Best CDN provider of 2024

Best CDN provider overall

(Image credit: Cloudflare) 

Cloudflare is a hugely popular American content delivery service that combines novice-friendly ease of use with expert-level features and functionality. It’s no wonder that Cloudflare protects about 20% of all websites, including major corporations such as Broadcom, L’Oreal, DHL and Shopify.

Setup is quick and easy. Simply update your DNS nameservers to use Cloudflare, and the service kicks in automatically, caching content and serving it to visitors from their nearest location.

But there's also much, much more. Web filtering can block bots, limit content spam, keep you safe from hackers or detect and mitigate DDoS attacks. Smart image optimizations can reduce image file sizes by up to 35%, further improving speeds.

There's wide support for standards like IPv6, HTTP/2 and SPDY, clever page rules to help you manipulate traffic, and a REST API allows developers to take full control of what the service is doing.

Cloudflare's free plan allows you to see what the service can do, without making any commitments, and it is a permanent option rather than some time limited trial. It's very usable, with unlimited bandwidth and no annoying restrictions to try and force you to upgrade. Just realize that support is limited to self help and a community forum, and the bot protections are more basic.

Upgrading to the Pro plan gets you the image optimization rules, extra configurability, and improved support in the form of trouble tickets. Pricing is simple at a flat $20 (£16) a month, with no complex per-region usage fees. A Business plan comes with a 100% uptime SLA, which the Enterprise offers maximum speeds and every bot and threat-blocking technology Cloudflare has to offer.

Read our Cloudflare review.

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Best CDN provider for configuration

(Image credit: Fastly) 

Fastly is the CDN of choice for big-name organizations from the likes of Epic Games and Spotify to Reddit, Stripe and New York Times, and it's easy to see why. The service lives up to its name by consistently delivering great performance results, and currently ranks sixth in CDNPerf's rankings for worldwide speeds (and it's #1 in Oceania.)

But this isn't just about raw network speeds. Fastly is ultra-configurable, and if you know what you're doing then you can fine-tune your set with clever video caching, and custom manipulation of HTTP headers to customize precisely how content is served. It takes some time to set this up, especially if you're a CDN novice, but make that effort and you'll see even faster results for even more of your visitors.

Fastly isn't as generous as Cloudflare when it comes to pricing; there's no free tier, and the company has a minimum charge of $50 (£37) a month, whatever your website happens to use.

Estimating your final costs can be a challenge, too, as Fastly charges depend on the bandwidth you use in each region (prices range from $0.12 per GB in North America to $0.28 in Africa.) There are some welcome extras, though, including free TLS/SSL for the first two mains, and overall Fastly is fair value for the features you get.

Read our full Fastly review.

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Best CDN provider for advanced users

(Image credit: Future) 

Gcore, headquartered in Luxembourg, is a CDN provider that excels in catering to the needs of entertainment vendors, including gaming and streaming networks. However, its versatility allows it to serve a variety of other online services as well. One of the standout features of Gcore’s CDN is its truly global reach. It boasts connection points in every timezone, ensuring that users have constant access with a 100% uptime guarantee. This global coverage is a significant advantage for businesses with an international footprint or aspirations. Response times are among the best in class, with 30ms worldwide as advertised, though some locations can offer response times as fast as 3ms.

The user interface is modern and intuitive, with all of the necessary functionalities on the left-hand side of the platform. A neat thing for the more visually inclined among us is their visual indicator of how much traffic you have left, which is quite neat to have.

This CDN is equipped with robust security measures, including integrated defenses against DDoS attacks, malware, and bots, ensuring uninterrupted service with a 100% uptime commitment, even amidst potential threats.

During our evaluation of the service, it was a pleasant surprise to find that Gcore provides SSL certificates at no additional cost. Simply navigate to the SSL certificates section and create one with ease. Pricing however could benefit from a more simplified approach, though for solely CDN services there are four plans, the Free one, limited though free; the Start plan is €35 a month, the Pro is €100 a month and the Enterprise one will require you to get in touch with the sales team.

Read our full Gcore DNS review

Best CDN provider for value

(Image credit: KeyCDN) 

KeyCDN is an easy-to-use budget CDN that is an attractive choice for first-time users.

Getting started couldn't be much simpler. Sign up with your email address and you can get started with a free 14 day trial, no payment details required. A well-designed web dashboard enables creating your first zone with the minimum of clicks, and there are guides to help you integrate the service with WordPress, PrestaShop, Magento and other apps.

