41 CDN Providers Compared for 2026: Pricing and Best Use

At 1 PB per month, list prices across CDN providers differ by more than 10×. As of Q3 2026, the same petabyte costs about $29,000 at Amazon CloudFront's public on-demand rates and about $2,500 on a committed flat-rate tier. Both deliver cached bytes. The difference comes from pricing model, request fees and contract structure, and PoP counts explain very little of it.

This comparison covers 41 CDN providers in a single table: pricing model with 2026 list prices where they are published, PoP count as stated by the provider, and best-fit workload. After the table you get category breakdowns, a cost-per-TB walkthrough at 100 TB and 1 PB, and a workload decision matrix you can take to a vendor shortlist meeting.

CDN providers compared: the 41-row table (2026)

Prices are public list rates for North America and Europe as of 2026. Most enterprise contracts are negotiated below list. "Not stated" means we could not verify a current PoP figure from the provider itself.

Where BlazingCDN fits: BlazingCDN is a pay-as-you-go CDN for high-volume video, downloads and images, priced from $5 per TB down to $2.50 per TB with one rate in the US, Europe and Asia; 100 TB costs $415 a month (as of October 2026). Its prices against every major CDN are on the CDN pricing comparison page.

Why PoP counts from CDN companies are not comparable

The PoP column is the least useful number in any list of CDN providers, and most rankings still sort by it. Akamai counts deployments embedded inside ISP networks. Cloudflare counts cities. Alibaba and Tencent count cache nodes, often several per city. Fastly runs fewer, larger PoPs with high per-site capacity. A "4,100" and a "100" measure different things.

What predicts real performance is peering density in the networks your users sit on, cache hit ratio for your object-size distribution, and tail TTFB under load. Treat PoP counts as a coarse filter for regions such as mainland China, India or Latin America, then measure.

What changed for CDN providers in 2026

• Consolidation is still settling. Edgio's shutdown in January 2025, following the StackPath and Lumen CDN exits, moved a large volume of customers to Akamai and pushed many teams to multi-CDN setups.
• Hyperscalers added flat pricing. CloudFront introduced flat-rate bundles in late 2025, alongside metered per-GB billing. Microsoft continues moving classic Azure CDN profiles to Front Door.
• Request fees matter more. Low-latency HLS and CMAF with short segments multiply request counts, so per-10K-request charges now show up visibly on video bills.

Top CDN providers by category

Enterprise CDN providers

Akamai, Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, Google Cloud CDN and Azure Front Door win on breadth: security suites, edge compute, compliance paperwork and procurement familiarity. Fastly's programmable edge and instant purge remain genuine strengths for streaming and API caching. The trade-off is price opacity. Real rates depend on contract terms, and egress list prices look very different from what you pay after a commit.

Price-performance CDN providers for high-volume delivery

This is the league where Bunny.net, CDN77, KeyCDN, Gcore, Medianova and BlazingCDN compete. Bunny.net has an excellent dashboard, integrated storage and optimizer features that many teams value beyond price. CDN77 and Medianova are strong in video. Gcore adds good EU and CIS coverage.

BlazingCDN targets the same buyers with progressive volume pricing, starting at $5 per TB, down to $2.50 per TB at volume (as of October 2026). It offers NVMe SSD edge storage and fast scaling under demand spikes. At 100 TB a month it costs $415. The full rate card is on BlazingCDN's published pricing tiers, and onboarding typically takes about an hour.

Video and streaming CDNs

All-in-one platforms such as DaCast and Muvi bundle encoding, players and monetization on top of partner CDNs. That saves engineering time, but you pay a markup on every GB. Teams already running Wowza, Nimble, Flussonic or MediaPackage usually do better pairing their packager with a pure delivery CDN plus an origin shield.

Cloud, security and regional CDN companies

If you need mainland China delivery, you need an ICP license and a domestic provider such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu or Huawei. Security-first CDN companies (Imperva, F5, Myra, Reblaze) justify their premium when application protection is the main purchase and bytes are secondary.

Cost per TB at 100 TB and 1 PB: the math

The figures below are 2026 public list prices for NA/EU traffic, excluding request fees and before any negotiated discount. They are approximate, so check current rate cards before quoting them internally.

CloudFront private pricing narrows this gap considerably for committed customers. Bunny's standard tier also buys more PoPs than its volume tier. Still, at 1 PB the spread between list prices is large enough that a split architecture pays for itself quickly: keep dynamic and security-sensitive traffic on your enterprise CDN, and move cacheable bulk bytes to a flat-rate provider.

Which CDN provider fits your workload? Decision matrix

FAQ

Which CDN providers are cheapest at high volume in 2026?

At 1 PB or more per month, committed flat-rate providers such as BlazingCDN (starting at $5 per TB, down to $2.50 per TB at volume, as of October 2026), Bunny.net's volume network and CDN77 contracts come in well below hyperscaler list prices. Always model request fees and regional surcharges, because they can add 20% or more for short-segment video.

How many CDN companies should a large platform use?

Most platforms above a few hundred TB per month run two: a primary and a failover or cost-tier CDN, steered by DNS or client-side logic. More than three rarely pays for its operational overhead.

Do more PoPs mean a faster CDN?

Not reliably. Providers count PoPs differently, and cache hit ratio, peering with your users' ISPs and tail latency matter more. Test with RUM data from your own audience.

Is Cloudflare Free suitable for video delivery?

Its self-serve terms restrict serving large volumes of non-HTML content such as video outside dedicated products like Stream. For sustained video egress, use a paid delivery CDN or a streaming product.

What replaced Edgio and StackPath for affected customers?

Akamai absorbed many of those contracts. Others moved to Fastly, CloudFront or price-performance CDNs, often as part of a new multi-CDN design.

Run this benchmark before your next CDN renewal

This week, export 30 days of edge logs and split your traffic by object size: under 1 MB, 1 to 100 MB, and over 100 MB. Price each bucket against two rate cards from the table, including request fees. Then send 1% of traffic from your largest bucket to a second provider for seven days, and compare p95 TTFB, cache hit ratio and origin egress.

If BlazingCDN is not already on your shortlist, we recommend adding it as one of the two, since the cost-per-TB gap is easiest to verify on your own bytes. What does your bill look like once request fees are separated from transfer?