Akamai has direct connections to those "difficult" ISPs, CloudFlare uses transit to reach them. To provide an example: transit to DTAG via GTT (CloudFlare) is

Akamai has direct connections to those "difficult" ISPs, CloudFlare uses transit to reach them. To provide an example: transit to DTAG via GTT (CloudFlare) is always saturated at peak hours. So Akamai has a big advantage (direct connection) if you want to reach Deutsche Telekom customers.