A content delivery network copies your files to servers near your visitors, and the invoice depends on three meters: gigabytes by region, requests, and the plan wrapped around them.
This guide ranks twelve CDN products on the cost of the first ninety days, the bill once Asia and security are added, how you leave, and whether you can run without a partner.
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In short
What CDN providers software does
A CDN provider operates a worldwide network of caching servers that store copies of website files, downloads, images and video close to visitors, so pages load faster and your own origin server carries less traffic.
In this order: setup effort, what it really costs, how your data comes back out, whether
you can leave, and who each CDN providers tool is built for. One rule sits on top of those tests:
Places 1 to 3 go to challengers, vendors outside the best-known brands in a category, wherever the category has them; the established names follow from place 4 in their ranked order. Why those five, and why there is no
score out of ten, is on the how we work page.
Teams whose workloads already sit behind Google Cloud load balancers
Buyers who want a CDN without a load balancer
Country is where the vendor is headquartered or contracts from, which is a
different question from where your data is hosted. Where the two tell different stories, the
entry says so.
Per-gigabyte CDN with a one-dollar minimum and no request fees
Ranked #1 of 12 in Best CDN Providers in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
The 14-day trial needs no credit card and the homepage promises you can cancel anytime. The price is what stands out: one rate for Europe and North America, no request fees, a one-dollar monthly minimum and monthly bandwidth limits you can set so a traffic spike cannot overspend.
Budget extra when your audience sits in Asia or Africa, and when you need the enterprise support plan.
What stands out
Pay as you go
No request fees
Two networks
Where it costs you
The Volume network used for the lowest rate has only ten points of presence
Asia, South America and the Middle East and Africa cost three to six times the Europe and North America rate
Right for
Websites and download sites serving mostly Europe and North America on a small budget
Wrong for
Buyers who need a contractual uptime guarantee and a sales team
SloveniaPay as you go by region, published; 14-day trial
Swiss pay-per-gigabyte CDN with unlimited requests and three zones
Ranked #2 of 12 in Best CDN Providers in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
KeyCDN offers a 14-day trial with no credit card and states that you get the whole network without commitment. Requests are unlimited, and a monthly minimum usage charge covers small sites.
Costs climb outside the home regions: Asia and Oceania at double, Africa and Latin America at two and a half times. Image processing is billed per thousand operations and push-zone storage per gigabyte.
What stands out
Pay as you go
Unlimited requests
Zones
Where it costs you
Log forwarding costs one dollar per day, more than a small account's traffic
A minimum payment applies, larger than the minimum monthly usage charge
Right for
Small and mid-sized sites wanting per-gigabyte billing without request charges
Wrong for
Teams needing enterprise contracts or lower rates outside Europe
SwitzerlandPay as you go by region with a minimum payment, published; 14-day trial
Flat 250 TB plan from a company run out of London and Prague
Ranked #3 of 12 in Best CDN Providers in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
Everything starts with a talk to sales or a test run: the pricing page offers a full-scale test with a transition team rather than a sign-up form. The Growth plan includes all points of presence and features, and overage is billed per terabyte.
Object storage with an S3-compatible interface sits alongside, with no egress fee between it and the CDN but a charge for traffic leaving elsewhere.
What stands out
Flat plan
Object storage
Enterprise
Where it costs you
The smallest published plan assumes up to 250 TB of traffic per month
Terms allow fee increases with only a 30-day window to terminate
Right for
Video, software and game distributors moving hundreds of terabytes monthly
Wrong for
Small websites that need a plan below the Growth tier
United KingdomFlat Growth plan published; Enterprise quoted per organisation; trial
Luxembourg network with a zero-fee plan and one terabyte included
Ranked #4 of 12 in Best CDN Providers in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
The plan table shows the pay-as-you-go column at no monthly fee, with one terabyte of traffic, and 10,000 image optimisations included.
After that, traffic is billed per gigabyte, requests above a billion per million, and image optimisation per 10,000. The base plan has only basic network-layer DDoS protection, so price the firewall and origin shielding before you rely on it.
What stands out
1 TB included
Pay as you go
Image optimisation
Where it costs you
The web application firewall and live streaming are on-demand extras
Phone support is listed only for Enterprise
Right for
Teams wanting a zero-fee start with one terabyte included
Wrong for
Buyers who need phone support or a firewall in the base plan
LuxembourgPay as you go with no monthly fee, published; Enterprise custom
The route in is the Developer account, then a Business bundle priced by traffic: ten terabytes, fifty or one hundred, each with overage at the bundle rate.
