Akamai vs Amazon Web Services
Split decision: Akamai is cheaper in 2 of the 3 contested categories, Amazon Web Services in 1. Neither is the cheaper provider outright.
Category by category
Each provider's cheapest published option in each category, on the axis that category is billed on. A dash means they do not sell into it.
| Category | Akamai | Rate | Amazon Web Services | Rate | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CDN & edge delivery | Akamai CDN | $0.085 | AWS CloudFront | $0.085 | Amazon Web Services |
| Cloud compute & VPS | Linode (Akamai Cloud) | $0.0075 | AWS EC2 | $0.042 | Akamai5.5× cheaper |
| GPU cloud | — | — | AWS EC2 P5 | $7.57 | only one competes |
| Object storage | Linode Object Storage | $0.020 | AWS S3 | $0.023 | Akamai1.2× cheaper |
| Managed databases | — | — | AWS RDS for PostgreSQL | $12.40 | only one competes |
About each provider
Akamai
Headquartered in US · 3 priced services
The original CDN, which acquired Linode in 2022 to add compute. Enterprise delivery pricing is negotiated, while the Linode-derived cloud products are published and flat-rate.
Amazon Web Services
Headquartered in US · 7 priced services
The largest cloud provider by revenue, with the broadest service catalogue and the most complex pricing. Rates are rarely the cheapest on any single axis, and egress in particular is priced well above the market.
Questions
- Is Akamai or Amazon Web Services cheaper in 2026?
- Split decision: Akamai is cheaper in 2 of the 3 contested categories, Amazon Web Services in 1. Neither is the cheaper provider outright. Picking a provider on an aggregate "cheaper" verdict is usually a mistake — what matters is which of them is cheaper in the categories you actually buy.
- What does Akamai offer that Amazon Web Services does not?
- Nothing in this dataset — every category Akamai sells into, Amazon Web Services sells into as well.
- What does Amazon Web Services offer that Akamai does not?
- In this dataset: GPU cloud, Managed databases. Akamai has no priced equivalent in those categories.
- Should I use both?
- Often the cheapest answer, and the table above shows where the seams are. Splitting workloads across providers costs you cross-provider data transfer and a second bill to reason about, so it pays off when the per-category gap is large and the traffic between them is small.