Akamai Global Traffic Management vs Fastly DDoS Protection: 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.

Fastly DDoS Protection

Teams operating high-traffic APIs and web applications will get the most from Fastly DDoS Protection because its pay-for-legitimate-traffic model removes the financial penalty for false positives that tanks ROI on other DDoS services. The 497+ Tbps absorption capacity and adaptive engine handle synchronized multi-vector attacks without manual rule tuning, which matters if your ops team is already underwater. Skip this if you need post-attack forensics and recovery orchestration; Fastly prioritizes real-time mitigation over the investigation side of the incident lifecycle.