Akamai Global Traffic Management vs F5 BIG-IP DNS: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Akamai Global Traffic Management

Mid-market and enterprise teams managing traffic across multiple datacenters or cloud regions should pick Akamai Global Traffic Management for its DNS-layer failover speed; automatic rerouting happens in seconds when a datacenter fails, not minutes. The 100% uptime SLA and real-time health monitoring directly address PR.IR resilience requirements without requiring you to build failover logic yourself. Skip this if your infrastructure is single-region or if you need DDoS mitigation as your primary security control; GTM handles availability, not attack deflection.

F5 BIG-IP DNS

Enterprise and mid-market security teams needing DNS-layer DDoS defense at scale should evaluate F5 BIG-IP DNS for its ability to absorb volumetric attacks while maintaining authoritative DNS availability; the 100 million RPS capacity and integrated GSLB mean you're not bolting on a separate DDoS appliance. The tool maps cleanly to NIST PR.IR for infrastructure resilience, though its monitoring and anomaly detection lag behind dedicated threat detection platforms. Skip this if your organization needs DNS security to also cover recursive resolver hardening or advanced query-pattern analytics; BIG-IP DNS is built for the authoritative side of the nameserver equation.