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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. CDN
  4. CDN
  5. Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront vs CloudFlare

Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront vs CloudFlare

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Akamai
Akamai
Stacks1.9K
Followers442
Votes0
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Stacks21.4K
Followers10.8K
Votes935
CloudFlare
CloudFlare
Stacks77.2K
Followers23.1K
Votes1.8K

Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront vs CloudFlare: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will explore the key differences between Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, and CloudFlare. These are popular content delivery network (CDN) providers that offer various services related to website performance, security, and scalability.

  1. Network Size and Global Presence: Akamai has a vast network of servers located in over 135 countries, ensuring high availability and low-latency content delivery worldwide. Amazon CloudFront operates from multiple edge locations in more than 200 cities globally, while CloudFlare has a network presence in over 200 cities across 100+ countries. This extensive global infrastructure allows businesses to reach a broad audience and ensure fast delivery of content regardless of the user's location.

  2. Integration with Other Services: When it comes to integration with other cloud services, Amazon CloudFront has an advantage. It seamlessly integrates with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings, such as Amazon S3, EC2, and Lambda, making it a preferred choice for organizations already using AWS. Akamai and CloudFlare also offer integration with various services, but CloudFront's tight integration with the entire AWS ecosystem simplifies the setup and management process for AWS users.

  3. Security Features: All three CDN providers offer security features to protect websites and applications from various threats. Akamai and CloudFlare have comprehensive security offerings, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, web application firewall (WAF), SSL/TLS encryption, bot mitigation, and threat intelligence. Amazon CloudFront also provides DDoS protection and integrates with AWS Shield for advanced security measures. Additionally, CloudFlare offers its customers a free SSL certificate, making it an attractive option for startups and small businesses.

  4. Performance Optimization: Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, and CloudFlare focus on optimizing website performance through various techniques. Akamai offers dynamic site acceleration, route optimization, and image optimization to improve page load times. CloudFront provides features like dynamic content caching, origin shielding, and content compression for enhanced performance. CloudFlare's performance features include automatic content minification, image optimization, and a global content delivery network. These performance optimizations help reduce latency and enhance the overall user experience.

  5. Pricing and Cost Structure: Akamai is known for its high-end enterprise-grade services, and as a result, its pricing tends to be on the higher side. Amazon CloudFront follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where customers only pay for the data transfer and requests made. CloudFlare offers a variety of pricing plans, including a free tier, making it accessible to startups and small businesses. Their pricing is based on features and additional services, such as advanced security, rate limiting, and load balancing.

  6. Ease of Use and Configuration: Amazon CloudFront provides an intuitive user interface within the AWS Console, which simplifies the setup and management process. Akamai and CloudFlare also offer user-friendly interfaces, but CloudFlare's interface is particularly favored for its user-friendliness and ease of configuration. CloudFlare's dashboard provides a range of customization options and real-time analytics, making it easier for website owners to monitor and optimize their content delivery settings.

In summary, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, and CloudFlare are leading CDN providers with key differences in terms of network size, integration with other services, security features, performance optimization, pricing, and ease of use. Choosing the right CDN depends on specific requirements, such as global presence, cloud service integration, security needs, budget constraints, and ease of configuration.

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Advice on Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare

Francesco
Francesco

CTO at ORDR.menu

Dec 1, 2021

Decided

I don't think I have registered a domain in the last 10 years that hasn't been linked to CloudFlare within the first 2 hours from registration.

The benefits you get from even the free version of CloudFlare are amazing. From day 0:

  • 30/80% of bandwidth savings thanks to their CDN
  • Origin IP address protection
  • Managed SSL
53k views53k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Akamai
Akamai
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
CloudFlare
CloudFlare

If you've ever shopped online, downloaded music, watched a web video or connected to work remotely, you've probably used Akamai's cloud platform. Akamai helps businesses connect the hyperconnected, empowering them to transform and reinvent their business online. We remove the complexities of technology, so you can focus on driving your business faster forward.

Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.