Business covers fifty domains and unlimited users. The security suite and private nodes are listed only under Enterprise High Volume, so the plan you start on is not the plan that protects a large property.
What stands out
Traffic bundles
Founded 2002
Multi-CDN
Where it costs you
Fees can rise by up to eight percent a year on thirty days' notice
IPv6 and HTTP/3 are not offered on the Developer account
Right for
Media, gaming and ad-tech companies wanting a fixed monthly traffic bundle
Wrong for
Teams who need the price to stay fixed through the whole term
United StatesDeveloper account plus Business and Enterprise bundles, published
Setup means connecting a source, which can be Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi or a web folder, then writing image URLs with parameters. The 30-day trial includes 100 credits.
Management costs two credits per gigabyte-month, delivery one credit per gigabyte, and each edit varies. Because originals stay in your storage, leaving means rewriting URLs, not exporting files.
What stands out
Image processing
Credit-based
Your own storage
Where it costs you
Credit use varies by feature, so a month's bill is hard to forecast
It handles images and video only, so other site files need another CDN
Right for
E-commerce and media sites that resize and convert many images on the fly
Wrong for
Sites that only need static files cached at the edge
United StatesCredit bundles per month, published; 30-day trial
Programmable edge CDN with metered regions and a starter allowance
Ranked #7 of 12 in Best CDN Providers in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingNorth America
The Free tier gives 100 GB, one million requests and 100,000 image requests a month, enough to run a proper test. Beyond that the invoice has several meters: bandwidth by region, requests, image requests, TLS per domain and the optional security products.
Enterprise pricing is custom. The meter that grows fastest is bandwidth outside Europe and North America, where rates reach twenty-eight cents.
What stands out
Programmable
Usage-based
Per-region rates
Where it costs you
Bandwidth costs twelve cents per gigabyte in Europe and North America at the first tier
Managed TLS beyond five domains is charged per domain each month
Right for
Engineering teams wanting to control caching and routing in code
Wrong for
Small static sites watching a per-gigabyte budget
United StatesFree, Growth and Enterprise tiers; usage rates published
Reverse-proxy CDN with DDoS protection on every plan
Ranked #8 of 12 in Best CDN Providers in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingNorth America
The route in is a primary setup: add the domain, then change nameservers at the registrar. A CNAME setup keeps your DNS elsewhere but is limited to Business and Enterprise.
Plans cost nothing, twenty, two hundred, or a contract, with the uptime guarantee only from Business. Cache Reserve is usage-based, so the plan price is not always the whole bill.
What stands out
Reverse proxy
Unmetered DDoS
Four plans
Where it costs you
Free and Pro require Cloudflare to become your authoritative DNS provider
The terms limit use of the CDN for video and large files without paid services
Right for
Sites wanting DNS, CDN and DDoS protection from one dashboard
Wrong for
Video or download distributors on the standard plans
United StatesFree, Pro and Business plans published; Contract quoted per organisation
Many separate delivery products, priced after a sales conversation
Ranked #9 of 12 in Best CDN Providers in 2026.
Pricing on requestNorth America
Akamai's documentation guides you through building an Ion property: hostnames, variables, rules for accelerating delivery, offloading origin and security, then testing and going live.
That is an engineering task, and the commercial side runs through sales because the Ion page publishes no price. The cloud pricing page covers compute and storage, not CDN delivery, so a budget needs a quote.
What stands out
Ion
Media delivery
Sales-led
Where it costs you
No delivery price is published and the trial is started through a sales form
Delivery is split across several products, each with its own configuration
Right for
Enterprises with sales-led procurement and a team to configure properties
Wrong for
Small sites that want to sign up and pay by card
United StatesQuoted per organisation; trial on request
Choose between the flat plans, with one monthly price and no overage charges, and pay-as-you-go. The plans bundle the firewall, DNS, bot analytics and storage credits, and the free tier of the metered model includes one terabyte and ten million requests.
Transfer from AWS origins is waived. The decision is between a predictable plan price and metered rates, and flat plans are per distribution.
