BlazingCDN vs Akamai
Akamai is the enterprise standard, and it does not publish what it charges. We do. Most of this comparison follows from that one difference.
Our rate is printed on the pricing page. You can check it before you talk to anyone.
Every Akamai CDN product page ends in a contact form, not a price. The only delivery rate they publish anywhere sits on their cloud, and it is $5 per TB flat.
Or open the full pricing table and read the rate yourself.
Which one actually fits your traffic
We would rather lose the click than lose a month of your team’s time. Here is the honest split.
Pick BlazingCDN if
- You move video, game builds, updates or other large files
- Terabytes drive your bill, not the number of requests
- You want the rate printed rather than negotiated, and the same for everyone
- You want no annual commit and no minimum volume to sign up to
- You are adding a second CDN next to the one you already run
Pick Akamai if
- You need the security suite: App and API Protector, Guardicore, bot management
- You want one vendor for delivery, security, edge compute and observability
- Your buyers require a named enterprise brand and a negotiated contract
- You need reach into markets where their footprint is genuinely unmatched
Side by side
Pricing model
Per terabyte delivered
A negotiated enterprise contract, priced per product
Published price
Yes. $5 down to $2.50 per TB in progressive tiers, the full table printed on the pricing page
None for the CDN. Their cloud publishes $0.005 per GB, which is a different product
Regional pricing
One rate across our regions
Whatever the contract defines, per region and per product
Heavy video and large files
What the network is built and priced for
Adaptive Media Delivery and Media Services Live, both licensed separately and both on quote
Time to a number
Same day, by email
A sales conversation. There is no other route
The one delivery price Akamai publishes
Their CDN products carry no rate card at all. Their cloud does, and it is worth reading, because it is the only delivery number Akamai puts in writing anywhere.
“US$0.005 per GB”
Network transfer overage on Akamai Cloud Computing, North America. Flat, with no volume steps.
Akamai Cloud Computing pricing, North America. Checked 28 August 2026. Read it on their site
What it means in practice
$0.005 per GB is $5 per terabyte, which is exactly our entry rate, and we will not pretend otherwise. The difference is what happens next: theirs is flat, ours steps down through the tiers to $2.50. And that number is for their cloud, not their CDN. For the CDN they publish nothing at all, so what you would actually pay is whatever your negotiation produces.
Why ours is printed instead
Ours is printed, all of it, at every volume, and it is the same number for everyone. Nobody gets a better rate for negotiating harder or arriving through a reseller. See the full tier table, Video CDN and Anycast CDN.
Read their own numbers before your renewal
These are Akamai’s own figures, from their own second quarter results, published 6 August 2026. We have not adjusted or interpreted them.
Their biggest segment, and growing
Where the investment is going
The only segment shrinking, for the second quarter running
What that means at your renewal
Security and cloud are growing at double digits. Delivery, the product you are actually renewing, is the one line going backwards. A vendor’s pricing flexibility usually sits where its growth does not, and that is a better reason to ask for a number than anything we could tell you about ourselves.
And what is coming the other way
Akamai briefed the industry in March 2026 on a 3% interim surcharge from 1 April, and price adjustments of up to 10% on contract renewals, citing server, memory and energy costs. Reported by Dan Rayburn. Our rate card has not moved, and when it does it moves on the pricing page first.
Segment figures are Akamai’s own, from their second quarter 2026 results release dated 6 August 2026: Security $604M up 10%, Cloud Infrastructure Services $99M up 39%, delivery and other cloud applications $396M down 6%. The surcharge and renewal adjustment are as reported by StreamingMediaBlog in March 2026, not published by Akamai directly. Checked 28 August 2026.
Tell us your monthly terabytes. We send back the number.
No account needed to get a price. One email, one answer.
Speed tests look similar on both networks. The invoice does not. Here is the same traffic, priced two ways.
200 TB a month here, billed across progressive tiers from $5 down to $2.50 per TB. No platform fee, no minimum commit, no contract. The whole table is printed on the pricing page.
The same 200 TB on Akamai. There is no published figure to put here, because Akamai does not publish one. What you pay depends on your commit, your term and how well your procurement team negotiates.
Run your own volume through it
50 TB a month
$4.30 a terabyte effective, printed on our pricing page. On Akamai this volume is a conversation, not a number.
