Teams look for an Akamai CDN alternative when they cannot find a price: Akamai's content delivery pages offer only a sales contact and a trial form, with no CDN rates published. Smaller buyers go to pay-as-you-go networks that print a per-gigabyte rate, while larger ones compare Fastly, Cloudflare or a hyperscaler CDN on the same traffic.
Short answer: The first three alternatives to Akamai in our CDN providers ranking are Bunny CDN, KeyCDN and CDN77. The first three places are kept for challengers when the category has enough of them; the best-known brands come after that, in ranked order. Choose Bunny CDN if you want a printed per-GB rate and a $1 minimum instead of a quote. Every one of the 11 products below comes from Best CDN Providers in 2026, with a note on how it departs from Akamai.
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Pricing: Quoted per organisation; trial on request
Established in: United States
Built for: Enterprises with sales-led procurement and a team to configure properties
Not for: Small sites that want to sign up and pay by card
01
Why buyers look past Akamai
01
No CDN price can be read
The Akamai content delivery page gives no price points and says to contact a sales consultant. The Ion page describes no pricing model or contract terms either. The only dollar figure on the Akamai home page is a US$100 credit for Akamai Cloud, which is a different product. A buyer cannot model a delivery bill before talking to sales.
02
The trial runs through a form
Ion offers a free trial, but by request: you fill in a form and an Akamai team member contacts you to activate it. The page states no length or limit. Several alternatives here let you open an account and push traffic the same day, some with a free allowance (Gcore 1 TB, Fastly 100 GB, CacheFly 100 GB).
03
A long product list to choose from
Akamai splits delivery into separate named products: Ion, API Acceleration, IP Accelerator, Adaptive Media Delivery, Download Delivery, Image & Video Manager and Cloud Wrapper among them. Finding which ones your workload needs is part of the sales conversation. Bunny, KeyCDN and Gcore price one pull-zone style service with the same rate card for everything on it.
Credit bundles from $25 to $500 a month; Enterprise quoted; 30-day trial
Credit-billed image processing with its own CDN
image transformation is the main reason you use a CDN
#6
03
What each one does differently
1
Bunny CDN
Slovenia · Pay as you go from $0.01/GB (Europe, North America); $1 monthly minimum; 14-day trial
Bunny CDN prints two rate cards: a Standard network of 119 points of presence at $0.01/GB for Europe and North America, and a Volume network of 10 points of presence from $0.005/GB. The monthly minimum is $1 and there are no request fees. It lacks Akamai's media and security product depth, and above 100 TB a month it moves to sales.
Switch from Akamai if you want a printed per-GB rate and a $1 minimum instead of a quote.
Switzerland · Pay as you go from $0.04/GB with a $49 minimum payment; $4 minimum usage
KeyCDN charges $0.04/GB in North America and Europe for the first 10 TB, falling to $0.01/GB above 100 TB, with unlimited requests included. A minimum payment of $49 applies and the first three zones are free. Image processing costs $0.40 per 1,000 operations. It is a plain pull and push CDN, with no edge compute product comparable to EdgeWorkers.
Switch from Akamai if a small site wants regional per-GB rates and no sales call.
United Kingdom · Growth $990/month for 250 TB; $3.96/TB overage; Enterprise quoted
CDN77 sells one flat Growth plan at $990 a month for up to 250 TB, with overage at $3.96/TB and every point of presence included. Beyond that, Enterprise is quoted. Its pages quote a 330 Tbps network and S3-compatible object storage with no egress fee towards its own CDN. A flat monthly fee suits steady traffic, not a spiky month.
Switch from Akamai if you ship large steady volumes and want one monthly figure.
Luxembourg · 1 TB free monthly; then €0.01/GB falling to €0.005/GB at 2 PB
Gcore gives 1 TB of free CDN traffic every month without a card, then bills €0.01/GB from 1 TB to 500 TB, dropping to €0.005/GB at 2 PB. It lists 210+ edge locations and puts image optimisation and FastEdge serverless next to the CDN. Its stated platform uptime SLA is 99%, a looser figure than some rivals.
Switch from Akamai if you want a free monthly terabyte and euro billing.
United States · Free 100 GB; tiers $299, $1,499 and $3,499 monthly; 10 TB included on each
CacheFly separates three decisions: a feature tier (Adoption $299, Production $1,499, Governance $3,499 a month), a bandwidth commit from 10 TB upward sized by a representative, and an optional support plan from $995 a month. A free account gives 100 GB on one domain. The tiered structure is closest to an enterprise contract.
Switch from Akamai if you want a published entry price but an enterprise-style commit.
United States · 100 GB free; $0.12/GB to 10 TB in Europe and North America; Enterprise quoted
Fastly has a Free tier, a usage-based Growth tier and a quoted Enterprise tier. Full Site Delivery includes 100 GB free, then $0.12/GB in Europe or North America for the first 10 TB, plus request fees per 10,000. It cites 622 Tbps of capacity and runs Compute at the edge, so developers can program delivery. Bills have more line items than Bunny or KeyCDN.
Switch from Akamai if your team wants programmable edge delivery with a usage meter.
United States · Free $0; Pro $20 and Business $200 a month on annual billing; Contract quoted
Cloudflare lists CDN, DNS, DDoS protection and SSL on every plan, from Free at $0 through Pro at $20 a month billed yearly and Business at $200, with Contract by quote. Delivery is bundled into a flat plan, not metered per gigabyte on the plans page. The plans page states no bandwidth figure, so read the service terms before moving heavy video or download traffic.
Switch from Akamai if you want a fixed monthly plan with security bundled in.
