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.
Read full review All new upgraded non-human bot detection feature is widely used across all the platforms open for customers and it is a great success. It provides zero access to malicious bots.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review ShieldSquare provides an easy to implement way of identifying website users that could be bots. By rating the potential of the user of being a bot, we are able to handle that user in the proper way. False positives are extremely rare with ShieldSquare. Plus, their support staff is also available to analyze traffic to specific content, and they can customize their algorithms when necessary to optimize the performance of their solution to suit our needs. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review It would be nice to allow for more granularity when selecting which bots I'd like to allow through. I contacted support and asked about this and they said this was in the works. If you select to show captchas instead of blocking, I feel their captcha screen could use some improvement on the UI/UX to make it more intuitive for users to know what to do. I contacted support and made them aware of this. Would be nice to see captchas information in the statistics (i.e. how many captchas were presented, from what IP addresses, how many were filled out correctly), Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 When I compared these two products, Distil Networks only offered a solution where their bot detection sits in between your website and the visitors, similar to how Cloudflare works. I didn't want this so I decided to go for ShieldSquare that uses connectors. I want my visitors to hit the website directly, not have something sit in between.
Read full review 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. Read full review Network Bandwidth efficiency Read full review ScreenShots Radware Bot Manager Screenshots