On this page you can find an overview of the features and pricing of Akamai and Cloudflare. We hope this helps you compare these two Content Delivery Networks. You can find additional tips that help you select the right CDN here.
Features | Akamai | Cloudflare |
---|---|---|
PoPs | ~2200 | 71 |
Purge All | Fully supported | Fully supported |
Instant Purge | Fully supported | Fully supported |
Control panel | Fully supported | Fully supported |
Origin Push | Fully supported | Not supported |
Origin Pull | Fully supported | Fully supported |
Origin Shield | Additional costs | Additional costs |
GZIP Compression | Fully supported | Fully supported |
Custom Rules | Fully supported | Fully supported |
HTTP/2 Protocol | Fully supported | Fully supported |
SPDY Protocol | Not supported | Fully supported |
Raw Access Logs | Fully supported | Additional costs |
Real time statistics | Not supported | Additional costs |
Online signup | Not supported | Fully supported |
API | Purge, Statistics, Configuration Management | Purge, Statistics, Configuration Management |
Custom CNAMEs | Fully supported | Additional costs |
Shared SSL Certificates | Fully supported | Fully supported |
Custom SSL Certificates | Additional costs | Additional costs |
Wildcard SSL Certificates | Additional costs | Not supported |
Support | Phone and Email support, Community Forum | Email support (free), Phone support (Paid) |
Video On Demand (VoD) | Fully supported | Not supported |
RTMP Streaming | Fully supported | Not supported |
Multiple CDNs | Not supported | Not supported |
CDN balancing tech | Not supported | Not supported |
Storage | Additional costs | Not supported |
Property | Akamai | Cloudflare |
---|---|---|
Global flat fee | N/A | N/A |
NA/EU Traffic (low volume) | N/A | N/A |
NA/EU Traffic (high volume) | N/A | N/A |
APAC Traffic | N/A | N/A |
LATAM Traffic | N/A | N/A |
Extra costs | N/A | N/A |
One of the older, and most well-known CDN providers is Akamai Technologies. Founded in 1998, the company has served notable customers such as Twitter, Adobe, Facebook, Nintendo, Sky and Fox, BBC and CNN, and Bing.
Accounting for a large portion of the world’s Web traffic, Akamai’s Intelligent Cloud Computing Platform is built on top of 200,000 servers, in over 110 countries, within more than 1,400 networks in the world.
In the CDN industry, Akamai Technologies is a large player. The company holds a variety of CDN related patents, and is no stranger to patent infringement disputes. In 2005 Akamai Technologies acquired competitor Speedera, a move that ended a long-lasting dispute over Speedera-held patents. Additionally, Akamai has been in a dispute with Limelight Networks since 2006 over an alleged patent infringement - a case that came to an end in August 2015, with Limelight being held liable for the infringement.
Through the Google Cloud Platform CDN Interconnect program, Akamai has established a peering arrangement with Google’s Cloud Platform. Joined by Highwinds, CloudFlare, Fastly, Level3 and EdgeCast, Akamai has established private interconnects with Google edge locations, to the benefit of both parties customers. Compared to data traffic routing over the public Internet, traffic via the interconnects suffers less latency, and the connection is more reliable. Google Cloud platform who use GCE as their origin receive a discount to their egress origin traffic routed via Akamai.
Akamai has an extensive reseller program and works with a large amount of partners to resell its services. One of those parties is Warpcache.
Interested in learning more about the company, Akamai services and Akamai pricing? Contact Warpcache here.
Not to be confused with Amazon Cloudfront, CloudFlare is a San Francisco-based CDN provider founded in 2009.
The company offers a Free plan, which includes a CloudFlare issued SSL certificate. The features included in the Free plan are basic; more become available to Pro, Business and Enterprise customers.
CloudFlare, together with Akamai, Fastly, Highwinds, Level3 and EdgeCast, is part of the Google Cloud Platform CDN Interconnect program. As part of the collaboration, 30 CloudFlare points-of-presence (PoPs) are directly connected to the Google Cloud infrastructure. When a content request comes in from a Google Cloud origin it will route directly through the interconnect between both parties rather than through the public Internet. As a result, latency is reduced for origin requests. Clients using Google Cloud also receive a discount to their egress traffic.
CloudFlare serves, and has served notable brands such as Reddit, Ello, Cisco, Zendesk, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, OkCupid and eHarmony.