Akamai CDN
Ranked 7 of 7 CDNs by recommenders
People recommend Akamai for handling large enterprise sites at scale and for being a solid CDN choice. The most common caveat is that you must sign a sales agreement before use, with no public pricing.
People recommend Akamai for handling large enterprise sites at scale and for being a solid CDN choice. The most common caveat is that you must sign a sales agreement before use, with no public pricing.
27 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- criticize it
- 18
- approval share
- 33%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Handles large enterprise sites at scale
“Akamai seem to be living proof that it's possible to operate that kind of business at scale from the US without vice signalling”
Comment from 9 Jan 2026 in “Cloudflare CEO on the Italy Fines” “How often do you hear of Akamai going down and they host a LOT more enterprise/high value sites than Cloudflare.”
Comment from 5 Dec 2025 in “Cloudflare was down” Praised as good among major CDNs
“Much better from akamai, tornado, kamatera, others.”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “Google suspended my company's Google cloud account for the third time” “Akamai, Google, AWS, etc all have good solutions.”
Comment from 6 Dec 2025 in “Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Opaque or overpriced pricing, sales agreement required
“you can't even use Akamai without signing a sales agreement ahead of using them”
Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare” “Going to Akamai's site I don't see a single mention of pricing”
Comment from 18 Nov 2025 in “GoSign Desktop RCE flaws affecting users in Italy” “overpriced and overwrought competitors like Akamai”
Comment from 9 Sep 2026 in “A Biography of Lee Holloway, the Architect of Cloudflare's Technology (Part 1)” Hostile to users, fingerprinting and blocking
“Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai refuse to talk to me before they can grab a unique fingerprint”
Comment from 22 May 2026 in “How you probably will find Satoshi” “both companies were on a user hostile (per usual) campaign to hide query parameters”
Comment from 18 Jun 2026 in “RFC 10008: The HTTP Query Method” “they block many user mercilessly”
Comment from 14 Jul 2026 in “Precursor” Outages blamed on configuration problems
“configuration problem in Akamai’s infrastructure”
Comment from 5 Aug 2026 in “IP and DNS Leaks in WebKit Affecting Proxy Browsers and iCloud Private Relay” “Akamai is who dropped the ball here”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “Astro Joining Cloudflare” Caching and filtering quirks
“Akamai edge servers don't cache responses that include the Vary header”
Comment from 27 Aug 2026 in “Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers” “Akamai was just giving a blank 403 because it looked to much like SQL.”
Comment from 9 Sep 2026 in “Getting phpBB 1.4.4 working in Docker” “Which, on Akamai, are by default ignored!”
Comment from 11 Mar 2026 in “Cloudflare Crawl Endpoint”
Other CDNs people recommend
The four most recommended other CDNs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 744 | 1,249 | 37% | 13 | 3 yrs26 owners | — |
| Bunny.net | 121 | 52 | 70% | 12 | 2 yrs16 owners | Approved |
| Amazon CloudFront | 24 | 11 | 69% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Cloudflare CDN | 12 | 15 | 44% | 9 | — | — |
| Akamai CDNThis page | 9 | 18 | 33% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
23 of the 27 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“all the other cdn providers do this too, like akamai, fastly, cloudflare, etc.”
“overpriced and overwrought competitors like Akamai”
“Akamai was just giving a blank 403 because it looked to much like SQL.”
“you can't even use Akamai without signing a sales agreement ahead of using them”
“Akamai edge servers don't cache responses that include the Vary header”
“configuration problem in Akamai’s infrastructure”
“I liked that even more as you really need a second device.”
“they block many user mercilessly”
“both companies were on a user hostile (per usual) campaign to hide query parameters”
“the deficiencies in their product are not even close to subtle”
“Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai refuse to talk to me before they can grab a unique fingerprint”
“They are still losing money unlike Akamai”
“Which, on Akamai, are by default ignored!”
“Akamai is who dropped the ball here”
“other apps like shitty Akamai”
“Akamai seem to be living proof that it's possible to operate that kind of business at scale from the US without vice signalling”
“Could they be more concerned with the various script kiddies and scanners”
“Which Akamai can do, and Runonflux can do.”
“Akamai, Google, AWS, etc all have good solutions.”
“nobody that had to deal with our Akamai stuff had anything kind to say about them as a vendor”
“How often do you hear of Akamai going down and they host a LOT more enterprise/high value sites than Cloudflare.”
“Going to Akamai's site I don't see a single mention of pricing”
“Much better from akamai, tornado, kamatera, others.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.