Akamai vs. Azure CDN

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Akamai
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Akamai Technologies, headquartered in Boston, offers a Akamai: a content delivery network (CDN).N/A
Azure CDN
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft offers a content delivery network, Azure CDN.N/A
Pricing
AkamaiAzure CDN
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AkamaiAzure CDN
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
AkamaiAzure CDN
Considered Both Products
Akamai
Chose Akamai
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.
Chose Akamai
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.
Chose 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 …
Azure CDN

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
AkamaiAzure CDN
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
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Score 8.6 out of 10
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AkamaiAzure CDN
Likelihood to Recommend
7.5
(16 ratings)
10.0
(7 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(2 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
AkamaiAzure CDN
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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Microsoft
Azure CDN has at hand an infinity of applications and tools to implement in your system and have better control of your data in a clean and secure platform on the web, we recommend this program since the percentage of solutions provided by this program is very high and find a way to make each user's job easier.
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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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Microsoft
  • I found the CDN very easy to setup and configure within the Azure Portal.
  • Being Azure, there are plenty of free tools that allow you to manage the CDN from a UI that is not the portal. This was especially handy when I trained end users how to manage content within their specific realm.
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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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Microsoft
  • Tough learning curve--you have to be comfortable with the Azure Cloud logic and UI to use it easily
  • Special or uncommon use cases' pricing can be hard to forecast/follow
  • Can be expensive for simple use cases
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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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Microsoft
Great support from the team whenever we're stuck. Very proactive in resolving issues and also making changes as per the requirements of the organization.
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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
Microsoft
More user friendly and it’s so easy to learn, the prices may be close to each other, but the service is excellent.
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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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Microsoft
  • Azure CDN reduced origin instance load by removing the need to constantly serve large numbers of static files, meaning applications can be deployed with smaller/fewer instances.
  • Azure CDN reduces apparent load times to customers by serving cached files out of POPs in the local region of those clients, instead of requiring those clients to make multiple, lengthy requests through to the origin servers.
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ScreenShots