United States · Flat plans at $0, $15, $200 and $1,000 a month; pay-as-you-go separately; Custom quoted
CloudFront now offers flat-rate plans per distribution: Free at $0 with 1 million requests and 100 GB, Pro at $15, Business at $200 and Premium at $1,000, none with overage charges, plus a Custom tier by contact. Pay-as-you-go pricing sits on a separate page. It fits teams already on AWS, though the plans cap requests and are tied to that account.
Switch from Akamai if your origins already live on AWS and you want capped monthly bills.
United States · Base fee $35 (Standard) or $330 (Premium) monthly plus $0.083/GB transfer in Europe/N. America
Azure Front Door bills an hourly base fee, shown as $35 a month for Standard and $330 for Premium, plus outbound transfer from $0.083/GB in North America and Europe for the first 10 TB. Requests are metered too. It makes sense for estates that run on Microsoft Azure, but the base fee exists even on quiet days.
Switch from Akamai if your workloads and billing already sit in Azure.
United States · $0.08/GiB first 10 TiB (Europe/N. America) plus cache fill and lookup charges
Google Cloud CDN charges separately for cache data transfer out ($0.08 per GiB for the first 10 TiB in Europe and North America), cache fill ($0.01 to $0.04 per GiB) and lookups ($0.0075 per 10,000). Volume discounts begin above 500 TiB a month, by contact. It is attached to Google Cloud load balancing, not a standalone account.
Switch from Akamai if your backends run on Google Cloud and you accept metered billing.
United States · Credit bundles from $25 to $500 a month; Enterprise quoted; 30-day trial
imgix is an image and video processing service with a CDN, not a general delivery network. It bills in credits: Starter $25 a month for 100 credits, up to Growth Plus at $500 for 3,570, with 1 credit per GB delivered and 2 per GB stored. A 30-day free trial exists. Software downloads and streaming do not belong here.
Switch from Akamai if image transformation is the main reason you use a CDN.
Akamai remains the practical choice when you need a negotiated contract at very large scale. Its company page reports 700+ cities and 11,500+ employees, and the platform covers delivery, security and edge applications under one vendor, with a 100% availability SLA stated for Ion. If you already hold a committed Akamai agreement, the missing public price list matters less, because your rates are in the contract. Moving makes sense mainly when a bill is small enough that a published rate would beat the quote.
05
What moving off Akamai involves
01
Mirror your cache rules before cut-over
List the behaviours your Akamai configuration enforces: cache keys, TTLs, header rewrites, redirects, origin shielding and any EdgeWorkers code. Rebuild each on the new network and test it against a staging hostname. Not every vendor here has an equal of EdgeWorkers, so mark code-based logic as a separate migration task.
02
Shift traffic gradually through DNS
Point a slice of traffic, for example 5 percent through weighted DNS, to the new CDN and compare hit ratio, origin load and error rates for a week. Lower the DNS TTL beforehand and keep the Akamai contract active until the new network has carried a full billing month. Check TLS certificates and token or signed-URL schemes before you raise the share.
03
Price your real traffic, not the headline
Take a month of Akamai delivery reports and split gigabytes by region. Apply each candidate's regional rate card and add request, storage and minimum fees. A per-GB rate for Europe says little if half your audience is in Asia, where several of these networks charge more.
06
Questions about replacing Akamai
6 answers
What is the best alternative to Akamai as a CDN provider?
It depends on volume, but Bunny CDN, KeyCDN, CDN77 and Gcore are the first to check because they publish prices.
Bunny CDN starts at $0.01/GB for Europe and North America with a $1 monthly minimum, and Gcore gives 1 TB free every month. CDN77 sells a flat $990 a month plan for 250 TB.
Does Akamai publish CDN prices?
Not on the pages we read. The content delivery page directs buyers to contact a sales consultant, and the Ion page describes no pricing. The published dollar figure on the home page is a US$100 credit for Akamai Cloud.
Is there a free trial for Akamai?
Ion lists a free trial that you request by form, after which an Akamai team member contacts you. The trial length is not stated on the page we read.
Which alternatives have a free tier?
Gcore includes 1 TB of CDN traffic each month, Fastly 100 GB, CloudFront a Free plan with 100 GB and 1 million requests, and CacheFly a free account with 100 GB on one domain.
Cloudflare has a $0 plan. imgix, Bunny CDN and KeyCDN offer trials instead.
Which alternative suits a workload already on a hyperscaler?
CloudFront for AWS, Azure Front Door for Azure and Google Cloud CDN for Google Cloud. Each is billed through the cloud account, and each meters transfer by region, so compare it against a standalone network on your own traffic.
Can these networks replace Akamai's edge computing?
Partly. Fastly runs Compute at the edge, Gcore lists FastEdge, CacheFly has EdgeControl for JavaScript logic and Bunny has Edge Scripting. Akamai's EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV have no one-to-one match, so test your functions first.
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Sources
Checked 5 November 2026
Akamai home page: Akamai covers cloud computing, cybersecurity and content delivery; US$100 Akamai Cloud credit; contact sales for security and delivery.
Akamai content delivery: CDN product list (Ion, Download Delivery, Adaptive Media Delivery, EdgeWorkers, EdgeKV, Cloud Wrapper); contact a sales consultant; no price points.
Akamai Ion: Ion features, 100% availability SLA, free trial by request form, no pricing described.
Founder of The Knowledge Engineers and of 2 Steps Ahead, an AI search visibility agency. Editorially responsible for every page on this site; research and drafting are AI-assisted.
Author and fact-checker: Sebastiaan Smits. This page was last reviewed on 5 November 2026; our review process is public.
