Akamai vs Fastly comparison

Akamai and Fastly are both solutions in the CDN category. Akamai is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.7, while Fastly is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5. Akamai holds a 16.2% mindshare in CDN, compared to Fastly’s 3.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

Akamai and Fastly are two competing services in the content delivery network category. While Akamai's extensive global network offers strong security and reliability, Fastly leads with its real-time capabilities and agility, appealing to businesses prioritizing modern technologies.

Features: Akamai offers a comprehensive security suite, extensive caching capabilities, and broad global reach, which are invaluable for large enterprises. Fastly attracts businesses with edge computing, real-time logging, and customization options, enabling rapid deployment and flexibility.

Room for Improvement: Akamai could enhance its setup process by simplifying it for less technical users and reducing the time required for deployment. More intuitive user interface improvements would be beneficial. Fastly may consider expanding its global presence and improving its integration with zero-trust solutions. Enhancing its offering for small enterprises could also be a beneficial move.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Akamai's traditional setup process is complemented by strong support, requiring careful planning and configuration. Fastly provides a developer-friendly setup with rapid deployment options and efficient customer service, making it easier for businesses new to CDN technology.

Pricing and ROI: Akamai requires a larger initial investment with potential for a strong long-term ROI due to its established infrastructure. Fastly presents a more flexible pricing model with lower upfront costs, which suits smaller businesses and startups aiming for short-term budget-conscious benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai vs. Fastly Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai vs. Fastly

January 2025

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.2%, up from 20.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai is 16.2%, up from 15.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 3.4%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

CDN

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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XYX ABC

Product Manager at Infozion

Offers great enterprise support, ideal for solutions requiring high scalability and seamless integration with AWS infrastructure

For Akamai, it is definitely one of the best tools out there. However, there are challenges with how their approach is designed for large enterprises. 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. That's the biggest challenge we faced when migrating to Akamai from other solutions, like Cloudflare. It can be difficult to migrate between platforms. Due to its great features but high activation thresholds. So, while it's a powerful tool, it has limitations for some implementations. It was difficult to migrate from and to Akamai. It is challenging when we are building a website.

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Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."

"Cloudflare has many features."

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."

More Cloudflare pros

"The initial setup is simple, especially for SaaS solutions."

"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."

"We can see how much traffic can be downloaded on the portal."

"The solution is very sustainable and flexible."

"This solution can be used for web , video and media caching and streaming."

"The solution's technical support is very good...The installation phase of Akamai was easy."

"Akamai provides low-latency throughput."

"The solution's technical support is very prompt and good."

More Akamai pros

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

Cons

"There are some issues with the CDN services."

"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."

"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."

"Support response time could be improved."

"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

More Cloudflare cons

"Sometimes a little hard to navigate around the user console."

"Local connectivity would be great linked to our own telecom/Cablevision CDN."

"The fact that it is an expensive product is its only shortcoming."

"I'd like to see more Web 3.0 and IoT solutions."

"The solution could offer more integrations."

"The product's scalability can be improved since certain shortcomings regarding the security part of the solution currently exist."

"One area for improvement with Akamai could be pricing."

"Costing-wise and integration with other tools need improvement, especially API security."

More Akamai cons

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"Support is not that great."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

"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."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"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 pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The price of Akamai could be less expensive."

"The solution can be one of the more expensive options, reflecting their established market position."

"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."

"Quite high in price, but equivalent to other enterprise products on the market"

"The price of the solution depends upon its usage."

"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."

"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."

More Akamai pricing and cost advice

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"It is an expensive solution."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

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Comparison Review

it_user69348

Partner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Nov 17, 2013

Akamai vs. CloudFlare – Simple Stats

In the world of CDNs Akamai is the incumbent 500 pound gorilla, no question. They have a HUGE global presence, super solid technology and networks, and have the most experience with large enterprise clients. However, now there other strong players in the CDN market. One of the most…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

28%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Akamai?

The most valuable feature in managing web traffic has been the ability to handle vertical scaling effectively.

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What needs improvement with Akamai?

Costing-wise and integration with other tools need improvement, especially API security.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Akamai?

We monitor all the traffic which is coming from the Internet to our environment through the Akamai CDN.

See all answers

What do you like most about Fastly?

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for h...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fastly?

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a ...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 49% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

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Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Google Cloud DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Azure Front Door vs Akamai

Compared 23% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Akamai

Compared 15% of the time

Amazon CloudFront vs Akamai

Compared 5% of the time

AWS Global Accelerator vs Akamai

Compared 4% of the time

Windows Azure CDN vs Akamai

Compared 4% of the time

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F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 11% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Edgio vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

January 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Akamai

January 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Fastly

January 2025

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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

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Cloudflare

Akamai

Fastly

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“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. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Akamai is a powerful solution that aims to enhance the performance and reliability of websites and applications. With features like excellent performance, robust security measures, and efficient content delivery, it optimizes user experience. It also offers bandwidth optimization, caching, online asset security, and protection against DDoS attacks. Users value its wide network coverage and reliable customer support.

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

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

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

Buyer's Guide

Akamai vs. Fastly

January 2025

Free Report: Akamai vs. Fastly

Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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