Protect your apps and APIs, stop credential abuse, and move to a Zero Trust security model with the world’s most powerful edge security platform; Focus on increasing revenue with powerful data and automation built to enhance customer experience on web and mobile applications; Deliver and monetize high-quality and secure online streaming experiences; Quickly integrate Akamai into existing developer workflows, streamlining cloud deployment and delivery
Fast- Using a network of edge locations around the world, Amazon CloudFront caches copies of your static content close to viewers, lowering latency when they download your objects and giving you the high, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver large popular objects to end users at scale.;Simple- A single API call lets you get started distributing content from your Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon EC2 instance or other origin server through the Amazon CloudFront network.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services Amazon CloudFront is designed for use with other Amazon Web Services, including Amazon S3, where you can durably store the definitive versions of your static files, and Amazon EC2, where you can run your application server for dynamically generated content.;Cost-Effective- Amazon CloudFront passes on the benefits of Amazon’s scale to you. You pay only for the content that you deliver through the network, without minimum commitments or up-front fees.;Elastic- With Amazon CloudFront, you don’t need to worry about maintaining expensive web-server capacity to meet the demand from potential traffic spikes for your content. The service automatically responds as demand increases or decreases without any intervention from you.;Reliable- Amazon CloudFront is built using Amazon’s highly reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of edge locations used by Amazon CloudFront automatically routes end users to the closest available location as required by network conditions.;Global- Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of edge locations, located near your end users in the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America.
CDN;WAF (Web Application Firewall);DDOS Protection;
Statistics
Stacks
1.9K
Stacks
21.4K
Stacks
77.2K
Followers
442
Followers
10.8K
Followers
23.1K
Votes
0
Votes
935
Votes
1.8K
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 245
    Fast
  • 166
    Cdn
  • 157
    Compatible with other aws services
  • 125
    Simple
  • 108
    Global
Cons
  • 3
    UI could use some work
  • 1
    Invalidations take so long
Pros
  • 426
    Easy setup, great cdn
  • 278
    Free ssl
  • 200
    Easy setup
  • 191
    Security
  • 181
    Ssl
Cons
  • 2
    Expensive when you exceed their fair usage limits
  • 2
    No support for SSHFP records
Integrations
Cloudinary
Cloudinary
Cloudability
Cloudability
No integrations available
CodeGuard
CodeGuard
Google Analytics
Google Analytics
GoSquared
GoSquared
Clicky
Clicky
UserVoice
UserVoice
SnapEngage
SnapEngage
Blitz
Blitz
Pingdom
Pingdom

What are some alternatives to Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare?

KeyCDN

KeyCDN

KeyCDN offers super fast and secure content delivery for minimal loading time. In addition to the CDN, it also offers advanced image processing and many other features such as live logs and Let's Encrypt SSL.

Fastly

Fastly

Fastly's real-time content delivery network gives you total control over your content, unprecedented access to performance analytics, and the ability to instantly update content in 150 milliseconds.

MaxCDN

MaxCDN

The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them.

jsDelivr

jsDelivr

jsDelivr is a free CDN for open source developers, with advanced features for javascript projects with access to NPM and Github It uses multiple CDN providers, resulting in the best possible uptime and performance.

Moovweb XDN

Moovweb XDN

All-in-one platform to develop, deploy, preview, experiment on, monitor, and run your frontend.

Limelight CDN

Limelight CDN

Whether it’s your website, mobile applications, videos, music, software, games, or APIs, your content needs to reach customers quickly, reliably, and securely. It provides the capacity, coverage, and performance to cost-effectively deliver a better experience for you and your customers.

cdnjs

cdnjs

Everyone loves the Google CDN? Even Microsoft runs their own CDN. The problem is, they only host the most popular libraries. We host it all - JavaScript, CSS, SWF, images, etc! Powered by CloudFlare.

Statically

Statically

A free, fast, & modern CDN for open source projects, WordPress, images, and any static assets.

Incapsula

Incapsula

Through an application-aware, global content delivery network (CDN), Incapsula provides any website and web application with best-of-breed security, DDoS protection, load balancing and failover solutions.

Cloudflare CDN

Cloudflare CDN

A CDN is a distributed network of servers that provides several advantages for a web site: Cached content: By caching web site content, It helps improve page load speeds, reduce bandwidth usage, and reduce CPU usage on the server.

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