Five carriers serving the global edge in 2026. Track the board, read each gate brief, and pick the route that fits your traffic. Figures reflect publicly listed rates as of mid-2026.
The widebody of the edge. Cloudflare runs across 330+ cities and bundles CDN, DNS, free SSL, WAF, bot mitigation, and Workers edge compute under one roof. Bandwidth is folded into flat plan fees, with no per-GB charge on standard website plans, which keeps small-to-mid sites cheap and predictable.
Acceptable-use policy restricts wholesale video / large-file delivery on standard plans. Real cost can fragment across add-ons (Argo, Stream, Logpush). Per-zone billing compounds across many domains.
The AWS shuttle. 750+ PoPs plus embedded ISP locations, and zero egress when pulling from S3, EC2, or ALB in-region. If your encode-package-deliver pipeline already lives in AWS, this is the path of least architectural resistance.
Setup and config are less intuitive than plug-and-play rivals. Per-request fees ($0.0075/10k HTTPS NA) and regional multipliers can surprise finance. Costs vary widely outside AWS-native stacks.
The developer's charter jet. Smallest network of the majors (~90 PoPs) but consistently reports the lowest P99 TTFB on cached segments, with instant global purge under 150ms. Compute@Edge runs Wasm directly in the request path for manifest manipulation and per-viewer logic.
Premium pricing versus volume providers. Origin-fetch bandwidth billed at near-delivery rates. Smaller footprint means deeper last-mile reach is weaker than Akamai for massive live events.
The flag carrier. The category pioneer still moves ~30% of all CDN traffic on a 4,100+ PoP ISP-embedded topology, which remains the safest choice for global live events past one million concurrent viewers. Adaptive Media Delivery handles LL-HLS natively.
No public price; expect a sales call. Pricing structure is complex with separate CDN, security, and performance charges. Slower change cycles and contract floors trip up smaller, agile teams.
The budget regional that overdelivers. From $0.01/GB in NA/EU with no per-request charges, which is a structural advantage for segmented video that generates high request counts per GB. An intuitive dashboard makes it friendly for non-technical owners and WordPress sites.
Smaller footprint (119 PoPs) than the global giants. Security stack is lighter; deep compliance needs (HIPAA, heavy PCI) lean toward Akamai or Cloudflare. Less brand recognition in enterprise procurement.
No single carrier wins every route. Cloudflare for the bundled stack, CloudFront for AWS, Fastly for edge logic, Akamai for enterprise scale, Bunny.net for raw price. Model your own traffic shape before you book.