Akamai API Gateway vs. NGINX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Akamai API Gateway
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Akamai offers their API Gateway, touting easy control and access to enterprise applications via their services.N/A
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
Pricing
Akamai API GatewayNGINX
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Akamai API GatewayNGINX
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Akamai API GatewayNGINX
Features
Akamai API GatewayNGINX
API Management
Comparison of API Management features of Product A and Product B
Akamai API Gateway
7.7
Ratings
7% below category average
NGINX
-
Ratings
API access control8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Rate limits and usage policies7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
API usage data8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
API user onboarding8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
API versioning7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Usage billing and payments7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
API monitoring and logging9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Akamai API Gateway
-
Ratings
NGINX
7.8
Ratings
2% below category average
IDE support00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.70 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
User Ratings
Akamai API GatewayNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Akamai API GatewayNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
It is really helpful for managing [the] scaling of systems with need and utilizing resources when needed. Also, DevOps support for deployment plans is quite useful when deploying applications. Monitoring systems with graphQL and utilizing them in APIs is quite helpful when used in Microservices systems to identify system capabilities and user utilization of applications.
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Nginx is well suited for serving any static content - whether that be images, JS files, HTML files, CSS files, videos, etc. If you have a high-traffic website, Nginx will be a great fit because it handles large number of requests extremely efficiently. Nginx has full support on Unix systems, but only has limited support on Microsoft Windows machines.
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Pros
  • Graphically representation in GraphQL
  • Scaling system
  • DevOps management
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  • Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.
  • Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.
  • SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.
  • Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.
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Cons
  • Quota enforcement can be simplified
  • Caching mechanism for API with akamai can be improved
  • Gateway configuration can be simplified as details are not much elaborate
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  • Nginx often requires some initial configuration. It's worth doing, because you'll end up with great results, but it can be slightly daunting for someone to get started using it. Apache might have a leg up in that regard--When you install Apache, typically it's just about ready to do what you want already. But the issue with Apache is that most people skip the extensive tuning phase required after that, and with nginx it becomes more just a part of the configuration process.
  • Sometimes, the configuration syntax, even though it's powerful and terse, isn't the most intuitive. Luckily there's plenty of documentation about what things mean and how to accomplish certain things. There may not be much that can be done about this--to have a powerful web server, you need a powerful-enough configuration language.
  • The nginx brand is somewhat fragmented, and it can be confusing. There's the open source nginx web server, which I've primarily been referring to. But then there's NGINX Plus, a premium subscription-based service which works with a range of other NGINX products (NGINX WAF, NGINX Amplify, NGINX Controller). I've met a number of people who weren't very familiar with nginx, and instinctively went to nginx.com first, and from there it seems like everything costs money. It's only when they realize there's a different site, nginx.org, that they find what they went looking for.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
Great value for the product
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Usability
No answers on this topic
Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
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Alternatives Considered
Akamai [API Gateway] helps better in terms of representation of graphQL and its consumption in monitoring system making a package for deployment speed with monitoring and scaling application with all services and utilizing most of a system without much knowledge of other aspects. Also, [a] user-friendly system helps people to handle [the] system with necessary options
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I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives
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Return on Investment
  • Decrease in time required for deployment and monitoring by significant amount causing less support resources needed
  • Scaling applications on month-end at high usage time has reduced TAT time for issues and no of issues occurring
  • Quota enforcement has allowed [managing] multiple systems and their needs in respective stakeholders hands and reduced infra teams involvement in [the] management of reoccurring problems
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  • When we first migrated our primary bidding environment architecture to Nginx, it was under duress due to Apache's inability to keep up when we consolidated away from an HAproxy model to a central HTTP proxy. So we even when we did not know what we were doing, we were able to make it work in a bad situation, and everyone was quite happy.
  • The biggest complaint I have is that I find the module compilation requirements for nginx+ rather burdensome. If we pay for Nginx+, I'd love to see then have pre-built modules for ready for each release of more modules. We are spending our own time engineering an in-house solution for module testing for nginx+ releases, which is disappointing.
  • I've also, as the primary Nginx person at my organization, inserted my expertise into other projects, and have saved our company lots of money getting rid of big $$$ appliances for general SSL proxying.
  • Speaking of Nginx replacing SSL appliances, we had an instance where we had to suddenly enable elliptic-curve SSL ciphers and our big $$$ appliances (you know who they are), were falling over. Even their SSL accelerator cards, after all, are just a few extra cores to process SSL. But in an environment of our size, we use DNS to spread the load to hundreds of frontend proxies with dozens of cores each to spread this load out, all at a lower price than ONE of the appliance pairs running Nginx. We couldn't even tell the change in load in our Nginx architecture when we enabled the ciphers.
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration