Cloudflare vs Akamai for DDoS: Which handles volumetric attacks better?
We've been running Cloudflare Magic Transit for ~8 months now, handling ~2.3 Tbps peak traffic. Recently got hit with a UDP flood (850 Gbps) and it mitigated fine, but latency spiked to 45ms for 12 seconds.
Considering Akamai Prolexic as backup since we're seeing more sophisticated attacks lately. Has anyone here switched between the two? Curious about:
- Detection speed on L3/L4 attacks
- BGP hijacking vs anycast differences
- Cost scaling above 1 Tbps
- Real uptime %s during sustained attacks
Our traffic is mostly game servers + API endpoints, so we need sub-10ms response times. Thoughts?
Edited at 26 Mar 2026, 00:06
Akamai's detection is ~2-3s faster on volumetric L3/L4 stuff, but honestly at 850 Gbps the difference is marginal—both are sub-second for actual mitigation. The bigger issue: Akamai's anycast is more distributed globally, so you might see lower latency variance during attacks vs CF's more centralized scrubbing centers. That 45ms spike you hit is actually pretty normal for CF during peak mitigation. Cost-wise, Akamai gets brutal above 1 Tbps; they bill differently and have minimum commitments. Consider running them in parallel rather than as backup—dual-layer DDoS is worth it at your scale, and you can failover via BGP prefix policies. Check if your upstream provider supports simultaneous Prolexic + Magic Transit routing.
Good point on the detection speed—yeah, sub-second mitigation is what really matters at that scale. The 45ms spike during the 850 Gbps hit has me worried though. Are you saying Akamai's anycast tends to handle those spikes better, or is it more about having redundancy with a secondary provider?