Akamai CDN vs. StackPath Edge Delivery

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

Well suited to:

1. Startups - Very competitive pricing, better than AWS for object storage and CDN.
2. The less technical - for those looking to implement a CDN, it doesn't get any easier than StackPath
3. The more technical - Well documented API, serverless scripting and container deployments
4. Fast object delivery - StackPath tends to be faster (sometimes much more ) than AWS S3. See below however...

Not so well suited to:

1. Multi-tiered web applications
2. Ultra high bandwidth requirements. Stackpath isn't meant to be a substitute for AWS or Azure when you're looking to push 100s of TBs of traffic.
3. Object storage works well if you don't need fine-grained bucket lifecycle or permissions management.

Incentivized

• 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

• Price competitive.
• Easy to use.
• Good reporting.
• Quick to deploy.
• Start-up friendly.
• Good technical information via blog, FAQ and community discussion.
• I can talk to real person for urgent support.

Incentivized

• 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

• Analytics.
• Many options hidden in API.
• Web console.

Incentivized

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

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

When we identified the need for having a Content Delivery Network to improve our website loading performance we researched a bit and found StackPath. Reading its reviews and the info on its website we have found that they had everything we needed so we didn't need to look for other products.

Incentivized

• 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

• Easy 25-30% improvement in website performance vs non CDN solution
• Less expensive and faster object storage than AWS
• Aided greatly in maintaining KPIs in terms of performance, availability

Incentivized