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Akamai

Akamai

Overview

What is Akamai?

Akamai Technologies, headquartered in Boston, offers a Akamai: a content delivery network (CDN).

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Akamai's use cases span various areas, providing solutions for businesses looking to optimize their online presence. With its premium-tier …
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Market Leading CDN

8 out of 10
April 21, 2017
Incentivized
Akamai is our content delivery network of choice and helps us to serve assets to users as quickly and efficiently as possible. Their CDN …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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What is Akamai?

Akamai Technologies, headquartered in Boston, offers a Akamai: a content delivery network (CDN).

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  • No setup fee

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  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Demos

HTTP1 vs HTTP2 - Akamai Demo

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akamai HTTP2 demo

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Macrometa + Akamai Streaming Application Demo - Dev Week Day 3

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Edge 2015: Akamai Fast Purge Demo

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Akamai Sensor Data Generation | Android/iOS | X-acf-sensor-data header

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Macrometa + Akamai EdgeWorkers App - Dev Week Day 3

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Product Details

What is Akamai?

Akamai Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(70)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Akamai's use cases span various areas, providing solutions for businesses looking to optimize their online presence. With its premium-tier CDN offering, Akamai helps offload server load and improve customer experiences through closer edge locations. Users have consistently praised the stability and dependability of Akamai, enabling them to handle high traffic volumes and remain operational during peak times. The platform's granularity in rules, settings, tweaks, and adjustments has proven highly valuable for optimizing content loading, allowing users to fine-tune their websites and deliver content with speed and efficiency.

As a cloud platform, Akamai is widely utilized for delivering secure and high-performing user experiences globally on B2B and B2C websites. By leveraging Akamai's edge servers, organizations can reach customers across different regions effectively. Additionally, Akamai's security features, including WAF Site Shield, provide protection against threats, ensuring website safety. Moreover, Akamai serves as a content delivery caching layer for infrastructure acceleration while also offering load balancing capabilities for faster and more efficient content delivery, enhancing the overall customer experience. Whether it is reducing overhead and improving page loading speed for eCommerce applications or serving as a failover tool for global websites, Akamai proves to be a reliable solution that meets diverse needs in today's digital landscape.

Edge caching with CDN tools: Several users have found Akamai's edge caching with CDN tools to be highly beneficial as it has offloaded repetitive work from more expensive application servers, resulting in significant time and cost savings.

Robust DDoS protection services: Many users appreciate that Akamai's DDoS protection services are considered robust. This feature provides a sense of peace of mind, knowing that their online security is well-taken care of.

Fine-tuning capabilities: Users value the ability to finely tune different settings available in Akamai, such as blocking IPs, cache settings, headers, redirects, and error status handling. This level of control allows for a tailored and optimized experience to meet specific needs.

Daunting and confusing user interface: Several users have found the user interface of Akamai to be overwhelming and perplexing, particularly for new users. This has made it challenging for them to navigate through the platform and understand its functionalities.

Non-competitive pricing tiers: Many reviewers have expressed dissatisfaction with the pricing structure of Akamai, stating that it is often not competitive compared to other companies offering CDN services. This has deterred some potential customers from choosing Akamai as their preferred provider.

Lack of intuitive configuration: Some users have mentioned that configuring Akamai platforms is not intuitive and requires specialized training. This has created a barrier for basic use, leading to frustration among users who expected a more user-friendly setup process.

Based on user reviews, users suggest the following recommendations for Akamai: Consider alternative CDN options such as Azure or Amazon CDN instead of Akamai. Take advantage of Akamai's seamless integration with other products offered by the company. Carefully review contracts and foster a strong relationship with the account manager to ensure a smooth implementation of Akamai's services. Please keep in mind that these recommendations are based on the experiences and opinions shared by users in their reviews.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-16 of 16)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
October 11, 2022

Global growth assured

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Publish content to corporate websites. We use it to deploy files in all countries where we have some particpate company.
  • publish globally
  • aggregate, statistical and user information
  • improved security posture
  • Security operations
  • SIEM integration
Good for international companies, in scenarios where big files are downloaded it could be very expensive.We use the CDN service to avoid network congestion problems especially when it comes to distribution of heavy content such as graphics and videos. Distributing content to users from our datacenter was not feasible. CDNs facilitate this task and allow sharing of text, graphics, scripts and multimedia files and software downloads, video streaming on demand ...
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use the following Akamai products to protect public facing web apps and API

Akamai KSD - Blocks the web security threats before they ever reach our cloud hosted origin servers

Akamai CDN - makes digital experiences secure, reliable, and fast
  • Large global footprint
  • technology is powerful and can handle complex demands
  • Great customer service
  • Cost is on the higher end compared to other CDN providers
  • Admin interface is not so easy to understand
The robust CDN solution packs a lot of heat – limitless scalability, optimized content delivery, and last-mile acceleration. You will find Akamai CDN solution extra useful if you are looking to deliver video and other types of multimedia content.

If you have a small number of viewers of your web content and/or your geographic scale is limited and/or your have limited budget, you probably don’t need Akamai CDN.
February 16, 2022

Akami Review

PRABHAT MISHRA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We were using it for CDN purposes & we were even using it for security reasons.
  • For caching we were using CDN.
  • To prevent any DdoS attacks this is best.
  • It was serving as proxy server for edge locations.
  • We should be having more detailed logging on Akamai side.
  • We should have more support for edge locations.
  • We should try implementing session on Akamai side.
Akamai is best suited for CDN use. They have very awesome support for caching on edge locations. The security feature is very awesome to prevent any DDoS attacks.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have several documents that we need to share with multiple people via SMS or E-Mail. The easy way to do it is to store the document in a CDN repository and sent the link to the document via SMS or Email and add the link into the message. Having the document in Akamai enables us to modify the message and enables us to send billions of messages in a small period of time.
  • It's a really fast CDN
  • The protection and security is fantastic
  • Also the API is reliable
  • The registration process was complicated several years ago (Don't know is this remain)
  • More endpoints in Australia
  • We got 2 outages in 5 years. But those was more that a hour
Store documents that need to be accessed by multiples users at the same time, saving in Internet cost. Also helps to keep the storage cost low and increase customer satisfaction as the downloads are fast, reliable, and geographical close to the customer. We use Akamai to store and share documents with several hundred users concurrently.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Akamai's caching technology is being used by our corporation for our eCommerce applications. These applications are heavily utilizing Akamai's caching to reduce the overhead of serving up media-rich content from our own server resources that are hosted locally and in a server colocation environment. This technology greatly reduces also the speed at which our pages are served.
  • Caching
  • Reducing overhead
  • Speeding up content retrieval
  • None
This technology greatly reduces the time needed and also the speed at which our pages are served. It is not well suited for dynamic content.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Akamai across the IT Department to handle load balancing and caching for our web traffic. It allows customers to access content in a faster and more efficient manner, delivering overall better customer experience.
  • Akamai does a great job at caching content for customers, which delivers faster speeds when retrieving content on the web.
  • There is a lot of flexibility with how you configure Akamai to work with your services.
  • I believe Akamai has room for improvement with their Luna Control Center. The design could be better and more straightforward.
I think Akamai is an excellent tool for an organization that deals with high volumes of traffic and wants to provide a solution for improving content delivery. For a small organization, Akamai may not be the best and most affordable solution.
Vaibhav Choksi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Akamai platform is currently being used as a cloud platform for delivering secure and high-performing user experiences to any device globally on B2B and B2C websites. Akamai helps global delivery units with its powerful features for content delivery, edge platform, and networking.

  • Akamai is strong at Content Delivery Process with its own method of mirroring website HTML and CSS elements.
  • It also has peer to peer networking feature that let users download large files directly from peers outside Akamai's network.
  • Akamai's intelligent edge platform provides a cloud-connected network of servers located over 100 countries globally.
  • Akamai platforms does not come with an intuitive UI to configure and it requires training for set up.
  • Akami is mostly costly and will be proven very expensive for small organization that are not scaled.
  • Akami activation takes a longer time for a lot of testing with multiple scenarios especially with edge servers scenarios.
The Akamai Property Manager is the latest version in the configuration management portal for managing edge caching configurations that have improved from its previous version. On the other side, the UI is not very user-friendly and needs to be improved.
Phillip Holder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Akamai for the following:

  • Across the organization as a whole.
  • Hosting of almost all pages across the organization.
  • Edge servers to reach customers all over Canada.
  • Redirects.
  • Rewrites.
  • Creation and redirect to maintenance pages.
  • Security - WAF/Site shield.
  • Applying GTM (Global Traffic Manager) rules for managing the load on the site.
  • Akamai Staging for testing prior to release to production.
  • Whitelisting IP's for A/B testing.
  • Providing online security for critical commerce applications we run on a day to day basis - obvious as to why this is important.
  • Providing multiple edge based servers located closer to clients across the country for better performance for our customers.
  • 100% uptime - This is probably the best guarantee I have seen in the industry.
  • Excellent support 24/7 - for complex project solutions.
  • I would like to see an increase in telephone support allocation - i.e. hours we have available per month to talk to their specialist as more and more we are getting into complex solutions and require their expertise.
It is well suited for large complex organizations that require detailed web-based solution and a flexible vendor who can handle any and all issues.

It is not that well suited for smaller organizations simply to do to costs and resource constraints within the same, i.e. many small organizations would not have Akamai skilled developers on hand and or would not need to take advantage or even understand the multitude of web-based solutions Akamai offers.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Akamai as a CDN failover tool for our global website. Using Akamai as a CDN allows us to offload our origin servers and speed up delivery of content to customers. We are also using Akamai's cloudlet tools for redirections and vanity URLs for SEO improvements. Our organization also uses Akamai for failover in case of maintenance we can still serve partial content for our site.
  • Content Delivery. Akamai has thousands of edge servers worldwide to serve your content as fast as possible to the proximity of the user. This speeds up page load time and user experience.
  • Customer support. Akamai customer support are some of the best I've worked with. They are quite to response and the engineers know what they are doing.
  • Lots of tools. Akamai is not just acting as a CDN, but the vast amount of tools/products available allows a large portion of the site to be managed.
  • Cost. Akamai is an enterprise level product and the cost can be pretty expensive for smaller organizations.
  • Activations can take a while and therefore if you are doing a lot of testing on different scenarios you may spend hours waiting for activations to take effect. However this may not be an issue with Akamai itself but the fact that rules need to be propagated to all edge servers.
Well suited:
- If your organization is serving customers globally, and you have a website catering to customers from different regions globally, a CDN can speed up your content delivery as traffic can route to nearest edge server instead of the origin.
- Your organization has a lot of micro-sites, subdomains aside from the main site.
- If your site requires an additional layer of protection ie. DDoS protection

Less appropriate:
Your organization is localized in a specific region/country. CDN may not have as much benefit in this case.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Akamai is used across the whole company as a content delivery/caching layer of our infrastructure, accelerating delivery of many different types of content i.e. images and web pages. It front-loads our e-commerce capabilities and a few other systems.
  • Very advanced compression algorithms and a global content delivery network.
  • Sophisticated security features.
  • On-demand network scalability.
  • Great dashboard and real-time reporting
  • Requires specialized training for basic use.
  • Not very intuitive to configure.
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.
June 27, 2018

Review of Akamai!

Joshua Dickson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Akamai primarily for its many CDN product variants. In using a CDN, we afford ourselves the ability to offload the majority of from our servers onto CDN servers, which both reduces our own bill and provides a better experience for customers due to closer edge locations. Akamai, in particular, is a premium-tier offering within the CDN space, and we've had great luck from a stability and dependability perspective.
  • 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
  • The user interface can be daunting and confusing to new users
  • The pricing tiers are often not competitive with standard CDN service offerings from other companies
Akamai is a superior premium services offering if that's what you need from a CDN. For more typical use cases, we're often more often than not implementing MaxCDN, or integrated CDNs from cloud providers (e.g. CloudFront, Azure CDN, etc). If you find that Akamai's offerings are really what you need, and you are okay paying the premium, the services themselves are great. There's a reason they're used by major enterprises of all sizes, and used for hosting video content from the NFL, etc.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Akamai is primarily used within our company as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and caching framework for our public facing websites, enabling us to offload from our servers a vast amount of rich content and rarely changed items freeing up resources on our estate and enabling us to reduce our infrastructure, saving money and overheads in time.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Akamai is (as far as I'm aware) class leading in it's offering, although I haven't used anything else - but it is a really excellent CDN where you don't need to update your file references or anything like that, since you pass through Akamai's edge servers IT development teams don't need to change the way in which they would work in order to get the benefits. In terms of less well-suited scenarios - it's hard to say since you couldn't really use it for purposes other than what it's designed for, although the rules do allow for some pretty impacting changes to be possible, you could potentially take the site down if you were working uninformed.
April 21, 2017

Market Leading CDN

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Akamai is our content delivery network of choice and helps us to serve assets to users as quickly and efficiently as possible. Their CDN means we can cache content so our users have a significantly faster experience of our website. They provide us with tools to refresh and invalidate content that we wish to remove from the cache and offer support with making site performance improvements.
  • Easy cache refreshing
  • Huge site performance benefit
  • Helpful support
  • Website could be easier to navigate
Akamai are the leaders in content delivery networks and their service reflects that. If you want a fast experience for your users then a reliable CDN is essential and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Akamai.
Adam Rooney | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Without Akamai we would never be able to handle even a small percentage of the traffic that we experience on our site on a daily basis, and during peak times throughout the year Akamai has been the one thing to keep us going. The granularity that it allows for in terms of rules, settings, tweaks and adjustments to how content is loaded is very helpful.
  • Caching is one of the greatest benefits that Akamai allows for, saving time, money and experiencing the user experience.
  • Knowing they provide DDOS and other attack protection gives you peace of mind.
  • How finely you can tune all of the different settings available to you, from blocking IPs, cache settings, headers, redirects and even handling error statuses .
  • 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.
At times when we need a piece of content on the site to display at an EXACT time and we have to be 100% sure that all assets are loaded and changed to the minute Akamai still allowed us to have caching for the bits we need and the flexibility to refresh the pieces of content that we needed.
Schyler Manning | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use several Akamai products across our entire organization for our CDN and security needs.
  • While no CDN service is perfect, Akamai Ion is as close as it gets. I couldn't imagine using another product.
  • The Kona Site Defender takes a little work to get dialed in but has proven to be an extremely helpful tool.
  • I'd like to see more variations of products like Bot Manager.
Akamai Ion is hands down the best CDN for any enterprise level company.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used Akamai as a CDN for our website for about 2 years. Review is anonymous (for now) because we are considering legal action against them for deceptive billing practices and contractual terms with intent to defraud. I will return and edit once that has played out.
  • They are an adequate CDN for static images if you can figure out their crazy terminology and convoluted interfaces. That's it.
  • Really confusing contracts and deceptive billing practices.
  • Convoluted interface. Difficult to understand what goes where because they use strange naming conventions.
  • When you ask for support to help with an issue, they always try and get you on a call to demo an upgraded service. Their "support" is really just a glorified sales team trying to get you to upgrade and pay more at every turn.
  • Many on their support staff do not speak english well enough to convey ideas and concepts in a clear manner.
We had a terrible experience. I would never recommend them to a colleague, unfortunately. In fact, I advise people to stay away no matter what.
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