Akamai vs Fastly comparison

Akamai and Fastly are both solutions in the CDN category. Akamai is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.5, while Fastly is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5. Akamai holds a 16.4% mindshare in CDN, compared to Fastly’s 3.5% 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 Mar 9, 2025

Akamai and Fastly operate in the content delivery network sector. Akamai holds an advantage in network coverage and security features, enhancing global performance. Fastly, however, offers greater flexibility, allowing for more agile responses to specific needs.

Features: Akamai provides broad global coverage, superior application security, and an extensive threat intelligence platform. Fastly excels with real-time logging, rapid configuration capabilities, and seamless integration with frameworks like Terraform.

Room for Improvement: Akamai's integration complexity and documentation depth may pose challenges for some users, and its setup may be time-consuming. Fastly's CDN performance can be limited by the absence of extensive global peering, and its zero-trust capabilities are less comprehensive compared to leading competitors.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Akamai's deployment model is supported by detailed documentation and numerous integration options, albeit complex. Fastly provides an easy deployment experience with user-friendly tools like Fastly CLI, facilitating quick changes and committed customer service for efficient issue resolution.

Pricing and ROI: Akamai's premium pricing reflects its high-level security and expansive reach, yielding significant ROI for security-focused clients. Fastly offers a more streamlined cost structure, maximizing ROI through speed and reduced deployment costs, particularly benefiting budget-conscious businesses prioritizing rapid deployment.

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

Buyer's Guide

Akamai vs. Fastly

March 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 March 2025, in the CDN category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 22.7%, up from 21.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai is 16.4%, up from 16.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 3.5%, 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 most valuable feature is its usability."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"It's very user-friendly."

"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."

More Cloudflare pros

"All the policies of the CDNs are very beneficial."

"Akamai provides low-latency throughput."

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

"Akamai has a very established network of PoPs globally."

"The most valuable feature of Akamai is its ease of use and simple integration. Additionally, the solution has new aspects added to it regularly."

"The worldwide reach of the Akamai CDN is one of the key values of this CDN and the agreements worldwide that they keep running."

"It's a scalable and reliable solution."

"If an attacker conducts an attack, we can check what query he is running and whether he wants to see our password or any other files."

More Akamai pros

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

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

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

"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."

Cons

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"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."

"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."

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."

"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."

"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."

More Cloudflare cons

"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."

"Their support is very slow. If you file a support ticket, it takes a long time before it gets resolved."

"I would like to see improvements in the security aspect. The web application firewall needs to be enhanced and offers more customization options."

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

"It would be better if we could be notified about specific attacks."

"Caching strategy is an area with certain shortcomings in the solution where improvements are required."

"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."

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

More Akamai cons

"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."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"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."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

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

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very 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."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

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

"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 solution's pricing is based on bandwidth."

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

"This is a very expensive solution but it works well."

"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."

"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 price of Akamai could be less expensive."

"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."

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

More Akamai pricing and cost advice

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

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"It is an expensive solution."

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

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

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

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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

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

25%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Akamai?

Akamai could improve by having a more robust and responsive support team. While the support is not bad, there is room...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Akamai?

We use Akamai ( /products/akamai-reviews ) as our CDN ( /categories/cdn ) to advertise prefixes and download traffic....

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...

See all answers

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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Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

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Azure Front Door vs Akamai

Compared 22% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Akamai

Compared 14% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Windows Azure CDN vs Akamai

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F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

March 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Akamai

March 2025

Download Akamai product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

March 2025

Download Fastly product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

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

Cloudflare

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.

Akamai

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.

Fastly

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

March 2025

Free Report: Akamai vs. Fastly

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

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