Fastly vs Akamai: A Security Competitive Comparison
Fastly's Next-Gen WAF outperforms Akamai's with real-time threat detection, superior performance, and seamless integration. Experience faster incident response, comprehensive support, and unmatched flexibility on our global network.
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Almost 90% of Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF customers are in full blocking mode*
Fastly is the only vendor recognized for 6 consecutive years as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Cloud WAAP **
Limited time offer: Get one year free of Next-Gen WAF. Learn more.
Why move to Fastly?
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
Capabilities | Fastly | Akamai |
|---|---|---|
WAAP | ||
Protection controls | ||
Architecture | ||
Single network | ||
Management & administration | ||
Configurability | ||
Configuration speed | ||
Ease of use | ||
Programmable, API-first | ||
Managed security | ||
Human-responsive SLA | ||
We offer industry-leading value
Move to a better WAF. We are committed to making the switch as seamless as possible.
Hear what our customers have to say
"The signals-based technology of the Next-Gen WAF lets us do more targeted blocking rather than blocking entire content types or countries."
Marc Gillitzer, Senior Director of Technology, Life Time
“Fastly's new Bot Management solution provides granular visibility and rule setting capability to let the good traffic in and keep the bad traffic out, which will help us protect our content and reduce infrastructure costs.”
Paul Laleu, CTO, Le Monde
“Fastly Managed Security Service is expanding our security capability—from bot protection to rate limiting to emerging threats. And we'll be able to continue to expand to our protection over time.”
Andre Lackmann, Technology Director, Nine
See what analysts and peers have to say
Six years in a row as a Customers’ Choice
See why Fastly was named a Customers’ Choice in the 2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ ‘Voice of the Customer’ for Cloud Web Application and API Protection.
2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Web Application and API Protection (WAAP)
Learn about the current landscape and what to look for when selecting a cloud WAAP solution.
* Almost 90% of Fastly Next-Gen WAF customers are in full blocking mode, as of March 2023.
**Fastly is the only vendor to be recognized as a Customers’ Choice for six years in a row in the 2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ ‘Voice of the Customer’ for Cloud Web Application and API Protection (WAAP). Download Report.
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Meet a more powerful global network.
Our network is all about greater efficiency. With our strategically placed points of presence (POPs), you can scale on-demand and deliver seamlessly during major events and traffic spikes. Get the peace of mind that comes with truly reliable performance — wherever users may be browsing, watching, shopping, or doing business.
377 Tbps
Edge network capacity1
150 ms
Mean purge time with Instant Purge™
>1.8 trillion
Daily requests served4
~90% of customers
Run Next-Gen WAF in blocking mode3
As of March 31, 2024
As of December 31, 2019
As of March 31, 2021
As of July 31, 2023
Support plans
Fastly offers several support plans to meet your needs: standard, gold and enterprise.
Standard
Free of charge and available as soon as you sign up with Fastly.
Gold
Proactive alerts for high-impact events, expedited 24/7 incident response times, and a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantee.
Enterprise
Gives you the added benefits of emergency escalation for support cases and 24/7 responses for inquiries (not just incidents).