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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
79
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (10th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (15th)
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
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 15.5%, down from 21.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai is 11.8%, down from 16.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon CloudFront is 5.3%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare15.5%
Amazon CloudFront5.3%
Akamai11.8%
Other67.4%
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 features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."
"CloudFlare has positively improved my site's speed, performance and security."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"The technical support is good."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"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."
"It's beneficial since it's one of the best solutions in the world for CDN."
"This is a very expensive solution but it works well."
"We have received excellent support from their team; I have not worked with any other applications where they have delivered professional services as good as them."
"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 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."
"Akamai is leveraged by many top-level businesses, ensuring reliability and support in case of outages or issues."
"It's a scalable and reliable solution."
"Edge configuration and availability are vital features for easy content drop-off requests"
"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 AWS environment was very helpful in terms of integration."
"Hosting static content or with engineering dynamic content is beneficial."
"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 product’s most valuable feature is the availability of the websites."
"The most beneficial feature is capturing the static data, which is crucial for our operations."
 

Cons

"The Always Online feature has room for improvement. It seems to work sometimes and not others even with the pro version."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"The installation was complex until I learned what I had to learn."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"We experienced some downtime in the fall of 2013, causing us to switch to Incapsula."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"Local connectivity would be great linked to our own telecom/Cablevision CDN, as we are a key player for Internet access in Argentina for final users of mobile, DSL, cable, and FTTH users."
"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."
"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."
"When we open tickets, we have a delay in response times."
"Akamai could improve by having a more robust and responsive support team."
"I'd like to see more Web 3.0 and IoT solutions."
"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."
"I would like to see improvements in the security aspect. The web application firewall needs to be enhanced and offers more customization options."
"There is room for improvement in customer service and support."
"The product should be more intuitive."
"CloudFront could improve in the areas of auto-scaling, reports, and insights. End clients desire more detailed reports to understand usage patterns better."
"The support must be improved."
"Sometimes, the server goes down automatically."
"Amazon CloudFront seems to have too many unnecessary products, which makes it cluttered."
"Amazon CloudFront can improve by accurately determining the latency of a non-defined URL that the solution encounters."
"One of the biggest challenges with Amazon CloudFront is their pricing policy"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"A free version of the solution is available."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"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 version."
"The price is reasonable."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The solution's pricing is based on bandwidth."
"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."
"This is a very expensive solution but it works well."
"Quite high in price, but equivalent to other enterprise products on the market"
"The price of Akamai could be less expensive."
"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."
"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."
"We do not have many options to optimize costs."
"The tool is affordable."
"Amazon CloudFront is an expensive solution."
"Compared to competitors like Azure and Google, we find AWS pricing to be advantageous."
"I used to work with AWS and Azure, and we provided cost comparisons for customers to help them choose the right services. Azure tends to be more user-friendly and easier to understand, while AWS may take more time."
"I rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten. The licensing follows a pay-as-you-go model."
"I rate Amazon CloudFront's pricing a five out of ten."
"Amazon's pricing varies depending on the data transfer."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai?
The pricing is good, with no complaints about costs, which is essential when deciding to have Akamai in your network.
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 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...
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudFront?
Honestly, Amazon CloudFront does its job really well, but it doesn’t always feel easy to work with. The setup can be ...
 

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: June 2026.
903,182 professionals have used our research since 2012.