200 TB a month
Where most video and software teams sit. $3.83 a terabyte effective. If you are on Akamai at this volume, you already know your rate, and you are the only person who does.
1 PB a month
1,000 TB billed down through the tiers, $3.32 a terabyte effective. Compare it against the per-terabyte figure on your own Akamai invoice, which is the only Akamai number either of us can actually check.
Our pricing is progressive, like tax brackets: $5 on the first 5 TB, stepping down to $2.50 above 1,000 TB. There is no Akamai column here because Akamai publishes no CDN rate to put in it, verified 28 August 2026.
The three questions that actually decide this
Nobody gets fired for staying, right?
That is the honest reason most Akamai contracts renew, and we are not going to pretend it is irrational. So do not move the contract. Move one workload: point a single pull zone at us, keep everything else exactly where it is, and compare one invoice. If it is worse, you change a CNAME back and nobody ever knows.
Do I have to move everything?
No. Most teams move the heavy traffic first, video, builds and downloads, and leave pages, security and anything that needs their edge logic on Akamai. Running two CDNs side by side is normal, and it is also how you keep your negotiating position for the next renewal.
Will you re-price me once I am big?
No, and here is why you can check that rather than trust it. The tier table is published, it is the same for everyone, and there is no volume threshold that moves you into a different conversation. Nobody gets a better rate for negotiating harder, arriving through a reseller, or being famous.
Keep it. Move the heavy traffic to us.
You do not have to move the whole contract. Leave the properties that need their security stack where they are, and take the terabytes that drive the invoice to a network that prints its rate.
- One pull zone, pointed at the origin you already use
- From $5 down to $2.50 per TB, published, no negotiation to see it
- Roll back by changing one CNAME if you do not like the result
Get your rate
Four fields. We reply with a written price for your volume, usually the same day.
We use this only to price your traffic and reply to you.
Splitting the traffic takes an afternoon
Create a pull zone
Point it at the same origin Akamai already pulls from. Nothing changes on your side.
Move the heavy paths
Video segments, installers, patches, archives. The paths that generate the terabytes on your invoice.
Compare one invoice
One billing cycle is enough to see the difference. If it is not better, change the CNAME back.
What you can find out before you talk to anyone
We publish a rate. They publish a contact form. Here is what that difference means line by line.
Where you start
$5 per TB delivered, pay as you go, with a $25 monthly minimum
Not published. Their cloud publishes $0.005 per GB, but that is not the CDN
Mid tier
The same tier table. Your rate steps down as volume grows, with nothing to re-sign
Not published
The tier that carries heavy traffic
$2.50 per TB on the top tier, and no platform fee at any volume
Not published. Enterprise CDN contracts are reported to run on annual commits with monthly minimums, but Akamai states no figure
Commitment
None. Monthly, stop whenever you like
A negotiated contract, normally annual with a committed volume
What gets billed
Delivered traffic only. Cache volume is never billed
Whatever the contract defines, per product, and you find out during the negotiation
Verified 28 August 2026: Akamai’s CDN solution and product pages carry no price of any kind, only a contact form. The $0.005 per GB figure is their published Akamai Cloud Computing network transfer overage for North America, not a CDN rate. Statements about commit and term structure are widely reported rather than published, and we mark them as such.
CDN feature by feature
Static files, downloads, images and APIs. Everything on our side is taken from our product documentation, and we have left in the rows where they are ahead.
