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Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront comparison

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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
78
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (10th)
Akamai
Ranking in CDN
5th
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 18.7%, down from 22.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai is 14.4%, down from 15.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 6.3%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare18.7%
Amazon CloudFront6.3%
Akamai14.4%
Other60.6%
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

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it."
"The technical support is good."
"Their free account offers an awful lot of functionality and savings alone, before you get on to the minimal $20 a month for a Pro account which comes with its own great list of features."
"CloudFlare has positively improved my site's speed, performance and security."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"It's a scalable and reliable solution."
"The initial setup is simple, especially for SaaS solutions."
"The most valuable feature in managing web traffic has been the ability to handle vertical scaling effectively."
"The stability and efficiency of Akamai have enhanced our network's performance significantly."
"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."
"Akamai provides low-latency throughput."
"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."
"Akamai is leveraged by many top-level businesses, ensuring reliability and support in case of outages or issues."
"The solution improves performance by reducing latency and cost."
"The distribution aspect of CloudFront and its ability to reduce latency are most beneficial."
"The most beneficial feature is capturing the static data, which is crucial for our operations."
"The solution has good security features."
"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."
"Edge configuration and availability are vital features for easy content drop-off requests"
"CloudFront provides a common access point, manages routing to different methods, and serves as an access point plus API routing."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the speed of delivery."
 

Cons

"Support response time could be improved."
"Technical support is not well developed. While there are good engineers, Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model."
"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."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"Eventually, things go sideways and require fixes when it would have been easier to prevent the issue initially."
"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"Sometimes a little hard to navigate around the user console."
"I'd like to see more Web 3.0 and IoT solutions."
"The product's scalability can be improved since certain shortcomings regarding the security part of the solution currently exist."
"The solution can be improved by creating a communication pathway with technical engineers because when we open tickets, we have a delay in response times."
"After three or four months from this perspective, I don’t know all the features on the platform yet, so I am still learning about it."
"The solution could offer more integrations."
"Local connectivity would be great linked to our own telecom/Cablevision CDN."
"Their support is very slow. If you file a support ticket, it takes a long time before it gets resolved."
"Sometimes, the server goes down automatically."
"The UI could be more user-friendly."
"One of the biggest challenges with Amazon CloudFront is their pricing policy"
"The only issues we've faced were when AWS itself had problems, and that's very rare. I can only recall one instance when they had issues, but they managed to resolve it quickly."
"A lot of caching features must be added to the solution."
"AWS is redesigning its user interface and user experience for CloudFront, and there is room for improvement in certificate management."
"They could be expanding the number of locations available. It will help users easily access content."
"There is room for improvement in customer service and support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"Quite high in price, but equivalent to other enterprise products on the market"
"The price of Akamai could be less expensive."
"Akamai is an expensive tool. Moreover, we have a pay-as-you-go model for additional features."
"The solution can be one of the more expensive options, reflecting their established market position."
"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 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."
"The price of the solution depends upon its usage."
"Amazon's pricing varies depending on the data transfer."
"I rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten. The licensing follows a pay-as-you-go model."
"The solution’s price is reasonable."
"Amazon CloudFront costs less than third-party services."
"I rate Amazon CloudFront's pricing a five out of ten."
"For CloudFront, I'm quite satisfied with the pricing. Initially, it doesn't require many resources for this specific solution."
"Compared to competitors like Azure and Google, we find AWS pricing to be advantageous."
"The policies and prices keep on changing frequently with AWS solutions"
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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
8%
Retailer
5%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
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: March 2026.
885,444 professionals have used our research since 2012.