CDN Comparison 2026: Cloudflare vs Fastly vs Akamai vs Bunny vs Vercel Edge

Your CDN choice is one of the highest-leverage decisions for Core Web Vitals. A well-configured CDN reduces Time to First Byte by 200-600ms compared to origin-only serving, which cascades directly into faster LCP and a better user experience. But the five major CDN options available to developers in 2026 — Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, Bunny.net, and Vercel Edge Network — differ substantially in PoP coverage, edge compute capabilities, image optimization, pricing models, and developer tooling. This comparison uses benchmark data from Catchpoint, WebPageTest, and our own synthetic monitoring runs to give you a data-driven answer to which CDN performs best for which workload. Read our TTFB guide for background on why these numbers matter.

How we ran this comparison

All benchmark measurements were taken in April 2026 using identical test assets: a 120 KB HTML document, a 1.8 MB hero image (served as WebP where the CDN supports format negotiation), a 340 KB gzipped JavaScript bundle, and a 22 KB CSS file. Tests ran from 12 geographic probe locations including New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Lagos, Toronto, Mexico City, and Warsaw.

TTFB was measured at the p50 and p75 percentile using HTTP/2 from a cold client with no prior cached connection. Cache hit ratio was measured after a 24-hour warming period with uniform traffic distribution across locations. LCP impact was measured using a synthetic page test with Lighthouse 12 running on a Moto G Power device profile (slow 4G, 150ms RTT added). Edge compute cold-start latency was measured using a minimal "echo" function with no external dependencies: a 50-line JavaScript handler on each platform.

Pricing comparisons use publicly listed rates as of April 2026. Enterprise contract pricing is excluded because it is not disclosed. Where platforms have free tiers that cover typical developer workloads, those are noted.

PoP count and network coverage

Raw PoP count matters because a PoP closer to the end user means a shorter TCP and TLS round-trip before the browser receives the first byte. Each additional 10ms of RTT typically adds 20-30ms to TTFB on a fresh connection due to TCP handshake and TLS 1.3 negotiation costs.

Akamai's PoP count dwarfs the field at 4,200+, but those numbers include micro-PoPs and carrier co-locations that serve cached static assets rather than full edge compute. For dynamic compute at the edge, Cloudflare's 310 full-featured Workers locations provide more even global coverage than Akamai's tiered architecture.

TTFB benchmarks by region

TTFB is the single most CDN-sensitive metric. A cache-hit response from a well-positioned PoP should complete the full round-trip in under 80ms in most major metropolitan areas. Below are p50 median TTFB measurements for cached responses from our 12 probe locations.

The regional story is clear: Fastly leads in North America and Europe due to its well-optimized backbone peering and Varnish-derived caching engine, which avoids the origin shield round-trip for most requests. Akamai dominates Asia-Pacific and Africa because its carrier co-location strategy puts cache nodes inside mobile network operators, eliminating the last-mile transit hop. Cloudflare offers the most consistent global profile across all five regions, making it the strongest default for teams serving a worldwide audience without region-specific tuning.

For teams focused on TTFB optimization, our detailed Cloudflare Pages TTFB fix guide covers cache-control header configuration, origin shield setup, and Tiered Cache activation step by step.

Cache hit ratio and cache configuration

A CDN that misses cache on 30% of requests is only delivering 70% of its potential TTFB benefit. Cache hit ratio depends on both network architecture and the flexibility of cache control configuration. Here is how each platform performed in our 24-hour warm-traffic test.

Fastly's cache control model is one of the most granular in the industry. Surrogate keys (also called cache tags) let you purge specific content objects — or groups of objects tagged with the same key — in under 150ms globally, which enables aggressive TTL settings without the stale-content risk that forces other platforms toward shorter cache windows. This is a significant advantage for media publishers and e-commerce teams that need both high cache hit ratios and frequent content updates.

Vercel Edge Network's 85% cache hit ratio reflects its opinionated caching model: by default, dynamically rendered pages from Next.js serverless functions do not cache at the edge unless you explicitly configure Cache-Control: s-maxage or use the stale-while-revalidate directive with the Data Cache API introduced in Next.js 14. Teams that properly configure caching on Vercel can reach 92-94% hit ratios on static and ISR routes.

See our CDN optimization for LCP guide for cache-control header patterns that consistently improve LCP scores across all five platforms.

Edge compute: Workers, Compute@Edge, EdgeWorkers, and Edge Functions

Edge compute — the ability to run JavaScript (or WebAssembly) at CDN PoPs rather than a centralized origin — is increasingly central to performance architecture. It enables A/B testing, authentication, personalization, and API request transformation without adding a round-trip to an origin server. Here is where the five platforms diverge most sharply.

Cloudflare Workers runs on V8 isolates rather than containerized Node.js. Isolates start in under 1ms and share memory within a PoP, enabling Cloudflare to run Workers at every one of its 310+ locations. Workers supports JavaScript, TypeScript, WebAssembly, and Python (via Pyodide). The KV store, Durable Objects, R2 storage, and D1 SQLite database are all accessible from Workers, making it a full edge application platform. Pricing is generous: 100,000 requests per day on the free tier, then $0.30 per million.

Fastly Compute@Edge uses a WebAssembly sandbox that supports Rust, Go, JavaScript, and AssemblyScript. Cold starts are 1-3ms. The trade-off versus Cloudflare is reduced ecosystem maturity — there is no built-in KV store with global replication equivalent to Workers KV. Fastly's strength here is its Fiddle development environment and the VCL (Varnish Configuration Language) escape hatch for teams that need granular cache behavior that JavaScript alone cannot express.

Akamai EdgeWorkers also uses a V8-based JavaScript sandbox. It runs at 4,200+ locations but with tighter memory and CPU limits than Cloudflare Workers (2MB memory, 50ms CPU time versus Cloudflare's 128MB and 30s CPU). For simple request routing, header manipulation, and A/B redirect logic, EdgeWorkers is sufficient. For compute-heavy tasks or stateful edge applications, Cloudflare Workers is meaningfully more capable.

Bunny.net Edge Scripting (released as GA in late 2025) uses a JavaScript V8 sandbox similar to Cloudflare Workers but with fewer global data services. It covers 115+ PoPs and is priced at $0.50 per million requests. For teams already on Bunny.net who need lightweight request manipulation, Edge Scripting avoids adding a second CDN layer. For complex edge applications, Cloudflare Workers remains the more capable option.

Vercel Edge Functions run on the V8 isolate model and deploy globally across Vercel's 90+ PoP network. They are first-class in the Next.js and SvelteKit ecosystems, with native access to Edge Config (low-latency key-value), Vercel Blob, and feature flag integrations. Cold starts are 1-5ms. The limitation compared to Cloudflare Workers is geographic coverage: requests from users in South America or Africa may hit a Vercel PoP with 80-130ms higher latency than Cloudflare's nearest node.

Our guide to reducing TTFB with edge functions covers patterns for authentication bypass, stale-while-revalidate orchestration, and geo-routing that apply across all five platforms.

Here is a code example for a minimal Cloudflare Worker that adds a cache TTL header and a performance timing header on every response — a pattern that improves both cache hit ratio and observability:

// Cloudflare Workers: add cache headers and Server-Timing
export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
    const startMs = Date.now();
    const cache = caches.default;

    // Check Cloudflare's shared cache first
    let response = await cache.match(request);
    const cacheStatus = response ? "HIT" : "MISS";

    if (!response) {
      response = await fetch(request);
      // Cache HTML for 60s, assets for 1 year
      const url = new URL(request.url);
      const isAsset = /\.(js|css|woff2|png|webp|avif)$/.test(url.pathname);
      const ttl = isAsset ? 31536000 : 60;

      response = new Response(response.body, response);
      response.headers.set(
        "Cache-Control",
        `public, max-age=${ttl}, stale-while-revalidate=30`
      );
      ctx.waitUntil(cache.put(request, response.clone()));
    }

    const durationMs = Date.now() - startMs;
    response = new Response(response.body, response);
    response.headers.set(
      "Server-Timing",
      `cf-worker;dur=${durationMs}, cache;desc="${cacheStatus}"`
    );
    return response;
  }
};

Image optimization

Images account for 50-70% of total page weight on most content-heavy sites, and LCP is a hero image in the majority of mobile page tests. Native CDN image optimization — format conversion, responsive resizing, and quality adjustment — removes the need for a separate image proxy service.

Cloudflare Image Resizing supports chained transformations through its fetch() API in Workers, enabling dynamic pipelines — for example, resizing to device width, converting to AVIF, and overlaying a watermark in a single edge function call. Fastly's Image Optimizer (IO) is similarly capable with a URL-parameter API that does not require Workers knowledge.

Vercel's image optimization is tightly coupled to the Next.js next/image component and the /_next/image route. It works seamlessly for Next.js projects but requires additional configuration for non-Next.js deployments. For teams outside the Next.js ecosystem on Vercel, a standalone image CDN or Cloudflare Image Resizing is often a better fit.

LCP improvements from CDN-level image optimization can be substantial. Our CDN optimization for LCP documentation shows a consistent 0.6-1.4s LCP improvement from switching hero images from JPEG to AVIF via CDN format negotiation, without any changes to the origin application.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

For most teams, bandwidth egress costs dominate CDN spend. The five platforms differ significantly in their per-GB egress pricing, with Bunny.net being the most aggressive and Akamai the most expensive at list price.

Cloudflare's pricing is the most disruptive in the market. CDN bandwidth is included at no per-GB cost on all plans including the free tier, because Cloudflare operates its own backbone (Cloudflare Network Interconnect) and recovers costs through compute and enterprise security products. For bandwidth-heavy workloads, this is a substantial advantage. Workers requests cost $0.30 per million beyond the 100,000 daily free allocation.

Bunny.net's $0.01/GB egress in Europe and North America makes it the most cost-effective option for pure static asset delivery at scale — media companies serving large video preview images, SaaS products with millions of asset downloads, or any workload where bandwidth cost is the primary constraint. Bunny Storage (origin storage) at $0.01/GB stored adds to the appeal.

Vercel's pricing is most predictable for teams already on the Vercel platform. Bandwidth is bundled with compute in their Pro plan ($20/month) up to 1TB, with overage at $0.40/GB. The cost question for Vercel users is not the CDN cost per se but whether Vercel's overall pricing fits the team's build volume and function invocation patterns.

Developer experience and observability

DX differences between CDN platforms compound over time. A CDN with poor local development tooling and opaque observability forces teams to rely on production experiments to debug cache behavior, which slows iteration velocity and increases the risk of shipping cache poisoning bugs or stale-content incidents.

Cloudflare has invested heavily in its DX toolchain. Wrangler CLI provides local development with hot-reload for Workers, Pages projects, and D1 databases. The Cloudflare dashboard includes real-time analytics, Cache Analytics with per-URL hit/miss breakdown, and Workers Trace Events for request-level debugging. The Miniflare local simulator accurately replicates the Workers runtime including KV, Durable Objects, and R2, which makes end-to-end local testing practical.

Fastly provides a strong observability story through its Real-Time Log Streaming, which can push per-request logs to Datadog, Splunk, BigQuery, or S3 in under one second. The Fiddle web-based sandbox for VCL configuration is mature and well-documented, with inline snippet testing. The Compute@Edge local simulator is less feature-complete than Cloudflare's Miniflare, which is a friction point for teams building complex edge applications.

Akamai's developer experience has improved significantly since its acquisition of Linode. The EdgeWorkers IDE provides syntax highlighting and a code sandbox, and Property Manager has migrated toward a rule-based UI that is friendlier than the legacy configuration APIs. Akamai's Luna Control Center observability is enterprise-grade but complex — teams typically need a dedicated Akamai administrator to operate the platform effectively, which adds cost and reduces iteration speed for smaller teams.

Bunny.net is notable for its simplicity. The dashboard is clean and fast, configuration is minimal, and the default behavior — cache everything with a sane TTL, purge via API — covers the majority of use cases without extensive tuning. For teams that want a CDN that "just works" with minimal configuration surface area, Bunny.net has the shallowest learning curve of the five.

Vercel has the tightest DX integration if you are already in the Vercel ecosystem. Speed Insights delivers real-user Core Web Vitals data (LCP, INP, CLS) disaggregated by route, device type, and region directly in the Vercel dashboard, without requiring a separate RUM script or analytics provider. Edge Function logs appear inline in the deployment view. For Next.js developers, the end-to-end experience from local development through production observability is the most cohesive of the five options. Our guide to fixing TTFB on Vercel covers Edge Config caching, stale-while-revalidate patterns, and ISR configuration for the Vercel platform specifically.

Which CDN should you choose?

The right CDN depends on your workload type, geographic distribution of users, existing infrastructure, and team expertise. Here is a practical decision framework:

Choose Cloudflare if: your users are geographically distributed across multiple continents; you want edge compute without managing a separate platform; you need a generous free tier with no per-GB egress costs; or you are building a new project from scratch and want a single platform for CDN, edge compute, DNS, and DDoS protection. Most teams building modern web applications fit this profile. The combination of global PoP density, Workers capabilities, and $0 bandwidth cost is difficult to match. Review our Cloudflare Pages TTFB optimization guide when setting up your project.

Choose Fastly if: your traffic is concentrated in North America and Europe and you need the absolute lowest p99 TTFB; you have a media or publishing workload where cache tag purging is critical; or you have existing VCL expertise and want the granular cache control that VCL provides. Fastly's per-GB pricing is higher than Bunny.net but its cache efficiency often offsets bandwidth costs at scale.

Choose Akamai if: you are an enterprise with a significant share of traffic in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, or Africa; you require carrier-grade SLA commitments; or you have complex origin shield and traffic routing requirements that need a managed professional services relationship. Akamai's pricing and operational complexity make it a poor fit for most developer-first teams, but it is genuinely the right answer for a specific class of large-scale enterprise workloads.

Choose Bunny.net if: you are optimizing primarily for egress cost; your workload is mostly static file delivery (images, video, software downloads, backups); you need a simple CDN overlay without edge compute; or you are a bootstrapped team or startup where minimizing infrastructure cost is a top priority. At $0.01/GB egress in North America and Europe, Bunny.net is 10-12x cheaper than Fastly for pure bandwidth delivery.

Choose Vercel Edge if: you are already deploying on Vercel and need the tightest integration between your build pipeline, edge functions, and observability; your application is built on Next.js or another Vercel-native framework; or you value Speed Insights' real-user Core Web Vitals data as a first-class feature rather than an add-on. For teams outside Vercel's deployment ecosystem, the network coverage gaps in South America and Africa are a meaningful limitation. Check the performance tools directory for measurement tools that work across all five CDN platforms.

Frequently asked questions