Akamai vs Fastly
Fastly publishes its delivery rates and gives you 100 GB and a million requests free to test with. Akamai shows no delivery price, splits delivery into separate products and starts its trial with a form and a call. Both are enterprise-grade configuration work, but only one lets you read the rate card before talking to anyone. Both vendors are headquartered in the United States.
Sebastiaan SmitsFounderVendors can pay for more visibility on this website, for example a higher place in a ranking or more room on a page. Commercial relationships can also affect which products we feature and how prominently. Every vendor link is marked the same, whatever the arrangement behind it. How that works.
Choose Akamai ifyour procurement runs through sales anyway and you need separate products for media, downloads and storage under one vendor.
Choose Fastly ifyou want to read the rates first, test on the Free tier, and have engineers who will control caching in code.
Akamai and Fastly side by side
| Akamai | Fastly | |
|---|---|---|
| Our CDN providers rank | #9 of 12 | #7 of 12 |
| Established in | United States | United States |
| List price, 2 November 2026 | Quote per organisation, nothing published on the Ion page we read; trial requested through a sales form | Free tier with 100 GB and 1M requests; Growth bills by usage, from $0.12 per GB (first 10 TB, Europe and North America) and $0.01 per 10,000 requests; custom Enterprise |
| Free tier | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Self-hostable | — | — |
| Built for | Enterprises with sales-led procurement and a team to configure properties | Engineering teams wanting to control caching and routing in code |
| Not for | Small sites that want to sign up and pay by card | Small static sites watching a per-gigabyte budget |
Both are reviewed in full in our CDN providers ranking: Akamai and Fastly.
Where they differ
Akamai 1 · Fastly 2 · open 2- 01
Reading the price list
Fastly's pricing page lists Free, Growth (usage-based with volume discounts) and Enterprise (custom) packages, with regional bandwidth rates and $0.01 per 10,000 requests. Akamai publishes nothing for delivery: the Ion page has no price and the cloud pricing page stops at compute and storage. Fastly is the one you can model in a spreadsheet.
Edge: Fastly
- 02
Trying it first
Fastly's Free package includes 100 GB bandwidth, 1 million requests and 100,000 image requests a month. Akamai's free trial begins with a form; someone from its team then reaches out. A self-serve allowance lets a team test on real traffic without an appointment.
Edge: Fastly
- 03
Breadth of delivery products
Akamai's docs list Ion, Adaptive Media Delivery, Download Delivery, Cloud Wrapper, NetStorage, Image & Video Manager and API Acceleration. Fastly's pricing page we read shows Full Site Delivery, Image Optimizer, managed TLS and optional security products. For video, large downloads and storage under one contract, Akamai lists more dedicated products.
Edge: Akamai
- 04
Cost of a growing audience
For the first 10 TB, Europe and North America cost $0.12 per GB on Fastly, Asia and Australia $0.19, and Africa, India and South Korea $0.28. After 5 free domains, managed TLS runs $20 per domain. Akamai's costs are not published, so we cannot say it is cheaper or dearer, only that Fastly's meters are visible and add up fast outside Europe and North America.
Depends on the buyer
- 05
Configuration effort
Akamai's Ion docs walk through a property with hostnames, variables and rules to accelerate delivery, offload origin and strengthen security, followed by tests and go-live. Fastly describes a programmable edge platform. Both need engineers, so a team hoping for a click-through wizard will be disappointed with either.
Depends on the buyer
When neither fits
If you want a published flat plan and DNS in the same account, Cloudflare lists Free, Pro and Business prices. If your origin runs on AWS, Amazon CloudFront has published plans and waives transfer from AWS origins.
Akamai or Fastly: questions
3 answersDoes Akamai publish CDN prices?
Not on any page we read. The Ion page shows no price, and the cloud pricing page covers compute, storage, databases and networking but no CDN delivery.
What does Fastly's free tier include?
100 GB of bandwidth, 1 million requests and 100,000 image requests per month.
How do I start an Akamai trial?
You submit a form on the Ion page and an Akamai team member contacts you.
Sources
Checked 2 November 2026- Akamai Ion product page: no price shown; trial form, then contact from Akamai.
- Akamai content delivery docs: list of separate delivery products.
- Akamai Ion docs: property set-up with rules, tests and go-live.
- Akamai cloud pricing page: no CDN delivery price.
- Akamai facts and figures: headquarters in Cambridge, MA, United States.
- Fastly pricing page: packages, free allowances, regional bandwidth rates, request rate, TLS pricing, programmable edge description.
- Fastly terms: Fastly, Inc., San Francisco, California.