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Akamai CDN vs. Amazon CloudFront vs. Amazon Cognito

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Akamai CDN

    Score8.3 out of 10
    N/AAkamai Technologies, headquartered in Boston, offers Akamai Connected Cloud, a content delivery network (CDN) with a variety of services used to guarantee application, API, and media delivery.N/A

    Amazon CloudFront

    Score8.2 out of 10
    N/ACloudFront is the content delivery network (CDN) from Amazon Web Services.

    $0.02

    Amazon Cognito

    Score7.4 out of 10
    N/AAmazon Cognito is a mobile identity product that allows users to add user sign-up and sign-in to mobile and web apps, and authenticate users through social identity providers.

    $0.01

    Per MAU

    Pricing
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAmazon Cognito
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Over 5PB
    $0.02
    Next 524TB
    $0.03
    Next 4PB
    $0.03
    Next 350TB
    $0.04
    Next 100TB
    $0.06
    Next 40TB
    $0.08
    First 10TB
    $0.09
    Starting Price
    $0.01
    Per MAU
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAmazon Cognito
    Free Trial
    NoNoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAmazon Cognito
    Considered Multiple Products
    Akamai
    Chose Akamai CDN
    Akami CDN was far better than Amazon CDN, I don't see much security aspect on Amazon CloudFront Due to which we moved to Akami.
    Incentivized
    Chose Akamai CDN
    I don't have any direct experience with any of the other CDNs, so it's hard to say. Like any solution out there, each service will have its pros and cons. Some will fit your business needs more than others. Akamai is amongst the best and meets our business needs.
    Incentivized
    Chose Akamai CDN
    Akamai is a leader in CDN domain with adaptive media delivery and download delivery and it helps work by reducing the distance between your website and your target audience. It also provides 24X7 support services.
    Incentivized
    Chose Akamai CDN
    We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more …
    Incentivized
    Amazon AWS
    Chose Amazon CloudFront
    If you are using other AWS services, then no other CDN can compete with AWS CloudFront. Its integration with WAF, Route53, ACM allow it to provide a whole ecosystem for building websites and using a CDN. It gives developers access to inexpensive, pay-as-you-go pricing. …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon CloudFront
    We ended up selecting CloudFront because we were already using an Amazon stack. To be honest, since we were already in the ecosystem there was little reason to deviate once we saw pricing was comparable.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon CloudFront
    CloudFront is well-suited for a particular use case with its native tie-ins to other Amazon/AWS services, like S3. If choosing from a platform-specific CDN, we tend to go with whichever CDN is available for use on that platform (e.g. Google or Azure). In rare cases we might …
    Incentivized
    Amazon AWS
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    10 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    13 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    90%
    Delivers good value for the price
    9 Answers
    90%
    Delivers good value for the price
    9 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    10 Answers
    92%
    Happy with the feature set
    12 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    9 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    10 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    10 Answers
    91%
    Implementation went as expected
    10 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAmazon Cognito
    Small Businesses
    Amazon CloudFront
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Google Cloud CDN
    Score6.2 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Google Cloud CDN
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Google Cloud CDN
    Score6.2 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    Azure CDN
    Score7.6 out of 10
    Azure CDN
    Score7.6 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAmazon Cognito
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.3
    (16 ratings)
    9.0
    (17 ratings)
    8.0
    (15 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.5
    (2 ratings)
    7.0
    (4 ratings)
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAmazon Cognito
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Akamai
    Akamai is a well-established brand name with a great product. It meets and many time exceeds the needs for global content delivery and security management layer at the edge. Fine grain security tuning seems cumbersome as the definition of the app keeps changing. It also requires an investment of time for the setup which doesn't necessarily make sense for smaller scale scenarios. Some products offered by AWS, Azure or the Google Cloud can be more tightly integrated with cloud provider offerings thus easier to configure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    Amazon CloudFront is the perfect solution for any type of company. If a company is small or medium size, CloudFront offers 1 TB monthly free bandwidth which is more than for any small and medium size companies. If we compare the speed of CloudFront with other CDN, CloudFront is way ahead of their competitors and with 1 TB free bandwidth. If someone is ready to invest time in CloudFront documentation then he/she definitely go for it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    Well Suited
    1. B2C mobile and web apps with a high number of users.
    2. Cheaper and cost-effective.
    3. If the other pieces of the infra are already using AWS services like Lambda, S3, Pinpoint, etc.
    Not Suited For:
    1. Advanced use-cases (Biometrics based authentication) Email, and other MFA channels.
    2. For any use-cases needing SCIM.
    3. Customized flows of SSO, and MFA will need a layer on Lambda and other AWS services.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Akamai
    • Content offloading - once rules are set up within Akamai you don't need to even think about how many images or large JavaScript or CSS files (for example) are being served from your own estate, Akamai takes care of it all via rules that are quick, easy and flexible.
    • Page caching - for pages that don't change very often Akamai allows you to set up rules, quickly and easily, to serve up your page content for you, which takes even more load away from your origin servers.
