TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    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

    Google App Engine

    Score8.4 out of 10
    N/AGoogle App Engine is Google Cloud's platform-as-a-service offering. It features pay-per-use pricing and support for a broad array of programming languages.

    $0.05

    Per Hour Per Instance

    Microsoft Azure

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

    $29

    per month

    Pricing
    Akamai CDNGoogle App EngineMicrosoft Azure
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Starting Price
    $0.05
    Per Hour Per Instance
    Max Price
    $0.30
    Per Hour Per Instance
    Developer
    $29
    per month
    Standard
    $100
    per month
    Professional Direct
    $1000
    per month
    Basic
    Free
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Akamai CDNGoogle App EngineMicrosoft Azure
    Free Trial
    NoNoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——The free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Akamai CDNGoogle App EngineMicrosoft Azure
    Considered Multiple Products
    Akamai
    Chose Akamai CDN
    Akamai offers sophisticated security and defense layers in addition to its content delivery network. Its focus on security is well known and beats offerings from AWS and Azure to punches. It redefined the cloud security market by extending its core offering.
    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
    Google
    Chose Google App Engine
    Compared with Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine requires a more complicated development environment setup. It's not as simple as using Visual Studio 2015 with Azure SDK. There are multiple IDE on the market to choose from for developing apps for Google App Engine. JetBrains …
    Incentivized
    Chose Google App Engine
    If you have a small team which is also responsible for development of the product then surely go for it. And if you have a larger team with dedicated person to take care of deployments. Go for cheaper options such as compute engine or AWS (be sure to do your research on pricing …
    Incentivized
    Chose Google App Engine
    We were on another much smaller cloud provider and decided to make the switch for several reasons - stability, breadth of services, and security. In reviewing options, GCP provided the best mixtures of meeting our needs while also balancing the overall cost of the service as …
    Incentivized
    Chose Google App Engine
    I think that Microsoft and Amazon are simply investing more in their offerings, and there are a bunch of cool PaaS solutions out there as well. Google App Engine is solid, and is probably the right choice for some projects. But ultimately one should evaluate each platform …
    Incentivized
    Chose Google App Engine
    • No management of operating system
    • Cheaper
    Incentivized
    Microsoft
    Chose Microsoft Azure
    We have settled with Microsoft Azure considered its effective administration and the ability to data visualization and analysis, together with the top-notch security/stability.
    Incentivized
    Chose Microsoft Azure
    As we are working mostly on .net projects and Microsoft has very nice integration available for the latest versions, we can get all the latest version for hosting at the earliest time. We can use the same in .Net Core. This should be a very well known product for our any .net …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    92%
    Would buy again
    12 Answers
    92%
    Would buy again
    34 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    13 Answers
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    92%
    Happy with the feature set
    12 Answers
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    35 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    10 Answers
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    24 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    92%
    Implementation went as expected
    12 Answers
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    34 Answers
    Features
    Akamai CDNGoogle App EngineMicrosoft Azure
    Platform-as-a-Service
    Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Akamai CDN and Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure
    Feature
    Akamai CDN
    -
    Ratings
    Google App Engine
    9.5
    32 Ratings
    20% above category average
    Microsoft Azure
    -
    Ratings
    Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings9.018 Ratings00 Ratings
    Scalability00 Ratings10.032 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform management overhead00 Ratings9.032 Ratings00 Ratings
    Workflow engine capability00 Ratings8.024 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform access control00 Ratings10.031 Ratings00 Ratings
    Services-enabled integration00 Ratings10.028 Ratings00 Ratings
    Development environment creation00 Ratings10.029 Ratings00 Ratings
    Development environment replication00 Ratings10.028 Ratings00 Ratings
    Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings9.028 Ratings00 Ratings
    Issue recovery00 Ratings9.026 Ratings00 Ratings
    Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings10.029 Ratings00 Ratings
    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
    Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Akamai CDN and Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure
    Feature
    Akamai CDN
    -
    Ratings
    Google App Engine
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Azure
    8.4
    27 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings00 Ratings8.126 Ratings
    Dynamic scaling00 Ratings00 Ratings8.725 Ratings
    Elastic load balancing00 Ratings00 Ratings8.624 Ratings
    Pre-configured templates00 Ratings00 Ratings8.225 Ratings
    Monitoring tools00 Ratings00 Ratings8.326 Ratings
    Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings00 Ratings8.424 Ratings
    Operating system support00 Ratings00 Ratings8.926 Ratings
    Security controls00 Ratings00 Ratings8.626 Ratings
    Automation00 Ratings00 Ratings8.224 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Akamai CDNGoogle App EngineMicrosoft Azure
