Fastly vs Akamai: A Competitive Comparison

Why move to Fastly?

See the methodology behind how we got these numbers.

Almost 90% of Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF customers are in full blocking mode*

43% Faster time to first byte (TTFB) than using Akamai CDN*

• Architecture: Fastly is differentiated from legacy CDNs by being built for the modern internet. We have powerful POPs on one network to cache more and deliver faster.

• Performance: A better network accelerates your web and app performance and delivers true real-time features. Deliver faster, cache more, and purge instantly with Instant Purge™ (150ms Mean Purge Time) by doing more from the edge and less from your origin.

• Control and Configurability: Full configurability gives you control over your content, caching, and roll-backs. Fastly is DevOps and CI/CD friendly, and always API-first.

• Marketplace: Fastly is the only external CDN on the AWS Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace, providing simplified billing and procurement.

• Real-Time Visibility: Our real-time log streaming, to a provider of choice, provides instant visibility into traffic, performance, potential threats, and troubleshooting. Eliminate black boxes and access granular visibility at every stage of the request path, from origin to edge.

• Superior Support: Fastly delivers superior customer support with a CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score of 95%, and a G2 ‘Quality of Support’ rating of 9.4, compared to Akamai’s 8.1 (as of January 2025) .

• Secure: Fastly minimizes the attack surface area present in most multi-tenant serverless platforms through our isolation technology, which creates/destroys a sandbox in microseconds for each individual request our platform processes–unlike with V8 instances.

• Accessing distributed data instantaneously - Read local, distribute key-value pairs globally in 320 ms with the Fastly KV Store.

• Reduce false positives: Fastly Next-Gen WAF's SmartParse detection engine ensures highly accurate, contextual classification of attack traffic, eliminating the need for the numerous, maintenance-intensive regex rulesets required by Akamai. This results in fewer false positives and less tuning toil.

• Improve visibility: Unlike traditional WAFs, Fastly's Next-Gen WAF also leverages Signals – clear, easy-to-understand labels attached to requests. These Signals provide deep visibility into traffic behavior, helping you quickly identify, understand, and respond to potential threats.

• Deploy anywhere: While Akamai can only deploy in the cloud, the Next-Gen WAF rapidly deploys and protects everywhere your apps operate–in the cloud, containers, and at the edge–and all on one network. 

• DevSecOps-friendly: Unlike legacy WAFs, which force developers outside of their toolchain environments to see and fix issues, Fastly’s API-first security portfolio offers single-click integrations with common development and operations alerting engines, chat-ops, project management, and incident tracking systems.

• Easy to manage: Rapid deployment, high accuracy, and a “set it and forget it” view means low overhead and reduced headcount to maintain the WAF. This translates to a faster path to achieving your security goals and frees up your team to focus on innovation.

• Simplified bot management: For customers needing enhanced visibility and control over bot traffic, Fastly Bot Management takes advantage of the same accuracy, visibility and ease of use of our Next-Gen WAF in a powerful, flexible package. 

• Superior support: With a 98% customer satisfaction score, Fastly leads the industry in customer support. In addition, our Managed Security Services ensure comprehensive coverage and responsiveness, with industry-leading service commitments.

How Fastly stacks up to Akamai

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Fastly Named a Leader by Independent Research Firm

See why independent experts gave our vision, innovation, and roadmap a 5/5 score.

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The Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Of Fastly Network Services

Fastly delivered 189% ROI over 3 years. Learn about the cost savings and business benefits of Fastly CDN.

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*Blog: Fastly is faster at time to first byte. It makes a difference.

** Based on the 318 ms median global key-value replication of an updated 12,883 Byte value, tested on 1/13/2024, compared to ‘within 10 seconds’ for EdgeKV according to Akamai” or equivalent. Learn more about the Fastly Research Methodology Glossary.