Editor Sebastiaan Smits ·
Published October 30, 2026 · Updated October 31, 2026
Buyers look past Akamai when a CDN needs a signup page and a price list instead of a sales conversation, or when traffic is too small to get attention from an enterprise account. Most move to CDN77, Fastly or Gcore for delivery, or to Cloudflare and Bunny CDN for published rates.
Short answer: The closest replacements for Akamai in our CDN providers ranking are CDN77, Fastly and Gcore CDN. Choose CDN77 if you move video or large files and want a published monthly volume price instead of a quote. The other 10 entries come from our Best CDN Providers in 2026 list as well, and every one is set against Akamai specifically, with a note on the cases where Akamai should stay.
Visibility in our rankings can be paid for. Payment moves a vendor's position within the shortlist; it never adds a vendor, and it never changes a word of the review or of this page. The first three alternatives go to challengers, vendors outside the best-known brands in a category, wherever the category has them; the established names follow in their ranked order. How it works: placement disclosure · editorial process.
The Akamai content delivery page lists Ion, Adaptive Media Delivery, Download Delivery, EdgeWorkers and a dozen more products, yet shows no CDN rates and sends visitors to a sales consultant. A budget cannot be checked before a conversation starts.
The same page names fifteen delivery products, from Cloudlets and Cloud Wrapper to mPulse and CloudTest. Buyers have to work out which of them their traffic needs. Smaller accounts often want one plan that covers the common case.
A free trials link sits under the pricing section, with no terms on the page. The US$100 credit shown on the page applies to Akamai Cloud, not to the CDN. Testing delivery with your own traffic therefore starts with a request.
Ordered by how well each fits a team leaving Akamai; our own placement among 12 ranked products is in the last column.
| # | Alternative | Headquarters | Switch if | Our rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  CDN77 | United Kingdom | you move video or large files and want a published monthly volume price instead of a quote | #2 |
| 2 |  Fastly | United States | your engineers want to script delivery and prefer a signup page to a sales call | #3 |
| 3 |  Gcore CDN | Luxembourg | you want one published per-gigabyte rate worldwide and a free terabyte to test with | #6 |
| 4 |  CacheFly | United States | you deliver software or media and want a narrower vendor with fixed monthly volume plans | #8 |
| 5 |  Bunny CDN | Slovenia | your traffic is mostly bandwidth and you want to read the rate card before you sign | #1 |
| 6 |  Cloudflare | United States | you want security and DNS in the same console and can work with flat plan tiers | #4 |
| 7 |  Amazon CloudFront | United States | your origins already run in AWS and you want delivery billed on the same account | #7 |
| 8 |  Azure Front Door | United States | your applications live in Azure and you need private connections from the edge to origin | #9 |
| 9 |  Imperva CDN | United States | your buying case is application security and the delivery layer can come from the same vendor | #11 |
| 10 |  Google Cloud CDN | United States | your origin sits behind a Google Cloud load balancer and you accept three-part billing | #10 |
| 11 |  KeyCDN | Switzerland | you want the plainest possible usage bill and need no custom rule engine | #5 |
Closest in spirit to a sales-led media network, yet it publishes one number: Growth is $990 per month for 250 TB, with $3.96 per TB beyond that, and every PoP plus 24/7 support included. Enterprise stays on custom pricing. Object storage with an S3-compatible API sits beside it.
Switch from Akamai if you move video or large files and want a published monthly volume price instead of a quote.
Sold as a programmable edge, with a free tier and metered rates that start at $0.12 per GB in Europe and North America after the first 100 GB. Compute, key-value storage and image optimization are separate meters. Enterprise is a quote, as at Akamai, but the entry point is self-serve.
Switch from Akamai if your engineers want to script delivery and prefer a signup page to a sales call.
Lists a free first terabyte every month with no card, then 0.01 euros per GB, falling to 0.005 euros per GB above 2 PB. Pricing is the same in every region. The vendor also sells cloud, AI and security products, so the CDN is one line among many.
Switch from Akamai if you want one published per-gigabyte rate worldwide and a free terabyte to test with.
A single-purpose CDN company whose pricing page says CDN is all it does. Monthly plans scale by included volume, from a free developer account through Business at $300 for 10 TB to Business Enterprise at $2,000 for 100 TB. Support goes to CDN engineers.
Switch from Akamai if you deliver software or media and want a narrower vendor with fixed monthly volume plans.
Pay-as-you-go from $1 a month, with $0.01 per GB in Europe and North America on the 119-PoP Standard Network and $0.005 per GB on the 10-PoP Volume Network. No request fees, and monthly bandwidth limits guard against surprise bills. Support plans and dedicated managers are optional extras.