Routing
Anycast with built in failover. 50+ signals weighed per request, routes re-evaluated in real time
Anycast across one of the largest edge footprints in the industry. This is the thing they are famous for
Cache control
TTL up to 365 days, a separate TTL per HTTP status code, minimum requests to cache from 1 to 10, inherit or ignore origin headers
Property Manager caching rules, and Cloud Wrapper as a tiered cache layer
Per-path rules
Locations: a rule set matched to an HTTP route, so different parts of one resource get different delivery settings. Extension proxying, URL parameter truncation, HLS and DASH handling and image processing, all per path
Cloudlets and Property Manager rules, plus EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV for logic at the edge
Purge
By path, in bulk, or total purge in one action. Plus cache warm-up through the API before a release
Fast Purge by URL, cache tag or content provider code
Origin Shield
Included. Automatic, or pinned to a region you choose
Cloud Wrapper, a separately licensed product
Compression
gzip, Brotli and zstd. At the edge or at origin, with a separate cache per encoding
gzip and Brotli, configured through Property Manager
Delivery speed control
A download speed cap you set per account, per domain or per URL, plus rate matched delivery so one big file does not take the whole pipe. Request intensity limits per client or subnet on top of that
Not exposed as a setting. Rate and download controls come through Property Manager behaviours agreed with your account team
Signed URLs
Validity window, signature bound to a client IP, a limit of 1 to 5 unique IPs per link, two secrets for rotation, partial path signing and URL encryption
Token authentication and signed URLs through Property Manager behaviours
Country and IP lists
Country allowlist or blocklist, IP allowlist or blocklist with mask support, referrer allow and deny lists and cookie checks. Set per resource, with no security plan to buy
Geographic and IP access control through Property Manager and their security products
Security stack
Their round
Access control only, as in the two rows above. No WAF, no bot management, no Zero Trust, and we do not claim any
App and API Protector, Guardicore, bot and account protection. This is the best security stack in the industry and the main reason to buy Akamai
Certificates
Let’s Encrypt at no extra charge, renewed automatically. Upload your own, in bulk, auto-assigned to matching domains
Certificate provisioning through their Certificate Provisioning System, managed with your account team
Origins and import
HTTP(S), S3, Swift, Wasabi and S3 compatible buckets, FTP, SFTP, rclone and rsync. Pull or push, pre-import or lazy, with a callback on the result
Any custom HTTP origin, their NetStorage, or an object store you configure
Image processing
One file at origin, every variant from a query string on your own domain. Variants are cached like any other file and cost nothing extra
Image and Video Manager, a separately licensed product
Logs and metrics
A Prometheus endpoint, Grafana, Alertmanager and OpenTelemetry on every account. Raw JSON logs for Graylog or ELK as a $50 a month add-on
DataStream and mPulse, both licensed separately
Running it from an agent
One MCP server, 52 typed tools: pull zones, cache and purge, metrics, domains and certificates, Cloud Storage and Video CDN. Read-only by default, with cache purge and warm-up; create and update are opt-in; deletes are a second opt-in limited to custom domains and Video CDN resources, and deleting pull zones, buckets or accounts is not implemented at all. Public on npm as @blazingcdn/mcp
Full API, CLI and Terraform provider. No MCP server that configures the CDN as a typed toolset
Our column is taken from our own published feature list. The Akamai column names their publicly documented products: Ion, Adaptive Media Delivery, Download Delivery, EdgeWorkers, EdgeKV, Cloudlets, Cloud Wrapper, Image and Video Manager, DataStream and mPulse. None of them carries a published price. Checked 28 August 2026.
Six places where we win
Not opinions. Each of these is a line item you can check on an invoice or in a config screen.
A rate, not a quote
Ours is $765 at 200 TB and it is printed. Theirs is whatever your negotiation produces, and you will never know whether the company down the road got a better one.
Nothing licensed separately
Tiered cache, image processing, logs and metrics are all in the account. On their side Cloud Wrapper, Image and Video Manager, DataStream and mPulse are separate line items on the contract.
Cache is never billed
Cache volume is never billed. You pay for what left the edge, not for how much of your library is sitting on it.
Raw logs, no upsell
A Prometheus endpoint, Grafana, Alertmanager and OpenTelemetry on every account, raw JSON logs for Graylog or ELK as a $50 a month add-on. Elsewhere raw logs are an Enterprise line item.
Links bound to a person
A signature can be tied to a client IP with a limit of 1 to 5 addresses, signed on part of the path, with the URL encrypted and two secrets you can rotate.
Knobs a platform hides
Chunk length, keyframe alignment, pre-cached first chunks, millisecond clipping, track selection, and any origin from S3 to rsync. Delivery is the product, so it is all exposed.
And four places where they win
If any of these four is the reason you are shopping, stay with Akamai. We would rather you read this here than find it out in month two.
- Security as a product: App and API Protector, Guardicore, bot and account protection. We do access control, not a security suite, and we do not claim otherwise.
- One vendor for delivery, security, edge compute, DNS and observability, on a single contract with a single account team.
- An edge footprint and a track record at a scale nobody in this comparison matches, including us.
- Procurement comfort. If your board needs a named incumbent, that is a real requirement and we will not argue with it.
Comparing more than one? See also Cloudflare pricing, CloudFront pricing and Fastly pricing, or start from our CDN pricing comparison.