Akamai Adaptive Media Delivery vs AWS Shield: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Akamai Adaptive Media Delivery is a commercial distributed denial of service mitigation tool by Akamai. AWS Shield is a free distributed denial of service mitigation tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best distributed denial of service mitigation fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Akamai Adaptive Media Delivery
Mid-market and enterprise teams streaming video at scale need Akamai Adaptive Media Delivery for its 100% availability SLA and edge-native content control, which eliminates the operational overhead of managing origin failover and geographic access policies yourself. The platform's serverless edge compute and intelligent caching stack mean you're not paying for unused capacity or dealing with origin overload during traffic spikes. Skip this if your primary concern is DDoS mitigation rather than delivery reliability; Akamai excels at keeping streams live, not at stopping volumetric attacks before they reach your edge.
Teams already deep in AWS who need Layer 3/4 DDoS protection without adding vendors should start with AWS Shield Standard, which covers all customers automatically at no cost. The free tier blocks the majority of common volumetric attacks; Shield Advanced adds behavioral analysis and AWS WAF integration for $3,000 annually, meaningful only if you're absorbing sustained multi-Gbps floods regularly. This is not a replacement for application-layer DDoS mitigation or a choice for organizations running multi-cloud infrastructure where you need consistency across providers.
