Pay-as-you-go or a monthly minimum — which suits your traffic?
This is the largest cost difference in the category and it is decided before any feature comparison.
Bunny.net charges from about €0.01 per gigabyte with no commitment and no minimum, and KeyCDN from about €0.04 per gigabyte on the same basis. A small site serving 50GB a month pays a few euros, and a month with no traffic costs nothing.
CDN77 starts from about €199 per month, or pay-as-you-go, and is built for media companies and streaming platforms where that floor is trivial against the volume. LeaseWeb quotes custom pricing by bandwidth and requirements, which is the enterprise model.
The arithmetic is stark rather than nuanced: for a business site or a blog, Bunny.net costs roughly what a coffee costs and CDN77 costs a hundred times more for the same delivery. For a video platform pushing hundreds of terabytes, the relationship inverts and the negotiated rate matters more than the list price.
Work out your actual monthly egress before comparing anything else, because it determines which half of this category you are shopping in.
Why does a CDN operator's jurisdiction matter?
Because a CDN sits in front of everything and sees every request. Which page a visitor loaded, from which IP address, with which browser, at what time — that is a complete access log of your site's traffic, held by a third party.
With a US-established provider, that log is reachable under the US CLOUD Act regardless of which edge server handled the request. With Bunny.net in Slovenia, Gcore in Luxembourg, CDN77 in Czechia or LeaseWeb in the Netherlands, it is not — the operator is EU-established and the processing is intra-EEA.
KeyCDN is Swiss, operating under the Swiss Federal Data Protection Act and an adequacy decision, which is outside the EU and outside US reach but not intra-EEA processing.
For most sites this is a modest consideration. For a site whose visitors would be compromised by their reading being known — a health resource, a legal advice service, a journalism outlet — the CDN log is the most complete record of that anywhere, and where it lives is the whole question.
How many points of presence do you actually need?
Fewer than the marketing implies, and the right ones matter more than the count.
Gcore runs 180+ points of presence and Bunny.net 110+, CDN77 85+ and KeyCDN 47+. Those numbers describe global coverage, but what determines your visitors' experience is whether there is a node near the places they actually are.
For a European business serving European customers, a network with excellent European coverage beats one with more nodes spread worldwide. Bunny.net has a strong European presence, CDN77 strong EU coverage, and LeaseWeb operates from multiple EU locations including the Netherlands, Germany and the UK.
Where the count genuinely matters is latency-sensitive global delivery — gaming and live streaming, where a hundred milliseconds is the difference between playable and not. Gcore is built for exactly that, with the largest network here and edge computing to run logic at the node rather than round-tripping to an origin.
The practical test is to check node locations against your actual analytics rather than counting them.
What else should a CDN do besides caching?
The useful extras are the ones that remove another vendor rather than adding a line item.
Bunny.net is the broadest here for a small team: edge storage so origin files live on the same network, Bunny Stream for video hosting and delivery, DNS, image optimisation and DDoS protection — all on one account and one bill. For a business that would otherwise buy a CDN, an object store, a video host and a DNS provider separately, that consolidation is worth more than a fractional price difference.
KeyCDN focuses on the delivery details that actually affect performance: real-time analytics rather than delayed reports, instant purge so a corrected page propagates immediately rather than after a TTL, automatic WebP conversion, HTTP/2 and free SSL.
Gcore extends furthest in the other direction with edge computing, cloud VMs, DNS hosting and load balancing, making it a platform rather than a delivery layer.
CDN77 specialises in video streaming with real-time analytics, and LeaseWeb integrates CDN with dedicated servers, cloud hosting and colocation for organisations wanting one infrastructure provider.
What breaks when you put a CDN in front of a site?
Cache invalidation, and it breaks in the same way every time. You fix a page, the CDN keeps serving the old version, and someone spends an hour convinced the deployment failed.
The mitigation is a purge mechanism you can actually reach from your deployment process. KeyCDN offers instant purge with cache control, and every provider here has an API — wiring purge into your deploy rather than doing it by hand in a dashboard is what stops this recurring.
The second failure is caching what should not be cached. A logged-in page served from cache to the wrong visitor is a data breach, not a bug, and it happens when cache rules are written by URL pattern without accounting for cookies or authorisation headers. Test authenticated routes explicitly before going live.
The third is assuming the CDN fixes a slow origin. A CDN accelerates static assets; a page that takes three seconds to generate still takes three seconds for the first visitor at each node. Fix the origin first, then cache it.
