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Akamai Ion vs NGINX Plus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Ion
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NGINX Plus
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Akamai Ion is 1.3%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX Plus is 6.4%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
NGINX Plus6.4%
Akamai Ion1.3%
Other92.3%
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

HarshBhardiya - PeerSpot reviewer
SOC Engineer at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Reliable bot management with valuable traffic analytics and good delivery configuration
We are using Akamai Ion primarily for CDN services. It is more about delivery configuration, and for security, we use Akamai WAF security controls and Botman Akamai Ion helps protect us from DOS, SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and scraping tools. Real-time analytics are very helpful for…
Michael Olayemi - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Checkit
Enables public access and secure configurations through reverse proxy
The primary valuable feature of NGINX for me is its ability to provide a reverse proxy. I have found that this feature supports our local server, and I am able to connect through our DNS system, making it accessible publicly. Additionally, the integration with SSL certificates and the configuration capabilities make it a valuable solution for my use case. Without NGINX, users would not be able to access our application, which means there is positive ROI from using NGINX as it is crucial for the functioning of my organization.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is bot management."
"Akamai is easy to use and very effective."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is simple to configure."
"I need to highlight that the number one thing about NGINX is that it is free."
"NGINX works much better than HAProxy in our current hardware and architecture for HTTP/HTTPS load balancing. ​​"
"I receive very good support."
"The most valuable features are the gateway and the ability to publish to sites."
"Its most valuable features are load balancing and application delivery. This is the most efficient application for these features because of stability and its efficiency."
"NGINX Plus also has NGINX App Protect. It's a separate module, which is inspired by the F5 apps."
"The load balancing module, which is equivalent to LTM, is the focus of the PSE. So far, the features of both are identical. I believe NGINX has more features for securing these services, but in terms of load balancing, both are massive solutions."
 

Cons

"The product must provide more flexibility."
"Log management should display data for more than two months."
"NGINX Plus is moderately priced, but it could give better value for money."
"One area of improvement could be that NGINX could provide a means to generate self-signed SSL certificates."
"It would be great if there was even more automation to make it even easier to maintain."
"Only improvement needed that I would point to is scalability. With it, I mean clusterized organisation on a low level. At the moment, the best alternative is RHEL HA."
"The KPI should be more focused on load balancing and the latency in application calling from the end system."
"If NGINX brings some features for health check in the open source version, it would be better. ​"
"The solution needs to be easier to setup and deploy."
"The biggest room for improvement would be to allow NGINX Core machines to cluster for memory zones in some way with a plug and play module. ​"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is expensive."
"The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."
"I am not so happy with their pricing policy, but this is not the worse thing in my life. I can tolerate it."
"​NGINX is a free tool in Brazil. There are some companies which do support it.​"
"NGINX Plus is an open-source solution with limited additional features. When you try to get additional features in the solution, then you need to pay an extra amount to NGINX Plus."
"HAProxy is cheaper than NGINX."
"The price is the cost to contract support with a specialized company, usually during consulting hours.​"
"There's an open-source version of NGINX that is free."
"You pay for each feature that you want."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Akamai Ion?
Akamai is easy to use and very effective.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai Ion?
The billing cycle is monthly, however, payment is done yearly. While expensive, it provides value for the services offered.
What needs improvement with Akamai Ion?
Log management should display data for more than two months. The traffic report needs to be more flexible. The response time of technical support should be improved.
Which is better - IIS or NGINX Plus?
IIS is a flexible, secure, and manageable web server to host anything on the web. IIS’s scalable and open architecture can handle the most demanding tasks. From media streaming to web applications,...
What do you like most about NGINX Plus?
It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.
 

Also Known As

No data available
NGINX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Eurail, Boston Scientific
Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Ion vs. NGINX Plus and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.