Akamai vs Fastly

Likelihood to Recommend

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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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Retail Company, 10,001+ employees

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For the use case that it was designed for, Fastly is best-in-class, and used by high-profile companies like Buzzfeed, The New York Times, and Stripe. For websites that require a highly-performant CDN layer, Fastly is a great choice. Fastly is not the best choice for very small companies and very small deployments, and it does not have the ease of implementation into large cloud PaaS vendors like AWS or Azure.

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Verified User

Director in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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Pros

Edge caching with Akamai's CDN tools allow for offloading repetitive work from more expensive application servers
Akamai's DDOS protection services are amongst the most robust in the industry

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Joshua Dickson

Director of Engineering

NorthOutComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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You can put your site behind Fastly and then selectively cache only some of the endpoints. You can modify the responses returned by stripping cookies or other personalization headers.
You can deliver images, and based on the user agent being Chrome, decide to serve, for example, a WEBP image format instead of PNG or JPG.

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Konstantin Gredeskoul

CTO

HomebaseComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Cons

Comparing releases - you have a facility to compare releases, which is good but is at a very granular level and I think the UI for this could be improved as it is essentially an XML text compare.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Airlines/Aviation Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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Setup can be difficult -- but only because the service is so robust and provides so many features.
Minimum spend is $50/month, even if you are not using the service enough to have spent the $50.

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Verified User

Director in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

I haven't had much experience with other CDNs and to be honest I haven't heard of many more other than Akamai which just goes to show which one is the most trusted and proves to be the best. There are others out there, such as CloudFlare, that claim to provide a similar service but there is always something missing that Akamai just already has.

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Adam Rooney

Developer

M and M DirectRetail, 501-1000 employees

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It’s the fastest and most configurable.

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Konstantin Gredeskoul

CTO

HomebaseComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

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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Vaibhav Choksi

Senior Product Manger, Digital Commerce

Dell TechnologiesComputer Hardware, 51-200 employees

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Fastly dramatically reduces load times for clients all over the world thanks to their global system of POPs.
Fastly is a cost-effective choice when a highly-performant CDN is required and makes it simple to support data that is quickly invalidated.

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Verified User

Director in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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Akamai

Fastly

Pros

Cons

Alternatives Considered

Return on Investment

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

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