    • Quick rollback - the Akamai system allows easy testing of rules and changes via a staging system, and also offers a quick rollback option, which is perfect for the rare occasions when something has been set up incorrectly.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • if a website’s static data are based in New York City, people in Boston will get the content faster than people in San Francisco or Tokyo. The farther away customers are from a company’s data center, the slower the website or application loads. This problem can be fixed with a content delivery network like Amazon CloudFront
    • When a visitor requests a file from your website, Amazon CloudFront automatically sends the request to a copy of the file at the nearest edge location. This results in faster download times.
    • You may have great hosting but it doesn’t have the capacity or scalability offered by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. The better CDNs like Amazon CloudFront offer higher availability, lower network latency and lower packet loss.
    • Amazon CloudFront provides 24/7 email and phone support
    • Amazon CloudFront Free Tier allows you to free up to 50 GB of data transfer and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS requests / month for one year.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • Strong integration with React.js and client-side applications
    • Easy to bridge Cognito identities with the rest of the AWS ecosystem
    • Easy to store user profile data directly in Cognito rather than having to build additional services/endpoints
    • Easy integration with AWS Lambda to extend and add sophistication to the service
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Akamai
    • The interface in their control centre could be a bit more user-friendly with some of the settings in places that you wouldn't expect them to be. The search offsets this problem to an extent but it's still sometimes slower than you'd like to find what you are looking for.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • Kinda of costlier when compared to rivals providing the same service
    • The setup of Distribution is kinda little complicated, need good exposure before setting up the service
    • Sometimes we can go with S3 Delivery service rather than Cloudfront if the website is providing static content and its way cheaper
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • Amazon Cognito has a bit of a learning curve. You need to learn its concepts and terminology. The documentation does not describe some topics comprehensively.
    • Some Console screens would benefit from improved search and filtering options.
    • When another AWS product (e.g., SageMaker) configures Cognito on your behalf, it is not clear what you're getting. For example, the expiration of a temporary password was configured but never communicated.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Akamai
    No answers on this topic
    Amazon AWS
    Easy way to integrate a CDN within the AWS infrastructure. It allows further customization based on company needs.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    Amazon Cognito is easy to use and implement if you don't need to implement custom policies. But if your security team requires something outside the box, then implementation becomes complicated and you risk wasting time. There is no option for customizable regex for passwords, which is a major deficiency. The standard password policy, allow to choose the length of the password, if it should contains at least one number, one special character, one uppercase letter and one lowercase letter.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Akamai
    Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    CloudFront is a good CDN solution. It can be a bit complicated to implement depending on your needs, but AWS tech support is great. You get to avoid a ton of upfront costs by going with CloudFront. It works best in conjunction with other AWS services in your infrastructure. Once you set it up, you won't need to do much to maintain it. It just works.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    Community support is excellent, many times even better and quicker then the offical AWS support. I really cannot recommend community support enough! Apart from that the service is relativily easy to use and does not have a huge learning curve. Examples are easy to follow and will help you start using the service.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Akamai
    We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more likely to suggest CloudFlare (which has a free tier) or an integrated offering from a cloud provider, like Cloudfront.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    Amazon has always been creative and leading, and I have been using its services for years. They are very reassuring and have fast and responsive support--you can call them from any time zone to respond quickly. High security on servers, open hands on changes, and increasing and decreasing server resources and features.
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    They are ideal tools to create a secure and unique login experience for our applications. Thanks to its API authorization, Amazon Cognito ensures connections to applications that are secure.It is easy to use and provides easy access to files and applications that you need to complete your goal.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Akamai
    • Akamai RoI improved over a period of times since it comes with heavy costs, however global deliveries in over 100 counties and global web platforms usage helps improve RoI
    • With the complex UI challenges, ROI could be impacted negatively when you have to invest in operations and time.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • RoI for using CloudFront is immense. You can use it for all your certificate management and static asset management of your websites using CloudFront.
    • It is as good or better than any other CDN provider with multi-region support across the world using AWS regions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • ROI is great for Amazon Cognito Overall.
    • It is included in the AWS Free Tier so you can use it for a good amount without paying, so the software can be tested beforehand.
    • The paid pricing is also affordable, so a positive impact on ROI.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots