Cloudflare brings in considerably less revenue than Akamai, but the market is willing to pay a far higher valuation for each of its dollars. As of September 2026, Cloudflare generates about $2.51 billion a year and trades around 44 times sales, while Akamai reaches $4.32 billion and trades around 3.6 times sales. The gap isn’t just about the CDN business: growth, security, cloud, AI agents and future expectations are pulling apart the valuations of companies increasingly competing for the same tech budgets.
Cloudflare, Akamai and rival valuations in 30 seconds
- Cloudflare grew 36% last quarter, compared with 5% for Akamai.
- Akamai has higher revenue, but its legacy content-delivery business keeps shrinking.
- Zscaler trades near 8 times sales and is growing around 25%.
- CrowdStrike combines 24% growth with a valuation near 39 times sales.
- Palo Alto Networks shows the market also pays steep premiums for security platforms with AI exposure.
The initial comparison is striking. Cloudflare closed the second quarter with $696.1 million in revenue, up 36% year over year. Akamai brought in $1.1 billion, up 5%. In other words, Akamai is still considerably bigger by quarterly revenue, but the market is valuing each dollar Cloudflare generates far more highly.
The picture gets more interesting once you add Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, F5 and Fastly. They aren’t perfectly interchangeable competitors, but they all operate in some mix of security, networking, applications, edge, cloud or enterprise infrastructure.
The result shows that Cloudflare isn’t simply a pricier Akamai. Investors are assigning very different valuations based on expected growth and, increasingly, on whether each platform can carve out a relevant position in AI infrastructure.
From 3.6 times sales at Akamai to nearly 39 at CrowdStrike
The price-to-sales ratio lets you compare companies with very different profitability levels. It divides market cap by trailing twelve-month revenue.
It doesn’t say on its own whether a stock is cheap or expensive, but it’s useful for visualizing how much the market is paying for every dollar a company brings in.
Here’s the approximate picture as of September 2026:
| Company | TTM revenue | Revenue growth | Approx. market cap | Price/sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Akamai | $4.32B | 5.9% | $15.4B | ~3.6x |
| Fastly | $687M | 20.4% | $3.62B | ~5.3x |
| F5 | $3.31B | 9.4% | $22.56B | ~6.8x |
| Zscaler | $3.35B | 25.4% | $26.5B | ~8.0x |
| Palo Alto Networks | $11.48B | 24.5% | $275.9B | ~24.0x |
| CrowdStrike | $5.4B | 24.3% | ~$209.5B | ~38.8x |
| Cloudflare | $2.51B | 33.5% TTM | ~$111B | ~44x |
Market caps shift daily with stock prices, so these multiples should be read as a snapshot, not fixed values.
There’s another important caveat, too: not all of these companies sell the same thing.
Fastly and Cloudflare are most directly tied to edge and application delivery. Akamai combines CDN, security and cloud. F5 has a long-standing presence in application delivery and security. Zscaler is much more focused on Zero Trust and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). CrowdStrike started in endpoint protection and has expanded Falcon into identity, cloud, data and security operations. Palo Alto Networks has an even broader enterprise security platform.
AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Cisco also compete with parts of these companies, but putting them in the same multiples table wouldn’t be very useful, since their consolidated revenue comes from much broader businesses.
Akamai’s problem disappears once you look only at security and cloud
Comparing Akamai’s total revenue with Cloudflare’s doesn’t tell the whole story either.
In the second quarter of 2026, Akamai brought in $604 million in security, up 10%, and another $99 million in Cloud Infrastructure Services, up 39%. Combined, that’s $703 million.
Cloudflare booked $696.1 million during that same quarter.
In other words, Akamai’s security and cloud infrastructure businesses combined are already close in size, on a quarterly basis, to the whole of Cloudflare.
But there’s a decisive difference.
Akamai earned another $396 million through Delivery and other cloud applications, a business that shrank 6%.
| Akamai Q2 2026 | Revenue | Growth |
|---|---|---|
| Security | $604M | +10% |
| Cloud Infrastructure Services | $99M | +39% |
| Security + infrastructure | $703M | — |
| Delivery and other cloud apps | $396M | -6% |
| Total | $1.1B | +5% |
| Cloudflare total | $696.1M | +36% |
This offers a much more convincing explanation for the valuation gap.
A shareholder can’t just buy Akamai’s Cloud Infrastructure Services and its fastest-growing security products. They buy the whole company, including a legacy delivery business that’s shrinking.
