August 24, 2026

CDNShark vs Bunny CDN: Where Bunny Wins, and Where the Products Diverge

Bunny is the closest thing CDNShark has to a peer: developer-first, self-serve, honest pricing page, no sales call. So this comparison is mostly about architecture and scope, and it opens with the part where Bunny wins.

Start with the uncomfortable one: bandwidth cost

Bunny is cheaper per gigabyte than CDNShark's paid tier. Not marginally.

BunnyCDNShark
Minimum spend$1/month$0 (Free) / $9.99 (Basic)
Standard network, EU & NA$0.01/GBFree tier: $0.005/GB
Basic: $0.02/GB
Asia & Oceania$0.03/GBsame rate, no regional pricing
Middle East & Africa$0.06/GBsame rate, no regional pricing
Volume network (10 PoPs)$0.005/GB first 500 TB
Request feesNoneNone

Figures as of August 2026.

If your decision is "cheapest bytes delivered," stop reading and use Bunny's volume tier. CDNShark's Basic overage rate of $0.02/GB is double Bunny's standard rate and four times its volume rate. The one place the comparison flips is flat regional pricing: CDNShark charges the same per GB everywhere, so an audience concentrated in Africa or the Middle East costs $0.02/GB rather than $0.06/GB.

Two networks, two very different tiering strategies

Bunny solves the cost/performance tradeoff by making you choose the network: a 119-PoP Standard tier, or a 10-PoP Volume tier at half the price. You pick per pull zone, explicitly.

CDNShark has one network of 11 edges and makes the tradeoff inside the router, per connection, without exposing a choice:


Bunny's model is more honest to the user: you can see exactly what you bought. CDNShark's model gives you one price and one endpoint, and the router decides. Which you prefer is a real preference, not a marketing point — but if you want to guarantee that a request is served from the closest possible city, Bunny lets you buy that and CDNShark does not.

Protocol support

Checked live against both edges rather than quoted from docs:

BunnyCDNShark
HTTP/2 (ALPN)Yes — negotiates h2Yes — negotiates h2
BrotliYes — serves content-encoding: brNo — gzip only
TLS 1.3YesYes
Edge scriptingYesNo
PoPs119 standard / 10 volume11

Bunny still wins this table, but by less than it did: HTTP/2 landed on CDNShark's edges in August 2026, closing the largest gap. Brotli remains a real one — it typically saves another 15–20% over gzip on text assets, and CDNShark does not offer it yet.

Where CDNShark is a different product, not a worse one

Anycast DNS is included, not a separate product

Bunny DNS is excellent and is billed separately. CDNShark's authoritative DNS runs on its own anycast prefix — 208.78.78.78, Technitium behind BIRD2 BGP, on nameservers distributed across Fremont, New Jersey, Kansas, London, and Sydney — and it comes with the plan. The data plane sits on two further prefixes, 208.78.78.79 and 208.78.79.79, deliberately announced through separate transit providers so a bad path on one does not take the service down.

Private origin tunnels

Bunny has no equivalent. CDNShark's tunnel lets an origin with no public IP and no inbound firewall rule serve traffic — the connector dials out over WireGuard, the edge reaches it by putting the tunnel ID in the TLS SNI, and the gateway demuxes on that. Two included on the free plan, five on Basic, 25 on Enterprise, $1.99/month each beyond that. There is a full architectural writeup in the private-tunnel post; the short version is that the customer's WireGuard private key never leaves their machine and the edges hold no per-customer tunnel state.

Scope of the account

Bunny sells CDN, Storage, Stream, DNS, and Optimizer as composable products you assemble and pay for individually. CDNShark sells one account that contains CDN pull zones, anycast DNS, S3-compatible object storage on Garage clusters, HLS video with signed playback tokens, origin tunnels, and a CAPTCHA — 10 domains and 50 pull zones on the $9.99 plan.

Composable is better engineering. Bundled is better billing. Pick the one that matches how you'd rather spend your time.

Config lives on the edge

Each CDNShark edge runs its own Redis master holding one JSON document per hostname — origin, cache rules, WAF mode, geo and IP policy, hotlink rules, edge redirects. The Lua reads it per request, falls back to the control-plane API if Redis is unreachable, re-syncs every 15 minutes, and self-heals every 5. An edge continues serving correct config with the control plane entirely offline.

Limitations, stated plainly

  • Bunny has 119 PoPs; CDNShark has 11 — Fremont, Kansas, Beauharnois, London, Gravelines (×2), Limburg, Warsaw, Delhi, Sylhet, Singapore. No South America, no Africa, no Japan, Korea, or Australia.
  • No HTTP/3 or Brotli. HTTP/2 is live as of August 2026; compression is gzip only.
  • Higher per-GB cost on the paid tier, as detailed above.
  • No image optimizer. Bunny Optimizer has no CDNShark counterpart.
  • No edge scripting.
  • Three tunnel gateway regions (US-West, Europe, Asia-Pacific) against 11 edge PoPs, so an origin far from all three still reaches its gateway the long way round.

Who should pick which

Choose Bunny if bandwidth cost dominates your bill, if you need broad PoP coverage in regions CDNShark does not serve, if HTTP/3 and Brotli matter for your page weight, or if you want to buy delivery as a clean single-purpose product.

Choose CDNShark if you want DNS, CDN, storage, video, tunnels, and CAPTCHA on one account and one invoice; if you need private origin tunnels; if flat regional pricing suits your audience distribution; or if you'd rather run ten domains under one $9.99 plan than assemble per-product billing.

Bunny is a very good CDN. CDNShark is trying to be a smaller number of bills. Those are different goals, and only one of them is about bytes per second.