What stands out
Flat-rate plans
AWS origins
Pay as you go
Where it costs you
Flat plans below Business carry small request allowances
The uptime guarantee is not part of the Free and Pro plans
Right for
Teams whose servers and storage already run on AWS
Wrong for
Buyers who want one product without an AWS account
United StatesFlat-rate plans and pay-as-you-go rates, published
Microsoft CDN and load balancer with an hourly base fee
Ranked #11 of 12 in Best CDN Providers in 2026.
Published pricingNorth America
Billing has four parts: an hourly base fee, data out to clients, data out to origins and requests. Standard is built for content delivery, while Premium adds the web application firewall, bot protection and Private Link at a much higher base fee.
Data from an Azure origin to the edge is free. Rates differ by zone, and volumes past 150 TB are quoted.
What stands out
Base fee
Load balancing
Premium WAF
Where it costs you
A monthly base fee applies even with little traffic
The firewall and Private Link are included only in Premium
Right for
Organisations already running applications on Microsoft Azure
Wrong for
Small sites that cannot absorb a fixed monthly base fee
United StatesBase fee per tier plus metered transfer and requests, published
Google edge cache attached to a cloud load balancer
Ranked #12 of 12 in Best CDN Providers in 2026.
Published pricingNorth America
The setup is an external Application Load Balancer with caching enabled on its backend. Charges are cache data transfer out, cache fill, lookup requests and, on misses, load balancer processing or storage operations.
Volume discounts are discussed above 500 TiB. For a stand-alone site on another host, the load balancer requirement is the reason this sits near the bottom of the list.
What stands out
Load balancer
Cache fill
Metered
Where it costs you
It requires an external Application Load Balancer in front of the origin
Four separate charges make the monthly total hard to predict
Right for
Teams whose workloads already sit behind Google Cloud load balancers
Wrong for
Buyers who want a CDN without a load balancer
United StatesMetered egress, cache fill and lookups, published
A CDN provider operates a worldwide network of caching servers that store copies of website files, downloads, images and video close to visitors, so pages load faster and your own origin server carries less traffic. The differences that matter are rarely in the feature list, so this is
the order we would work through them.
01
Decide whether you need a published price
11 of the 12 tools here publish what they cost; the other 1 quote per organisation. The ones you can compare without a sales call: Bunny CDN, KeyCDN, CDN77, Gcore, CacheFly, imgix, Fastly, Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Azure Front Door, Google Cloud CDN.
02
Decide how much the jurisdiction matters
These 12 vendors are established in 5 countries across 2 regions (North America 8, Europe 4). That decides whose disclosure law applies to what the vendor holds, wherever the servers are.
How CDN invoices are metered: gigabytes, requests or a flat plan
Two CDNs with the same headline price can produce different bills because the meter differs. Bunny CDN and KeyCDN bill bandwidth only, and KeyCDN states that requests cost nothing extra. Fastly bills bandwidth by region plus requests per ten thousand, and Google Cloud CDN adds cache fill and lookups.
Amazon CloudFront and CDN77 sell flat plans: CloudFront from zero to a thousand dollars a month with no overage charges, CDN77 a single Growth plan covering 250 TB. Gcore includes one terabyte, then bills per gigabyte. Work out the meter before the rate: a site with many small files pays more under a per-request scheme than a site with few large ones.
Export last month's traffic in gigabytes and requests from your current CDN or origin logs.
Price that month under each vendor's meter, not only its per-gigabyte rate.
Ask whether the monthly minimum, base fee or bundle applies even when traffic is low.
Regions decide the bill: Asia, Africa and South America
The published per-gigabyte price is nearly always the Europe and North America price. Bunny CDN charges three cents in Asia and Oceania and six cents in the Middle East and Africa on its Standard network, against one cent in Europe and North America. KeyCDN doubles in Asia and Oceania and reaches two and a half times in Africa and Latin America.
Fastly rises from twelve cents to twenty-eight in India, Africa and South Korea. Google Cloud CDN prices Asia Pacific above Europe. A site whose audience sits in Europe is cheap everywhere, while one with customers in Asia needs the regional table, not the headline rate.
Split last month's visitors by region, using your analytics.
Multiply each region's gigabytes by that vendor's regional rate.
Check whether the cheapest network covers the regions you serve.