Akamai is trying to change that mix. Cloud Infrastructure Services grew 40% in the first quarter and held at 39% in the second. The company also announced multi-year CIS contracts worth a combined $2.8 billion-plus during the first half of the year.
So simply describing Akamai as “the old internet business” wouldn’t be accurate either.
The company is transforming. The stock-market problem is that its new Akamai still sits alongside the old Akamai in the same set of books.
Cloudflare isn’t the only one getting a growth-and-AI premium
Adding CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks introduces another nuance.
CrowdStrike now moves around $5.4 billion in TTM revenue, more than double Cloudflare, growing 24.3%. Its market cap stood around $210 billion on September 11, roughly 38.8 times sales.
CrowdStrike’s most recent fiscal quarter reached $1.47 billion, and its ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) ended at $5.84 billion. The company is expanding Falcon from its roots in endpoint protection into cloud, identity, data, security operations and AI-related security. The market is willing to pay a steep premium for that model.
Palo Alto Networks presents a different picture. Its TTM revenue reaches roughly $11.48 billion and is growing 24.5%, while its market cap stood around $275.9 billion, implying about 24 times sales.
Its fiscal 2026 fourth quarter was especially strong: $3.41 billion in revenue, up 34%, and $9.1 billion of next-gen security ARR, up 63%.
The comparison shows that Cloudflare isn’t alone in premium-multiple territory. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks also reflect big expectations around security, platform consolidation and AI.
Zscaler offers a counterpoint.
It closed fiscal year 2026 with $3.353 billion in revenue, up 25%, but its market cap stood around $26.5 billion in September. Its multiple sits near 8 times sales, well below Cloudflare and CrowdStrike.
For fiscal 2027, Zscaler expects between $3.908 billion and $3.938 billion, roughly 16.6% to 17.5% growth.
The market isn’t just paying for current growth. It’s also trying to anticipate how long it can last.
The real debate is how much future growth is already priced in
Cloudflare has a feature that’s especially attractive for that narrative: it plays in several markets at once.
Its network provides CDN, DDoS protection, Web Application Firewall, Zero Trust, SASE, developer tools via Workers, storage, databases and a growing set of AI-related tools.
The company is also trying to position itself as infrastructure for an internet where a growing share of traffic comes from AI agents rather than people browsing directly.
Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s co-founder and CEO, leaned on exactly that idea while presenting second-quarter results. The company is building infrastructure, controls and tools aimed at machine-to-machine traffic and what it calls the agentic internet — part of the same push behind Cloudflare’s new wallet tools letting AI agents make secure purchases.
That helps explain the valuation. It doesn’t prove it’s justified.
Paying around $44 for every dollar of current revenue means assuming Cloudflare will keep growing fast for quite a while and will also manage to convert a sufficient share of that revenue into profit and cash flow.
It’s worth correcting a tempting claim from the original comparison here: you can’t simply conclude that Cloudflare needs eight years of 36% growth for its current valuation to resemble Akamai’s.
If it kept exactly 36% annual growth for eight years, $2.51 billion would mathematically become close to $29.4 billion in annual revenue. But the future valuation would also depend on margins, cash flow, dilution, interest rates, terminal growth and market cap at that point.
Beyond that, sustaining 36% compounded growth for eight years would be an extraordinarily demanding assumption for a company that would keep multiplying its revenue base.
The market isn’t literally saying that will happen.
It’s saying it attributes to Cloudflare a combination of growth potential, addressable market and technological optionality much larger than what it currently assigns to Akamai.
And that same reasoning explains why CrowdStrike trades near 39 times sales while Zscaler sits around 8 and Akamai barely tops 3.
The market isn’t simply valuing which company has more customers, more points of presence or more current revenue. It’s trying to decide who will capture the biggest share of enterprise spending on networking, security, cloud and AI over the next decade.
Widening the comparison beyond Cloudflare and Akamai paints a far more interesting picture.
Akamai is the cheapest of the group on a sales basis and Cloudflare one of the priciest, but between them sits an entire market assigning very different multiples to Fastly, F5, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike.
Cloudflare has to keep growing very fast to justify the expectations baked into its share price. Akamai has the opposite problem: it needs to prove that security and cloud infrastructure can grow fast enough to change the perception of a company whose legacy delivery business keeps shrinking.
In other words, the roughly $96 billion gap between their valuations doesn’t represent the internet both companies run today. It represents two radically different bets on what investors believe the internet will look like a few years from now.
This analysis compares company data and stock-market valuations and does not constitute investment advice.