More experienced users will appreciate features like Image Processing. This can resize, crop, sharpen, blur, overlay and otherwise tweak pictures to suit your needs, potentially reducing traffic by allowing your site to replace many images with just one.

A standout feature of KeyCDN is its low prices. Let's Encrypt SSL certificates come for free, while bandwidth charges start at $0.04 (£0.032) per GB- a third the price you'll pay with some of the high-end competition. There's a minimum $49 payment required up-front, but KeyCDN's tiny minimum monthly fee of only $4 a month means that could go a very long way.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these low prices don't get you leading-edge performance, but you're still getting plenty of power here for your money.

Read our full KeyCDN review.

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Best CDN provider for security

(Image credit: StackPath) 

StackPath's CDN has a relatively small network of 73 locations worldwide, mostly focused in North America and Europe with only a few elsewhere. But every one of those locations is optimized for speed, the company explains, and an impressive customer list including the likes of Valve and CloudLinux OS suggests it really can deliver.

SSL handling is a strong point. If you're new to the CDN business, StackPath gives you shared SSL for free, so you can get started right away with no extra effort or cost. But (unlike most CDNs) StackPath also allows you to use your own private SSL certificate for free, serving this from its own locations to maximize initial load times.

There's plenty more to like here, from smart image optimization, GZIP compression, effective anti-DDoS technology and a capable Web Application Firewall. And yet, StackPath is still very usable by even the greenest of CDN newbies. A straightforward web console helps manage your projects, and there's plenty of online help if you get stuck.

Pricing starts very simply, too, at a flat $27.50 a month for 1TB of traffic from anywhere (no complicated per-continent charging.) This is for a relatively basic service (24/7 costs extra, for instance), but it does give you an easy and cheap way to test StackPath, and find out if it's the right CDN for you.

Read our full StackPath review.

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Best CDN provider for enterprise

(Image credit: Akamai) 

Veteran CDN provider Akamai claims to have 'the world’s most distributed platform for cloud computing, security, and content delivery', and with more than 4,200 locations spread across 130 countries, it probably has a point.

Factor in leading-edge features such as video and image optimization, and it's no surprise that Akamai counts some of the biggest corporations around amongst its customer list: Adobe, Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Honda, Marriott, PayPal, WarnerMedia, the Washington Post, and many more.

This focus on power and functionality could be a problem for newbies. Akamai assumes its users have some background knowledge and experience of CDNs and networking, and although there's plenty of documentation to help you figure it out, this is still more complex to use than some of the competition.

Performance isn't always leading edge (as we write, Akamai is ranked 12th on CDNPerf's worldwide speed charts.) But it does excel in some areas, especially media services, allowing the likes of NBC Sports Network to deliver broadcast quality video on its live streams.

Pricing is a bit tricky, as there are no standard plans, and you must contact the sales team directly to get a quote. But it's easy to do this via live chat, email or phone, and the website indicates that you sample Akamai's abilities with a free trial.

Read our full Akamai review.

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Best free tier CDN provider

(Image credit: Amazon) 

Amazon CloudFront is the CDN side of AWS (Amazon Web Services), a cloud computing giant which offers everything from simple cloud storage and web hosting to a complete managed service for running your own satellite ground station (no, really.)

As you'd expect for such a heavyweight service, CloudFront has a large and very high capacity network with more than 450 POPs spread around the world. Although these 'only' cover 49 countries, they're better distributed than usual, with four locations in Africa and seven in South America.

The end result is seriously impressive performance. As we write, CloudFront ranks third for worldwide speeds at CDNPerf, and those extra locations lift the service to second place in Africa and South America (milliseconds behind G-Core Labs and CacheFly.)

CloudFront is stuffed with advanced security, configuration and reporting tools, but even better, it's growing all the time. While many CDNs have been much the same for years, CloudFront adds useful new tools every few weeks (see the What's New https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/whats-new/ page for more.)

The downside of all this power is CloudFront can be complex, at least initially. Calculating prices takes time and care, too, and if you're a newbie, keep in mind that tech support isn't included - if you need help, you'll have to fork out for it. Amazon more than makes up for that with its free tier, though, which gives you a generous 1TB of data a month, allowing you to trial CloudFront for as long as you need.