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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Akamai Ion

    Score9.9 out of 10
    N/AAkamai offers the Ion application delivery controller suite to automatically supply performance optimization to websites and mobile or web applications.N/A

    NGINX

    Score9.2 out of 10
    Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
    NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
    Pricing
    Akamai IonNGINX
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Akamai IonNGINX
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Akamai IonNGINX
    Considered Both Products
    Akamai
    No answer on this topic
    F5
    Chose NGINX
    Nginx works on basic operating system principles and what I like the most about it is that even after being feature-rich and easily customizable it uses minimum resources.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Would buy again
    30 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    26 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    30 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    90%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    18 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    26 Answers
    Features
    Akamai IonNGINX
    Application Servers
    Comparison of Application Servers features of Akamai Ion and NGINX
    Feature
    Akamai Ion
    -
    Ratings
    NGINX
    7.8
    21 Ratings
    2% below category average
    IDE support00 Ratings7.210 Ratings
    Security management00 Ratings8.018 Ratings
    Administration and management00 Ratings7.018 Ratings
    Application server performance00 Ratings8.018 Ratings
    Installation00 Ratings9.718 Ratings
    Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings7.016 Ratings
    User Ratings
    Akamai IonNGINX
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.8
    (48 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.1
    (4 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Akamai IonNGINX
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Akamai
    • Akamai Ion is excellent if you have the staff to manage the configurations and understand how best to leverage its benefits amidst ongoing Dev work without getting in their way. You'll have to communicate consistently on what the CDN does and does not do as well as drive knowledge sharing sessions on expected behavior or unexpected behavior to help reduce unnecessary troubleshooting from your IT and Dev teams when tickets/issues arise.
    • Akamai Ion is best suited for well equipped and well informed IT or Marketing teams that can leverage the delivery benefits of caching and offload. Doing so will increase customer satisfaction, reduce bounce rates, improve conversion rates as well as drive more time on site.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    [NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Akamai
    • Ease of management with good UI for making rules and behaviors.
    • There is also an API and Code integration for the advanced Dev-Ops team to use as well.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
    • Great at serving static content.
    • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
    • Open-Source (no cost)!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Akamai
    • The learning curve on using a CDN is steep and requires class time. The initial onboarding and integration with the business' DevOps teams should be a bit closer relationship.
    • Global vs. Regional management can be a bit challenging if your account is centralized overseas, and you want a local time-zone account manager on your time.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    • Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
    • I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
    • It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
    • It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
    • I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Akamai
    No answers on this topic
    F5
    Great value for the product
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Akamai
    No answers on this topic
    F5
    Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Akamai
    • Support for tickets has gotten better/quicker over the years.
    • Also, there is a wealth of information on the knowledge base, documentation, and there is also a message board too now.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Akamai
    No answers on this topic
    F5
    We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because
    • we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them
    • we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load
    • individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Akamai
    • Improved conversion rates.
    • Reduced page load times.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    F5
    • Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache.
    • Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy").
    • Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    NGINX Screenshots

    Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration