Akamai CDN vs. ImageKit.io

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.

Incentivized

ImageKit is very well suited as a CDN for images. It can generate thumbnails on the fly, show metrics about usage and traffic, and can even serve highly compressed web images and tiny blurry placeholder images to speed up the initial load time. It also has a very good React component that allows for lazy-loading images that are below the fold.

Incentivized

• 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 .

Incentivized

• Automatically convert images for fast delivery based on browser support and network quality.
• Well-documented integration documentation that is easy to follow when getting started with your implementation.
• Easy to navigate user dashboard for setup and management of server origins and account settings. The usage analytics page is also handy to track and fix any 404 errors there might be for an image/s.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The Usage Analytics page could be laid out a little better and include filtering options, options may include path, country, IP Address, etc.
• The ability to add an additional user to the starter plan would be great to illustrate the possibility to new customers.
• The API Reference guide could include some more section-specific code examples for each of the supported technology stacks.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Akamai offers sophisticated security and defense layers in addition to its content delivery network. Its focus on security is well known and beats offerings from AWS and Azure to punches. It redefined the cloud security market by extending its core offering.

Incentivized

The main consideration for our choice was to be able to optimize and deliver the images from the server they are stored on without needing to move or change the current product upload workflow for our Marketing team. This is where ImageKit.io provided the best solution at the time we evaluated the options available in the market.

Incentivized

• Positive - Akamai vastly reduced the number of content delivery servers needed here, saving money, hardware and management overheads.
• Negative - I don't think it's a "cheap" option, but also, you get what you pay for and for such a powerful product you don't expect it to be free.
• Positive - some of the support we have had has been really good.

Incentivized

• Improved Page Load times
• Increased SEO value of current store pages
• Conversion Rate increase

Incentivized