A question we come across quite frequently is ‘Why is Akamai so much better than Cloudflare ?’ – of course this question can have many elements to both the question and the answer, but if we consider a potential customer of either vendor is considering CDN services and/or cloud security services we can tailor the answer accordingly.

It is the kind of ‘for and against’ argument we make decisions on in life on a daily basis. However the ability/need to change CDN providers isn’t a decision many people make daily !

As a new customer to the world of CDN (Content Delivery Networking) it may seem a crowded and also complex market with not much to chose between the vendors other than perhaps price. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth however.

Why does speed matter ? Well 47% of customers will abandon a site if it doesn’t load within 2 seconds. Plus we know that Google ranks sites on many things, but speed is a critical element of that ranking. So slow really does mean bad news.

CDNs work by reducing the distance between your website and your target audience. The closer the content is to the user the quicker it loads. On one level it really is that simple. They make the connection faster, and thus improve the user experience overall.

CDN server locations and the size of the topography overall make a huge difference. You’re always going to have the best results if you sign up to a network that has the best coverage in the geographical area where your audience is. There’s no point using a CDN that hasn’t coverage where your customers are. Akamai has the biggest CDN infrastructure of them all with more than 216,000 servers in over 120 countries. If you look at the Cloudflare network, and pick the United Kingdom as an example, only a couple of POPs exist in the UK.

Cost is another factor. The usual adage of you get what you pay for applies. How much you will have to pay depends on how much of your website data you want to send across the CDN – also known as bandwidth – and much you will need to commit to requiring on a monthly basis. Any additional data useage will often be charged for. However, CloudFlare doesn’t charge based on bandwidth; the 3 main plans available (including the free one) all have different parameters based on different traits other than bandwidth.

CloudFlare

• Added security. Protects your website from some online threats for example DDoS.

• Site analytics. Examine website traffic also the number of attacks avoided by their WAF

• 24/7 email and phone support, but only on the top rated Enterprise plan.

Akamai Edge

• World leader in the CDN market

• Adaptive media delivery, download delivery (for software updates, other digital downloads).

• Media acceleration products (video and image)

• Dynamic site delivery (not just for static content)

• Media services and media analytics.

• Predictive content delivery.

• Global traffic management (direct traffic geographically and by load balancing)

• Cloud-based DNS. World’s largest DNS network.

• Advanced security features. Cross site scripting, DDOS. etc

• 24/7 email and phone support included.

One simple element to use to compare performance of CDNs is a thing called the “initcwnd” parameter (initial congestion window – the number of packets a server sends on a new connection after the first GET request), which has a significant impact on the performance of TCP connections.

A comparison of various CDNs including Akamai and Cloudflare is here. Notice how Akamai is triple the performance of Cloudflare.

Interestingly Cloudflare isn’t really a CDN, more of a reverse proxy service that takes the traffic and then serves cached versions of your content whenever possible and from a nearby location. Whereas Akamai is the most popular CDN on the market right now, used by the biggest websites. Apart from CDN, Akamai also offers a whole range of website performance tools, with every plan being custom-built on a per-client basis.

Cloudflare is typically a CDN that attracts smaller websites with smaller budgets. Akamai has traditionally attracted larger properties. Today however Akamai has released a budget product for customers wanting to leverage the benefits of the larger Akamai network. This means that customers can have a much wider choice than ever before.

Other comments

In order to enable layer 7 protection with Cloudflare, customers must manually press an “I’m under attack” button. No automated L7 attack protection.

With Cloudflare if you want to cache all types of content (e.g. HTML, JSON), you need the “Cache Everything” setting, and this imposes a long “max-age” directive of 2 hours. It ignores your origin server’s value.

Even on paid (Pro) account, Cloudflare support often takes several hours per reply. So a single query can take days to resolve. With Akamai response is within minutes. We have tested both.

Cloudflare operates as a network of proxy servers and data centers (more than 100) that are located around the world, powering over 10 trillion requests per month. The service can manage 10Tbps in bandwidth for their users. Akamai is many many times bigger, the service’s performance is based on 250,000+ servers stationed in more than 1,300 locations, in over 92 countries, taking sites and apps of its users closer to their end audience. The network delivers 95 exabytes of data a year across billions of devices. Recently it handled over 106Tbps of traffic – so ten times the capacity and more of Cloudflare.

CloudFlare has approximately 2,000,000 customers. According to Forrester, only 75 of these are on its Enterprise plan. Akamai has more experience with the enterprise market, with 5000 enterprise customers. CloudFlare’s pricing plan is focused on SMBs which typically have lower requirements for scale, performance, availability and security. However the Cloudflare free plan is just that…it doesn’t come with many guarantees. CloudFlare’s platform lacks the scale and reach Akamai can offer.

CloudFlare is a cloud-based website protection and acceleration service launched in 2010. Starting as a security vendor, it has expanded into the CDN, DNS and web optimisation markets. While not comparable from the perspectives of features, functionality or scale, CloudFlare markets itself as an equivalent but lower-cost competitor to Akamai.

Configuration and setup is simple on the Cloudflare free plan as it’s a reverse proxy. Its Enterprise solutions require ‘set-up consultations’, ongoing service management and cache configuration on a per page basis.

CloudFlare’s smaller platform inhibits its ability to be close to end users in all geographies, resulting in this slower global performance and higher frequency of network outages (Akamai has never had an outage). Akamai costs more because they make huge investments in the global infrastructure that provides greater benefits. Akamai offers premium capabilities at a price that reflects the value of their performance and availability – you get what you pay for. For those customers seeking a lower-priced solution with Akamai’s industry-standard availability and leading performance, Akamai offer website delivery solutions (such as Akamai WAP) with fewer capabilities (compared to Akamai Kona) at a price point reflecting the respective value of those solutions.

The fact remains that CloudFlare will need to improve the reliability of their services before becoming a true enterprise competitor to Akamai.

Cloudflare outages are well documented.

CloudFlare has had several highly-public network outages that impacted many customers, including one on March 13 2013, where a network change took down 785,000 customers – the third significant outage in four years. Many network-wide outages are discussed on CloudFlare’s public twitter feed, to which you can point your customers. Enterprise customers need a security solution that they can count of to remain available 100% of the time. Akamai provides that. CloudFlare does not.

July 11, 2014: Outage due to an upstream provider affecting CloudFlare.com and customers sites

Plus 2016,2017, 2019… Cloudflare have had plenty of outages.

CloudFlare uses Anycast routing which suffers from inefficient load balancing, inefficient mapping and an inability to read network conditions. Akamai’s system takes into account of server loads, as well as network congestion, to provide the fastest and most performant service.

Conclusion – Why Akamai ? and Why NOT Cloudflare ?

Akamai works with the world’s largest brands including financial institutions, media companies, governments and public sector companies. With over 150,000 servers in 92 countries and over 2500 locations, Akamai is most effective in bringing content closest to end-users, through a flexible delivery platform that provides the ability to scale reliably and adapt to changes. This means that Akamai is best placed to serve the customer, irrespective of what matters to the customer – enhancing customer brand image, protecting customers from revenue implications, ensuring rich user experiences or delivering mission-critical operations that provide the return on customer investments without the need for infrastructure build-outs.

Akamai offers unmatched reach with its platform, with over 150,000 servers in 92 countries and over 2500 locations, while the other players (including Cloudflare) offer a fraction of this breadth. With Akamai you can monitor the performance of your content and applications at the end-user level and get valuable insights based on the influence of different locations, browsers and networks that help you make real-time web experience optimisation decisions based on the requirements of a given situation. Akamai allows you to extend the reach of the data center infrastructure because of its scale, balancing traffic between multiple data centers to ensure 100% content and application availability, thereby proving you with the unparalleled visibility and security of your online properties hosted in the cloud.