Cloudflare Dominates European CDN Market, Serving Nearly 90% of CDN-Using Companies

Cloudflare's Dominance in Europe

CipherCue's analysis of European companies revealed that Cloudflare is the primary Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider for a significant majority of businesses. Out of 44,143 companies identified as using a CDN, 39,547 (89.6%) are fronted by Cloudflare. This figure is slightly higher than W3Techs' global estimate of 84.1% for identified reverse proxy providers.

Market Share of Other CDN Providers

While Cloudflare holds the top position, other CDN providers have a smaller presence. Amazon, primarily through CloudFront, ranks second with 3,112 detected users. Fastly, a dedicated CDN provider, is third with 1,299 users, and Akamai, an established name in the industry, is fourth with 396 users. The total counts for vendors can exceed the number of companies because some companies use multiple CDN services.

Country-Specific Variations

Cloudflare's market share varies across European countries, though it remains the majority provider in all examined regions. Its share ranges from approximately 80% in Spain and Ireland to about 95% in the Netherlands. The United Kingdom has the largest absolute number of Cloudflare-using companies, with 15,846 businesses. Germany represents the lowest share among large markets at 81.4%.

Methodology and Scope

The study focused exclusively on companies that actively use a CDN, excluding those that serve their websites directly from their origin servers. The detection method counts companies under each CDN vendor if multiple are used, which can inflate the numbers for smaller vendors but does not affect Cloudflare's overall share calculation against the total CDN-using set.