    Small Businesses
    Amazon CloudFront
    Score8.2 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Foundry
    Score8.5 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Object Storage
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Google Cloud CDN
    Score6.2 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Private
    Score9.6 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Azure CDN
    Score7.6 out of 10
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score8.6 out of 10
    SAP on IBM Cloud
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Akamai CDNGoogle App EngineMicrosoft Azure
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.3
    (16 ratings)
    9.0
    (36 ratings)
    8.7
    (96 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.3
    (8 ratings)
    10.0
    (17 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (8 ratings)
    8.3
    (36 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.8
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.5
    (2 ratings)
    8.4
    (12 ratings)
    9.0
    (27 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Akamai CDNGoogle App EngineMicrosoft Azure
    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
    Google
    App Engine is such a good resource for our team both internally and externally. You have complete control over your app, how it runs, when it runs, and more while Google handles the back-end, scaling, orchestration, and so on. If you are serving a tool, system, or web page, it's perfect. If you are serving something back-end, like an automation or ETL workflow, you should be a little considerate or careful with how you are structuring that job. For instance, the Standard environment in Google App Engine will present you with a resource limit for your server calls. If your operations are known to take longer than, say, 10 minutes or so, you may be better off moving to the Flexible environment (which may be a little more expensive but certainly a little more powerful and a little less limited) or even moving that workflow to something like Google Compute Engine or another managed service.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
    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
    Google
    • Quick to develop, quick to deploy. You can be up and running on Google App Engine in no time.
    • Flexible. We use Java for some services and Node.js for others.
    • Great security features. We have been consistently impressed with the security and authentication features of Google App Engine.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
    • You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
    • The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
    • The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
    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
    Google
    • There is a slight learning curve to getting used to code on Google App Engine.
    • Google Cloud Datastore is Google's NoSQL database in the cloud that your applications can use. NoSQL databases, by design, cannot give handle complex queries on the data. This means that sometimes you need to think carefully about your data structures - so that you can get the results you need in your code.
    • Setting up billing is a little annoying. It does not seem to save billing information to your account so you can re-use the same information across different Cloud projects. Each project requires you to re-enter all your billing information (if required)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
    • The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
    • Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Akamai
    No answers on this topic
    Google
    App Engine is a solid choice for deployments to Google Cloud Platform that do not want to move entirely to a Kubernetes-based container architecture using a different Google product. For rapid prototyping of new applications and fairly straightforward web application deployments, we'll continue to leverage the capabilities that App Engine affords us.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
    Read full review
    Usability
    Akamai
    No answers on this topic
    Google
    I had to revisit the UI after a year of just setting up and forgetting. The UI got some improvements but the amount of navigation we have to go through to setup a new app has increased but also got easier to setup. Gemini now is integrated and make getting answers faster
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Akamai
    No answers on this topic
    Google
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
    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
    Google
    Good amount of documentation available for Google App Engine and in general there is large developer community around Google App Engine and other products it interacts with. Lastly, Google support is great in general. No issues so far with them.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Akamai
    No answers on this topic
    Google
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
    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
    Google
    We were on another much smaller cloud provider and decided to make the switch for several reasons - stability, breadth of services, and security. In reviewing options, GCP provided the best mixtures of meeting our needs while also balancing the overall cost of the service as compared to the other major players in Azure and AWS.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
    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
    Google
    • Effective employee adoption through ease of use.
    • Effective integration to other java based frameworks.
    • Time to market is very quick. Build, test, deploy and use.
    • The GAE Whitelist for java is an important resource to know what works and what does not. So use it. It would also be nice for Google to expand on items that are allowed on GAE platform.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
    • DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
    • Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots