Akamai vs. ImageKit.io

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

E-Commerce is a perfect example where a service like ImageKit.io, is well suited. It takes a lot of the guesswork related to browser image format support, correct image dimensions for every kind of device, away from the developer. Thus reducing the need for maintaining code ourselves to check for and deliver an image for every user and his specific browser. This reduces code maintenance time in the long run and less custom code will ensure stability after integration for our online store running on OpenCart 3.

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

• Automatically convert images for fast delivery based on browser support and network quality.
• Well-documented integration documentation that is easy to follow when getting started with your implementation.
• Easy to navigate user dashboard for setup and management of server origins and account settings. The usage analytics page is also handy to track and fix any 404 errors there might be for an image/s.

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

• The Usage Analytics page could be laid out a little better and include filtering options, options may include path, country, IP Address, etc.
• The ability to add an additional user to the starter plan would be great to illustrate the possibility to new customers.
• The API Reference guide could include some more section-specific code examples for each of the supported technology stacks.

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

The main consideration for our choice was to be able to optimize and deliver the images from the server they are stored on without needing to move or change the current product upload workflow for our Marketing team. This is where ImageKit.io provided the best solution at the time we evaluated the options available in the market.

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

• Our code has become easier to maintain, we no longer need to let the backend generate thumbnails
• Our site speed up significantly, which boosted our SEO ranking
• We had a similar solution built in-house on AWS lambda, but we no longer have the headache to maintain this solution ourselves.

Incentivized