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Akamai vs Azure Front Door 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
Azure Front Door
Ranking in CDN
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (12th), Microsoft Security Suite (18th)
 

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 Azure Front Door is 5.6%, down from 17.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CDN Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare15.5%
Azure Front Door5.6%
Akamai11.8%
Other67.1%
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.
reviewer2226693 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Optimizing global application performance with robust security measures and advanced traffic management
DDoS capabilities in Azure Front Door could certainly be improved. Although Microsoft states it comes with basic DDoS protections out of the box, I find it often ineffectual in mitigating thousands of requests from a single source in a short span of time. User then have to rely on the WAF module where users must configure rate-limiting rules, as it does not automatically sense malicious spikes in traffic. I believe Front Door should have an out-of-the-box premium DDoS protection that can automatically detect and block malicious traffic. I would appreciate improvements in the turnaround time for support, especially since issues with Azure Front Door are usually critical for businesses. If there is an issue, it often results in downtime for line of business applications. I have faced this situation multiple times as one of the largest financial institutions in India is hosted there, adhering to strict SLAs that require prompt responses.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"If someone is looking for a secure and optimized wrapper over an open website, I would suggest CloudFlare services."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"I didn’t have to pay anything for better website security and reduced server load."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"As of now, the best thing about Akamai is WAF, and though CDN is a good feature, it comes in second place when compared to WAF. I am very impressed with the WAF offered by Akamai."
"The solution's technical support is very prompt and good."
"This solution can be used for web , video and media caching and streaming."
"The most valuable feature of Akamai is its ease of use and simple integration. Additionally, the solution has new aspects added to it regularly."
"It's a scalable and reliable solution."
"Our primary use case for this solution is data transfer, and we deploy the solution on private cloud."
"The initial setup is simple, especially for SaaS solutions."
"Akamai is leveraged by many top-level businesses, ensuring reliability and support in case of outages or issues."
"It works perfectly and you can assign as many web application firewall policies as you want to the same instance of Front Door."
"I am impressed with the tool's integrations."
"I find the technical support excellent, and I rate it a ten."
"The price is one of the most important aspects of the product; it's quite affordable, and the ease of the implementation is really vital because it's very easy to implement for our customers as we simply handle the first phase and Microsoft does all the rest."
"Rules Engine is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is that you can implement resources globally. It does not depend on location and ability or something like that. This is to connect clients around the world."
"Azure Front Door provides DDoS protection and features related to WAF."
"Has a great application firewall and we like the security."
 

Cons

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"The pricing could be improved."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"Yes, there were a few times when some of their CDN nodes would fail, creating serious speed issues with the site without any warning or notification from their side."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Their support is very slow. If you file a support ticket, it takes a long time before it gets resolved."
"The user console is quite overloaded, sometimes it's hard to find your way around."
"When we open tickets, we have a delay in response times."
"Akamai should improve its integrations."
"Costing-wise and integration with other tools need improvement, especially API security."
"Sometimes a little hard to navigate around the user console."
"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."
"On the commercials and pricing based on the region, they might have to work a bit because sometimes we lose on commercials."
"This is a relatively expensive solution."
"In the tool, there needs to be a good amount of monitoring in the area of health probes to capture in front of what is happening."
"There's a limitation on the amount of global rules we can add."
"The product's features are limited compared to Cloudflare. The tool also doesn't work well in a hybrid environment. I would like to see a way to add personalized APIs in the system."
"We should be able to use Front Door defenders with multiple cloud vendors. Currently, they can be used only with the Azure cloud."
"I'm responsible for the governance and cost control of Azure. I'm not a specialist in any products and therefore I couldn't really speak effectively to features that are lacking or missing."
"It lacks sufficient functionality."
"There is room for improvement and they're working on it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"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 price is reasonable."
"This is a very expensive solution but it works well."
"Akamai is an expensive tool. Moreover, we have a pay-as-you-go model for additional features."
"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."
"Quite high in price, but equivalent to other enterprise products on the market"
"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 price of Akamai could be less expensive."
"The solution's pricing is based on bandwidth."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"The pricing of the solution is good."
"The transition to the premium tier has led to increased costs, making it more expensive than the classic tier."
"It is on a pay-as-you-go basis."
"The product is expensive."
"Considering the standard licensing of the tool, even though we have not checked the billing as of now, it might not be very costly."
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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%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
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 Business9
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
 

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.
What's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?
We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Front Door?
I am not sure about the pricing but believe Azure Front Door might require a higher cost due to its entry point nature.
What needs improvement with Azure Front Door?
DDoS capabilities in Azure Front Door could certainly be improved. Although Microsoft states it comes with basic DDoS...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
Azure Front-Door
 

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai vs. Azure Front Door and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
903,118 professionals have used our research since 2012.