and easy integration."
"The tool is highly available and reliable. It helps to access server applications easily. Integrating Amazon CloudFront with other AWS services was very easy, I would rate it eight out of ten."
"The most beneficial aspect of Amazon CloudFront is its capacity to automatically arrange resources depending on user needs, eliminating the need for on-premises management."
"The most valuable feature is the number of servers they can put your content in while being reliable."
"The speed and usability of the solution are valuable."
"It is an expensive product with valuable features."
 

Cons

"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"Eventually, things go sideways and require fixes when it would have been easier to prevent the issue initially."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"We had to do a lot of digging and back-and-forth with technical support for specific use cases, and it might be helpful to have more screencasts or screenshots for common situations."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"We experienced some downtime in the fall of 2013, causing us to switch to Incapsula."
"CloudFlare doesn't provide the cache flush history. I am not able to find out the URL information of those I have recently flushed."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed."
"The solution could offer more integrations."
"One area for improvement with Akamai could be pricing."
"Akamai could improve by having a more robust and responsive support team."
"I'd like to see more Web 3.0 and IoT solutions."
"While it's great for solutions with high scalability, like global e-commerce, it's not really built for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). It has too many options and can be complex for SMBs to utilize."
"The fact that it is an expensive product is its only shortcoming."
"Akamai could improve by providing its own cloud services. We have to use third-party cloud services at this time, such as Amazon AWS. The offering becomes a lot easier for an SMB if everything was in one single platform to be used for the services."
"Caching strategy is an area with certain shortcomings in the solution where improvements are required."
"AWS is redesigning its user interface and user experience for CloudFront, and there is room for improvement in certificate management."
"It might benefit from multi-region support to enhance performance."
"From my perspective, I see some weaknesses in Amazon CloudFront; I would rate the product something around nine out of ten, but there are disadvantages compared to its competitors."
"It might benefit from multi-region support to enhance performance."
"With a mixed stack, things become a problem. With GCP and Azure, the DNS setup gets tricky when using CloudFront."
"The product could support any network load balancer. At present, we can use only Amazon’s load balancer application."
"The distribution networks need to be a little bit more user-friendly in the way that new users are not able to configure the CloudFront distribution as easily as experienced users."
"Its price is really high and can be improved. From the technology perspective, they should have some multi-platform integration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"This is a very expensive solution but it works well."
"Quite high in price, but equivalent to other enterprise products on the market"
"From the resource component, it's very costly, and Akamai's charges are also high. So, any organization with a high-tech budget can definitely afford it, but companies with 10-15% of their revenue as a technical budget probably won't be able to. That's where they have a lot of room for improvement if they want to onboard those early users."
"It is an expensive product. The licensing costs for the solution are based on the usage. If we need premium support, we need to buy it from Akamai."
"Price-wise, I find Akamai's pricing model's inclination to be more towards the expensive side of the spectrum, though I can't say that it is a very expensive product."
"The solution's pricing is based on bandwidth."
"The solution can be one of the more expensive options, reflecting their established market position."
"The pricing of Akamai is moderate, in my opinion. My company makes yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to Akamai. There are no additional costs besides the licensing costs for the solution."
"For CloudFront, I'm quite satisfied with the pricing. Initially, it doesn't require many resources for this specific solution."
"The solution’s price is reasonable."
"The tool is affordable."
"Its price is really on the high side. It should be cheaper in general."
"I rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten. The licensing follows a pay-as-you-go model."
"We do not have many options to optimize costs."
"Compared to competitors like Azure and Google, we find AWS pricing to be advantageous."
"Amazon CloudFront is an expensive solution."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which CDN solutions are best for your needs.
886,426 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

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 GR...
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...
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.
What do you like most about Akamai?
The most valuable feature in managing web traffic has been the ability to handle vertical scaling effectively.
What needs improvement with Akamai?
Other solutions are probably easier to set up, but you have more capability in Akamai. It would be beneficial if they...
What is your primary use case for Akamai?
We are using many of the solutions from Akamai, with the WAF in front of it and distribution to multiple targets wher...
How do I choose between AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Global Accelerator or Amazon CloudFro...
What do you like most about Amazon CloudFront?
The solution has good security features.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudFront?
I find Amazon's pricing good, rating it eight out of ten and considering it affordable and rightly placed, not expens...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Capital One, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Disney, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Home Depot, HP, IBM, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, LinkedIn, McDonald's, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Oracle, PayPal, Pinterest, Qualcomm, Rakuten, SAP, Spotify, Tesla, Toyota, Visa, Walmart, WeWork
Unilever, Spotify, Pinterest, MLB Advanced Media, Foursquare, PBS, Airbnb, Netflix, WIX, Comcast, Automobili Lamborghini, Rovio, Discovery Communications
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai vs. Amazon CloudFront and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,426 professionals have used our research since 2012.