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Akamai CDN vs. Amazon CloudFront vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

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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

    Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/AThe Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF) is based on technology acquired with Incapsula and the former WebSphere WAF.N/A
    Pricing
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontImperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    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
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontImperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    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 CloudFrontImperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    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
    Imperva, a Thales company
    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
    Best Alternatives
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontImperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    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
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
    Score9.4 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Azure CDN
    Score7.6 out of 10
    Azure CDN
    Score7.6 out of 10
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
    Score9.4 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontImperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.3
    (16 ratings)
    9.0
    (17 ratings)
    9.5
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.5
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.5
    (2 ratings)
    7.0
    (4 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Akamai CDNAmazon CloudFrontImperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
    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
    Imperva, a Thales company
    I recommend Imperva specially if you have a big environment with thousand of websites because of its ease to use and availability. Imperva delivers a reliable solution with great capability to contain cyber attacks and even fraud preventions in some cases. The only scenario it's less appropriate is if your focus is anti fraud instead of a solution to block cyber attacks.
    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
    Imperva, a Thales company
    • Block some dynamic attacks such as SQL injection.
    • Block unfriendly accesses based on geographic source.
    • Helps us implement SSL in cases where the original server can't (yet).
    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
    Imperva, a Thales company
    • Attack Correlation Validation - This specific policy produces a lot of false positives as well as the SQL injection policies. Of course it is difficult to tell what a legitimate query is on a public facing web app.
    • Profiling - I tend to spend more time than any other feature tuning the Web App Profiles. Plugins are used to help cope with this, but on extremely large web apps we are forced to turn off the profiling feature.
    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
    Imperva, a Thales company
    It's easy and works great. The onboarding process, although easy, can sometimes take too long for SSL and domain validation, but its not a big deal.
    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
    Imperva, a Thales company
    We haven't needed support from Imperva since implementation. But during that time, their personnel were very quick to respond to questions. Since then, it's been largely doing its thing for us (which is exactly what we'd hoped).
    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
    Imperva, a Thales company
    I believe there's no comparison as Imperva is a much more reliable and powerfull WAF. AWS WAF lacks of several features Imperva have and is not that simple to configure neither have a clean web console. I consider Imperva WAF a whole superior level of cyber security solution and it's consider to be one of the leader in this segment.
    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
    Imperva, a Thales company
    • Meet compliance requirements - Check.
    • Better Insight into web application - Absolutely great, checks all the traffic against RFC standards and will alert on common development mistakes that duplicate application traffic or provide attack vectors for potential attackers.
    • Have had several issues blocking a customer without producing alerts, while it happened only one week out of 2 years of working with the devices, it did produce a lot of headaches.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots