Akamai Reviews

So one of our main use cases is website hosting. It can be the website primarily targeted at a specific demographic or global. That's one use case. 

Another use case is providing an out-of-the-box solution for video streaming. If your business is primarily focused on live video streaming, Akamai might be the right solution for you. Other content delivery network (CDN) solutions, like Virtual Sand, do not support video streaming. That's the main reason for choosing Akamai. 

Additionally, Akamai is leveraged by many Fortune 500 companies. If there's an outage or any issues, you don't need to worry about the service level agreement (SLA) because most of your competitors and top-level business companies also rely on Akamai.

From my perspective, there are a few areas that need improvement, especially in terms of security upgrades. Currently, Akamai does not provide the same level of security as Cloudflare, which supports applications through SSL HTTPs. This is one aspect that needs attention. 

Another aspect is the pricing. Akamai should target mid-level and small to medium-sized businesses, not just enterprise-level companies. The larger companies already benefit from it, so it shouldn't be the sole focus. We should focus more on medium-sized businesses as well. 

Mostly, I would like to see improvements in the security aspect. The web application firewall needs to be enhanced and offers more customization options. Additionally, while there are many available servers, they come as add-ons. This limits our ability to explore all the features, as they require additional payments.

I have been working with Akamai for three years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a highly scalable solution.

If you have an in-house team of engineers to manage, you may not require much technical support. However, if you have limited support or are new to the platform, you might need customized software and dedicated technical support, which comes with an additional cost.

Therefore, you need to pay extra for the support. 

Setting up Akamai is a bit more complex compared to Cloudflare or similar services. It's more like an enterprise solution, so you need to sign a contract. The initial setup requires expertise either within your team or with support from Akamai to configure it for your infrastructure.

We have an in-house application because our main focus is website development. Additionally, we are working on an application that has a global reach.

Deployment primarily involves providing all the necessary services. Once you run the agent software on your infrastructure server, the client runs on the cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon, Azure, or GPT, or even on-premises data centers. Akamai, or any CDN solution, can be deployed as a cloud solution. You connect the DNS from your application to the Akamai cloud. When a request is made to your domain, instead of going directly to your server, it goes through Akamai first. Akamai then forwards the request to your internal server. This way, information is cached based on the local regions, improving performance.

Generally, a minimum of two to three engineers, preferably site reliability engineers, are required to handle the deployment and maintenance effectively.

Moreover, maintenance can be a bit challenging. Only someone with end-to-end knowledge of Akamai would be able to maintain it effectively.

Documentation and resources are available, but they are not publicly accessible. Only enterprise-level customers who are committed to Akamai receive the documentation. However, you still need support from their teams, especially when new features are rolled out. Unfortunately, there isn't an open support community where people can help each other. Cloudflare, on the other hand, offers more support in these aspects.

Akamai is an expensive tool. Moreover, we have a pay-as-you-go model for additional features. 

Akamai offers many additional services, but they often come as add-ons. On the other hand, Akamai is acquiring smaller companies to expand its offerings, particularly in the areas of security and other aspects. However, they are still in the incubation stage in terms of these aspects. 

In comparison, Cloudflare is more focused on security. The choice between these companies depends on your specific use case. For example, if you are an e-commerce platform, the high-quality resolution of product images is crucial for the end user. In such cases, Akamai may be the best solution, especially for handling high-resolution images and video streaming. 

However, if your application is a general website and you need CDN for caching and instant traffic from your server, Cloudflare and other similar solutions may be suitable.

Cloudflare comes with default denial-of-service protection, but if you're considering Akamai, you may also need to think about additional solutions like Reblaze for better security. Akamai primarily functions as a CDN, while Reblaze specializes in preventing SQL injection and DDoS attacks.

If you're focused on security, you should consider Reblaze. After deploying Akamai, if you experience numerous bot attacks on your site, you can implement Reblaze for additional security measures.

After installing Akamai, we introduced Reblaze to handle various security aspects. Our setup involves data coming from Reblaze to Akamai and then to our servers.

There are multiple benefits. Depending on the use case, if you only need a CDN for caching content, whether it's static or dynamic, they can consider using Cloudflare. It could be the cheapest option compared to Akamai, which comes at a higher cost.

Another factor to consider is if your website primarily streams videos. If you're a publication or media company with a website that heavily relies on images and streaming videos, Akamai is a suitable tool and platform, especially considering the Content Delivery Network (CDN) capabilities.

I would rate Akamai a nine out of ten, as it is a market leader.

We use Akamai to monitor all incoming and outgoing traffic. If we see malicious traffic or other activities from an IP, we block that IP.

We can use Akamai to see each segment and data packet from the firewall, whether it is going on or what they are trying to search in our environment. We can also use the solution to block the IPs. If an attacker conducts an attack, we can check what query he is running and whether he wants to see our password or any other files.

The solution can be more specific regarding the alerts it gives. Currently, we have to check each and every traffic for every IP. It would be better if we could be notified about specific attacks.

I have been using Akamai for one year.

Around four users are using the solution in our organization.

Initially, we contacted the technical support team to learn how to use Akamai and block ASN numbers and IPs. The technical support team is very helpful. If we have any doubts, they will contact us immediately and explain how to do it.

I would recommend Akamai to other users because it is a WAF firewall that will notify them of malicious traffic and attacker activities. Learning to use Akamai for the first time will be easy if you know how to analyze the logs.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use cases are for content delivery for all kinds of scenarios, video streaming, load balancing, caching, image managing, web application firewall, bot management and micro-segmentation. 

We can offload a lot of traffic to Akamai and it's one of the best web application firewalls out there in the market.

The user console is quite overloaded, sometimes it's hard to find your way around.

With regards to additional features, Akamai continues to buy other companies and integrate their services into their product. It's kind of like a big bouquet of solutions and it would be good to see this continue in the future. From experience, sometimes you have different user consoles from the same supplier and that makes it hard to keep an overview and have reporting of everything in one place. 

I have been working with Akamai for approximately 20 years.

Akamai has been providing this service for 20 years and they have never had a substantial outage, they even have some products that have an uptime of over 20 years, the stability is very good. 

The Akamai content delivery service is available worldwide with over 300,000 servers globally, it's a very scalable solution. 

The Akamai technical support is pretty fast and support is knowledgeable. 

With regards to the setup of the product, depending on which use case it can be easy or a little more complex. Setting up caching and DNS is very straightforward, but Bot manager is more complicated. 

As this is a high end product, it's quite high in price, but it's at a similar level to competitors, Amazon and Google. 

The main competitor at this moment in time is CloudFlare. CloudFlare is focusing on small businesses and has an aggressive pricing structure. But for larger enterprises, Akamai is our preference and we have been very successful in reselling the product. 

For companies who wish to implement Akamai I would advise doing this through a partner like us, we have the expertise and knowledge of different solutions and setup's, and have compared other similar solutions. Some solutions could use different products like CloudFlare, so a client should look for an independent integrator instead of going direct with a vendor. 

We're a media site, so we use Akamai for content delivery and streaming. 
It's spread across multiple departments. We're using several Akamai tools, including Property Manager, Cloud Identity, Bot Manager Premium, the CDN, and AMD for video streaming. 

Akamai provides low-latency throughput.

I'd like to see more Web 3.0 and IoT solutions. 

Our organization has been using Akamai for three or four years. I took over the head engineering position a year and a half ago.

Akamai is quite stable. 

Akamai is scalable. Definitely, yeah.

Akamai support is excellent. I rate them nine out of 10 because they have great debugging tools, and they're highly competent. We have their premium partnership, so their engineers are proactive and responsive whenever we have issues. It's pretty smooth.

Positive

The company switched to Akamai before I joined, but there were two or three solutions before that. Standardization was important for them because it's a media organization. They wanted one solution, so they put everything into Akamai.

Akamai was deployed before I joined, but we work with the Akamai product team closely. When they release a new product, we try to see if it fits. You only need a lean staff to deploy and maintain Akamai. We use three staff members to manage Akamai.

We handle everything with our in-house team, but we work closely with Akamai engineers.

There are two things: value for the money and return on investment. We haven't calculated the return on investment, but the value for the price we are paying is definitely there.

We've been using Akamai for the last two or three years, so we think we are getting value for the money. 

I rate Akamai eight out of 10. At end of the day there, I defer to Gartner's Magic Quadrant. They're one of the premium leaders on the OTT side, and we are a media organization. They're right on top of the Gartner report, so that's a good product. 

CDN and WAF are the main hardcore features in Akamai that we use in our company.

As of now, the best thing about Akamai is WAF, and though CDN is a good feature, it comes in second place when compared to WAF. I am very impressed with the WAF offered by Akamai.

If you ask about Akamai as a whole, then I would say that there are a lot of areas where improvements are required. In general, there are a few areas where I really think that Akamai's services need improvement. In Akamai, as far as CDN is concerned, I feel that its features are an area where some improvements or upgrades are required. Caching strategy is an area with certain shortcomings in the solution where improvements are required. Suppose you are using a feature called cache tags, which are basically a set of tags that are used to represent certain elements in the URL. When you use cache tags, you can flush out cache or parts of it or all the URLs that are associated with that tag. Akamai doesn't have a feature to cache the tag, as it currently has the feature to purge the cache in the tag. Akamai currently doesn't have a feature with which you can get all the URLs based on the tag and then apply some caching on top of it, making it a feature that Akamai lacks.

I have been using Akamai for four years. I am a customer of Akamai.

It is a stable solution. Though there are some minor issues with Akamai, it is an overall stable product.

I have worked with Akamai in two organizations to date. Considering the current organization where I work, we have the best possible support from Akamai, owing to which I don't have any flaws about them to discuss. In my previous organization, I used a standard for generic support from Akamai, which diligently followed the set protocol of Akamai, which is to reply to any queries from users within 24 hours.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup will be difficult for someone who has never dealt with CDN. For me, the product's initial setup was easy since I have been associated with CDN for quite some time now. With Akamai, I have always found its initial setup phase easy since everything is UI-oriented in the tool, making it an easy process.

The solution is deployed on the cloud services offered by Akamai.

Price-wise, I find Akamai's pricing model's inclination to be more towards the expensive side of the spectrum, though I can't say that it is a very expensive product. Akamai's pricing model makes it fall under a premium category.

I would absolutely recommend Akamai to those who plan to use it. Based on my experience with three CDNs that I have worked with, I found Akamai to be the best, a reason why I have been using Akamai for the past three to four years.

I rate the overall product an eight and a half out of ten.

My company uses Akamai as a CDN tool and for cloud security.

The most valuable features of the solution are the platform, deployment or infrastructure, and overall features it provides.

I can't point out any downsides of Akamai since it is presently one of the best solutions in the market.

In our company, we are good with how the solution works for us since we continuously use it to improve our processes.

New features will keep getting added to the product as the needs of businesses or organizations grow, making it a never-ending process.

The fact that it is an expensive product is its only shortcoming. The pricing of the product can be made better.

I have been using Akamai for five years. My company is a customer of Akamai.

It is a stable solution.

It is an easily scalable solution.

Akamai is a customer-facing product for my company, and we are a large-sized company.

The solution's technical support is very good. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The installation phase of Akamai was easy.

Akamai is a SaaS cloud-based solution.

It takes around ten to fifteen minutes to deploy the solution.

The number of people required for the deployment phase of the product varies since it depends on the size of an organization. Smaller organizations would need one or two people for the deployment, while the bigger ones would need more people.

It is an expensive product. The licensing costs for the solution are based on the usage. If we need premium support, we need to buy it from Akamai.

My company does not have to get involved in the maintenance of the product since it is a cloud-based solution.

Akamai is a highly reliable platform.

It is a very good solution offering unique features to users. The scaling capabilities of Akamai platform are its best feature that nobody in the market can match or offer.

I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.

Our company uses the solution as a content delivery network. We enhance website performance and have about 150 customers in Taiwan who use the solution. 

The solution is very sustainable and flexible. 

The solution could offer more integrations. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is very scalable. 

Our customers say that technical support is very good. 

The setup is a little bit complex. 

We implement the solution for customers and it usually takes one day depending on the scenario. 

The solution's pricing is based on bandwidth. 

I recommend the solution and rate it a ten out of ten. 

Our website is very high in content, and for faster delivery to the end user, we are using their Akamai. The largest network is owned by them. Akamai runs on any company's cloud infrastructure.

The most valuable feature of Akamai is its ease of use and simple integration. Additionally, the solution has new aspects added to it regularly.

Akamai could improve by providing its own cloud services. We have to use third-party cloud services at this time, such as Amazon AWS. The offering becomes a lot easier for an SMB if everything was in one single platform to be used for the services.

I have been using Akamai for approximately three years.

Akamai is stable.

The scalability of Akamai is good.

The solution is suitable for any sized organization.

The support from Akamai is fantastic. They have one of the best supports available. You have assigned engineers targeting specific issues. The use of the support services is very easy.

Positive

Akamai was simple to implement and set up.

The solution is not user-based. It's content-based. The number of GBs of transaction.

I rate the initial setup of Akamai a four out of five.

The price of Akamai could be less expensive.

I rate the price of Akamai a two out of five.

When comparing Akamai to other solutions they have a lot of bundled solutions. If you go to their competition, such as Amazon AWS, it would have a WAF, but it will not have a bot manager. If you use Cloudflare, the ease of integration is not as good as Akamai's. I have found most features are better in Akamai.

Akamai is the market leader in its field of consultation and productivity.

I rate Akamai a nine out of ten.