Proxy in front of the site, asset delivery or image service
These twelve products solve different jobs. Cloudflare sits in front of the whole domain, so on Free and Pro you move DNS to it, and a CNAME setup needs Business. imgix transforms images and video from your own storage and does not carry other files.
Google Cloud CDN needs a load balancer first, and Azure Front Door combines CDN with load balancing. The terms matter as well: Cloudflare reserves the right to limit use of the CDN for video or a large share of big files without paid services. Choose the job first, then the vendor.
Decide whether the CDN must handle the whole domain or only assets.
Read the service terms for limits on video, downloads or large files.
Check whether a load balancer, DNS move or origin change is required.
Leaving a CDN: price rises, notice and what sits on the edge
A CDN holds a cache of your files, not the only copy, so exit is easier than with most software. The risk is in the terms. CacheFly may raise fees by up to eight percent a year on thirty days' notice. CDN77 continues indefinitely until terminated and lets you leave within thirty days of a fee increase.
KeyCDN advertises access to the whole network without commitment, and Bunny CDN says cancel anytime. If you also store files on the vendor, as with KeyCDN push zones or CDN77 Object Storage, keep a second copy. Switching is then a DNS change, and imgix is the exception because your image URLs are rewritten.
Ask how and when prices may change and whether you can leave after a rise.
Keep the master copy of every file outside the CDN vendor's storage.
List where hostnames, certificates and image URLs point so you can repoint them.
What goes wrong most often when buying CDN providers software
Comparing the per-gigabyte rate of the cheapest region without pricing the regions your visitors are actually in.
Choosing a flat plan sized for a media business, then paying for 250 TB of capacity a small website will never use.
Forgetting that a firewall, log delivery or image optimisation is billed separately from the base CDN plan.
Moving DNS to a reverse-proxy CDN without checking which plan keeps your existing DNS provider.
07
Frequently asked questions
6 answers
What is the best CDN providers in 2026?
Bunny CDN leads our ranking of 12. The Ljubljana operator prices bandwidth by region with a monthly minimum and no per-request charge, and every feature is included in that rate.
The cheaper Volume network runs on only ten points of presence, against 119 on the Standard network, so a low rate buys fewer locations. Enterprise support, with a named account manager and a private Slack channel, is sold as a separate plan.
Which CDN providers tools publish their pricing?
11 of the 12, with the pricing model each one publishes:
Bunny CDN: Pay as you go by region, published; 14-day trial.
KeyCDN: Pay as you go by region with a minimum payment, published; 14-day trial.
CDN77: Flat Growth plan published; Enterprise quoted per organisation; trial.
Gcore: Pay as you go with no monthly fee, published; Enterprise custom.
CacheFly: Developer account plus Business and Enterprise bundles, published.
imgix: Credit bundles per month, published; 30-day trial.
Fastly: Free, Growth and Enterprise tiers; usage rates published.
Cloudflare: Free, Pro and Business plans published; Contract quoted per organisation.
Amazon CloudFront: Flat-rate plans and pay-as-you-go rates, published.
Azure Front Door: Base fee per tier plus metered transfer and requests, published.
Google Cloud CDN: Metered egress, cache fill and lookups, published.
The other 1 quote per organisation.
Is there a free CDN providers tool?
Fastly, Cloudflare offer a free tier or a free self-hosted edition.
Where are these CDN providers vendors established?
In 5 countries across 2 regions: North America 8, Europe 4.
Bunny CDN: Slovenia.
KeyCDN: Switzerland.
CDN77: United Kingdom.
Gcore: Luxembourg.
CacheFly: United States.
imgix: United States.
Fastly: United States.
Cloudflare: United States.
Akamai: United States.
Amazon CloudFront: United States.
Azure Front Door: United States.
Google Cloud CDN: United States.
What should you use instead of Bunny CDN?
KeyCDN and CDN77 are the next two on this page. KeyCDN is for small and mid-sized sites wanting per-gigabyte billing without request charges; CDN77 is for Video, software and game distributors moving hundreds of terabytes monthly.
Who should not buy Bunny CDN?
Buyers who need a contractual uptime guarantee and a sales team. The Volume network used for the lowest rate has only ten points of presence.
If your CDN providers product belongs among these 12, tell us what it does and who it is for. Inclusion is an editorial call; what a listing is and is not is set out under software advice.
