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Akamai CDN vs. Amazon CloudFront vs. Azure API Management

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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

    Azure API Management

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft's Azure API Management supports creation of API.

    $0.04

    per 10,000 calls

    Pricing
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAzure API Management
    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
    Consumption
    0.042 per 10,000 calls
    Lightweight and serverless version of API Management service, billed per execution
    Developer
    $48.04
    per month Non-production use cases and evaluations
    Basic
    $147.17
    per month Entry-level production use cases
    Standard
    $686.72
    per month Medium-volume production use cases
    Premium
    $2,795.17
    per month High-volume or enterprise production use cases
    Isolated
    TBA
    per month Enterprise production use cases requiring high degree of isolation
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAzure API Management
    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 CloudFrontAzure API Management
    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
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    10 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    90%
    Delivers good value for the price
    9 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    10 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    9 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    10 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAzure API Management
    API Management
    Comparison of API Management features of Akamai CDN and Amazon CloudFront and Azure API Management
    Feature
    Akamai CDN
    -
    Ratings
    Amazon CloudFront
    -
    Ratings
    Azure API Management
    8.0
    4 Ratings
    5% below category average
    API access control00 Ratings00 Ratings8.94 Ratings
    Rate limits and usage policies00 Ratings00 Ratings5.44 Ratings
    API usage data00 Ratings00 Ratings8.94 Ratings
    API user onboarding00 Ratings00 Ratings9.03 Ratings
    API versioning00 Ratings00 Ratings8.94 Ratings
    Usage billing and payments00 Ratings00 Ratings5.23 Ratings
    API monitoring and logging00 Ratings00 Ratings9.84 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAzure API Management
    Small Businesses
    Amazon CloudFront
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Google Cloud CDN
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Amazon API Gateway
    Score7.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Google Cloud CDN
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Google Cloud CDN
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Amazon API Gateway
    Score7.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Azure CDN
    Score7.6 out of 10
    Azure CDN
    Score7.6 out of 10
    OCI API Management
    Score7.9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAzure API Management
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.3
    (16 ratings)
    9.0
    (17 ratings)
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.5
    (2 ratings)
    7.0
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontAzure API Management
    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
    Microsoft
    APIM is useful for the standard scenarios:
    1) Securing your back-end APIs - If you have a legacy back-end web service that has a basic authentication scheme, you can add some additional security by placing APIM in front, and requiring subscription keys. Leverage your existing firewall to ensure only your APIM instance can communicate with your back-end API, and you've basically added a layer of protection.
    2) Lift and shift - there are always going to be clients that don't want to update their clients to use a newer API; in some cases you can make a newer API look like an older one by implementing some complex policies in APIM. You can also do the opposite, making older APIs look new, such as making an XML back-end accept both JSON and XML.
    3) Centralizing your APIs - if you've acquired another company and want to make their API set look as if it's a part of the larger whole, APIM is an easy way to provide a consistent front-end interface for developers.
    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
    Microsoft
    • Easy commissioning of APIs.
    • Great policies to control access.
    • Easy mock services for testing.
    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
    Microsoft
    • Lack of robustness is a bit of an issue. Several other providers offer more options and capabilities, but then, they are lacking in interface ease.
    • As with anything Azure, pricing is really hard to stay on top of. I always find that you really don’t know what you’re paying for until you get the bill. Having an excellent Azure Administrator can help resolve that.
    • Integrating with app services outside of Azure can be a challenge, or at least much more challenging than just using Azure App Services.
    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
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Microsoft
    Azure APIM vs Amazon API Gateway:
    1) Azure APIM was a complete package that included a developer portal.
    2) We are very Microsoft centric - so the Microsoft product suite aligned very well with our business needs.
    3) It was faster and easier to stand up Azure APIM for testing than it was for the Amazon API Gateway.
    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
    Microsoft
    • We can always think of positive ROI impact on business
    • It helps to easily facilitate the design, deployment, and maintenance of our APIs
    Read full review
    ScreenShots