Akamai CDN vs. AWS WAF

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Akamai CDN
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Akamai 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
AWS WAF
Score 6.8 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Web Services offers AWS WAF (web application firewall) to protect web applications from malicious behavior that might impede the applications functioning and performance, with customizable rules to prevent known harmful behaviors and an API for creating and deploying web security rules.
$0.60
per 1 million requests
Pricing
Akamai CDNAWS WAF
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Resource Type - Request
$0.60
per 1 million requests
Resource Type - Rule
$1.00
per month (prorated hourly)
Resource Type - Web ACL
$5.00
per month (prorated hourly)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Akamai CDNAWS WAF
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Akamai CDNAWS WAF
Considered Both Products
Akamai CDN

No answer on this topic

AWS WAF
Chose AWS WAF
When it comes to integration with AWS resources, we found that AWS WAF can easily integrate with CloudFront, API gateway, ALB, etc. When we analyzed other products, we found that the integration can be a little more difficult than just a click of a button. However, the pricing …
Chose AWS WAF
Easy of use. Setup and configuration is fairly quick. There are the usual advantages of it being a cloud solution where you can buy into the solution, configure it and set it up and get it up and running. If you are already a subscriber to AWS, having a native service has …
Best Alternatives
Akamai CDNAWS WAF
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Score 7.8 out of 10
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Akamai CDNAWS WAF
Likelihood to Recommend
7.3
(16 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(2 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Akamai CDNAWS 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.
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Amazon AWS
Well Suited: 1. To prevent DDOS attacks: AWS WAF has a lot of managed rules to prevent DDOS attacks based on traffic origination from a particular IP or IP reputation etc. 2. To rate-limit requests: Well it sounds familiar like preventing DDOS attacks, but it can also be used to rate-limit requests originating from the same IP address. We have used this feature so that we can test multiple failure scenarios for our application. 3. To prevent Data crawling: The BOT control feature allows us to prevent BOTs from crawling data on our websites. Not Suited: 1. To integrate applications outside of AWS Cloud: As I mentioned in my previous comments, this type of integration requires a custom implementation of another AWS resource.
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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.
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Amazon AWS
  • Protect any application against the most common attacks.
  • Provides better visibility of web traffic.
  • It allows us to control the traffic in different ways in which it is enabled or blocked through the implementation of security rules developed personally according to our needs.
  • It is able to block common attacks such as SQL code injection.
  • It allows defining specific rules for applications, thus increasing web security as they are developed.
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.
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Amazon AWS
  • AWS WAF is a bit costly if used for single applications.
  • they should provide attack-wise protection, like if my certain type of application is vulnerable to DDOS then I should be able to buy WAF, especially for that attack.
  • CLI tool to test in offline mode if possible.
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Likelihood to Renew
Akamai
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
We have been using AWS WAF for the past 3 years in front of our websites. We find it useful in preventing data crawling, DDOS attacks, etc on our websites, and hence we are going to use it in the future as well. AWS WAF is one of the best Firewalls in business.
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Usability
Akamai
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
The product is highly scalable. It is easy to configure the rules and thereby helps us to mitigate many vulnerabilities. The interface and programming of the firewall provisions were easy to setup. Amazon clearly spent a lot of time figuring this out and perfecting it. It allows users to do customized configurations based on their needs. It provides protection against a number of security issues like XSS, SQL injection, etc. I would definitely recommend this for protecting your infra as you scale, since this basically protects and filters all requests hitting your application server.
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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.
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Amazon AWS
If you're intending to use AWS WAF, I would say that you absolutely should sign up for support. AWS Support is excellent and they can help you in a really good way to solve your issues.
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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.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
Easy of use. Setup and configuration is fairly quick. There are the usual advantages of it being a cloud solution where you can buy into the solution, configure it and set it up and get it up and running. If you are already a subscriber to AWS, having a native service has its advantages.
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.
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Amazon AWS
  • Implementing this AWS service has been really favorable because when creating custom rules we give more specific protection to our applications against vulnerabilities that cause them to be consuming other resources or running with errors.
  • It allows us to control the traffic of our business applications, which is really favorable, given that in this way we can decide that you can access them and not.
  • It is extremely advantageous that we can establish rules in a centralized way since it saves time, as well as it allows us to protect several applications at the same time by reusing the rules established above.
  • It allows you to save time and money because we only pay for what is used.
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ScreenShots