Switch from Akamai if your traffic is mostly bandwidth and you want to read the rate card before you sign.
Bundles CDN, DNS, DDoS protection and a managed WAF ruleset from a $0 plan. Paid tiers are $20, $200 and a custom Contract level. The uptime SLA starts at Business. Moving here means accepting proxy-style onboarding rather than property configurations built for an enterprise contract.
Switch from Akamai if you want security and DNS in the same console and can work with flat plan tiers.
Flat-rate plans from $0 to $1,000 per distribution per month with no overage charges, or ordinary pay-as-you-go billing. The plans pull in AWS WAF, Route 53 and S3 credits. It earns its place when origins already run in AWS and finance wants one cloud invoice.
Switch from Akamai if your origins already run in AWS and you want delivery billed on the same account.
Charges a base fee of $35 or $330 per month by tier, plus outbound transfer and request charges. Premium adds WAF, bot protection and Private Link to origins. Think of it as Microsoft's global entry point for apps, with cache delivery as one function of it.
Switch from Akamai if your applications live in Azure and you need private connections from the edge to origin.
Sold as part of Imperva's application security platform, where caching and load balancing sit next to the WAAP. Like Akamai it has no public rates, but the page offers a free trial and a demo. You would choose it for the protection layer first.
Switch from Akamai if your buying case is application security and the delivery layer can come from the same vendor.
Attaches to Google Cloud load balancers and bills in three parts: cache data transfer out, cache fill and cache lookups. The page also names Media CDN for video. It rewards backends already on Google Cloud and gives little to anyone hosting elsewhere.
Switch from Akamai if your origin sits behind a Google Cloud load balancer and you accept three-part billing.
A Swiss pay-as-you-go service with a short rate table: $0.04 per GB in Europe and North America for the first 10 TB, no request charges and a $4 monthly minimum. Support runs 24/7 on every account. It has no enterprise property model of the Akamai kind.
Switch from Akamai if you want the plainest possible usage bill and need no custom rule engine.
Akamai is still the sensible pick when you already have an enterprise agreement, need several of its delivery, media and edge compute products from one vendor, and have staff who can run configurations through Property Manager and its API. For that profile a published price list matters less than product breadth and account support.
Akamai configures delivery through Property Manager, where an edge hostname and business rules tell the edge servers how to handle content from your origin. Before leaving, list every property, its hostnames and its rules, since a self-serve CDN will need each rule rebuilt in its own format.
Akamai documents a Property Manager API, a Terraform provider module, a CLI and an edge hostnames API. Use them to dump your current setup into files, then compare it with what the new service can express. Do not expect a one-click import.
Point a test hostname at the new CDN first and compare cache behavior with your old setup. Only move production hostnames when both agree. Keep the Akamai contract running until traffic has been stable for a full billing cycle, and ask sales about notice terms.
No. The content delivery page gives no rates and points to a sales consultant. The only published price we found is the credit offer for Akamai Cloud, which is a separate product. Expect to request a quote for Ion, Adaptive Media Delivery or Download Delivery.
The page links to free trials but gives no terms. Whether a trial covers your delivery product, traffic and duration has to be confirmed with Akamai. CDN77, Bunny CDN, Gcore and Fastly each publish a free tier or trial on their own pricing pages.
Yes. Akamai lists a Property Manager API, a Terraform provider module, a CLI and APIs for edge hostnames and CP codes. These let you read your setup into files. The documentation page we read does not describe a one-click export.
CDN77 lists $990 per month for 250 TB, Bunny CDN lists $0.005 per GB on its Volume Network, and Gcore lists 0.005 euros per GB above 2 PB. Check the PoP coverage for your audience, because the cheapest tiers can use fewer locations.
Not necessarily, but Amazon CloudFront, Azure Front Door and Google Cloud CDN each pair with their own cloud. CloudFront offers flat plans without overage, Azure charges a base fee per tier, and Google bills transfer, cache fill and lookups.
EdgeWorkers, EdgeKV, Cloudlets and Global Traffic Management are Akamai product names. Fastly Compute and Bunny Edge Scripting cover edge code, but not every Akamai product has a counterpart, so list what you actually use before comparing.
Every price, plan limit and product statement about Akamai here was read on the vendors' own pages on October 30, 2026. Either can change at any time, so read the figures as of that day.
Sebastiaan Smits, Founder, wrote, edited and fact-checked this page.
Founder of The Interregnum and of 2 Steps Ahead, an AI search visibility agency. Editorially responsible for every page here; research and drafting are AI-assisted. Last reviewed October 30, 2026.
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