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Akamai Ion vs VMWare Avi Load Balancer comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Ion
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMWare Avi Load Balancer
Ranking in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) category, the mindshare of Akamai Ion is 2.1%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMWare Avi Load Balancer is 4.2%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMWare Avi Load Balancer4.2%
Akamai Ion2.1%
Other93.7%
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

HarshBhardiya - PeerSpot reviewer
SOC Engineer at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Reliable bot management with valuable traffic analytics and good delivery configuration
We are using Akamai Ion primarily for CDN services. It is more about delivery configuration, and for security, we use Akamai WAF security controls and Botman Akamai Ion helps protect us from DOS, SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and scraping tools. Real-time analytics are very helpful for…
Sasikiran Sakalabattina - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Infrastructure engineer at TechMahindra
Centralized load management has improved availability and reduces manual effort for critical apps
The features we use most frequently in VMware Avi Load Balancer are virtual services, backend pools, health monitoring, and Layer 7 load balancing. Virtual services are a component of VMware Avi Load Balancer that serves as the primary entry point for the client traffic. In our application, I regularly create and manage the virtual services for the web applications, APIs, and internal business applications. We configure SSL certificates for load balancing the policies and health monitoring at the virtual service. The best feature of VMware Avi Load Balancer is health monitoring. The most valuable feature for me is the health monitoring capability. In our production environment with more than one thousand virtual machines, it continuously checks the health of the backend application servers. During monthly Windows patching or unexpected application failures, unhealthy pool members are automatically removed from the service. This feature is significantly reducing the traffic directed to unhealthy services without any manual intervention. Once the application server is restored, VMware Avi Load Balancer automatically adds the server back to the pool. This feature has significantly improved the application availability and is reducing the business downtime. Due to this, manual interventions required are minimal, so it is saving time.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Akamai is easy to use and very effective."
"The most valuable feature is bot management."
"The WAF - the web application firewall itself - is great."
"Moving from a legacy solution to a newer one has provided us with tangible returns."
"Overall, VMWare Avi Load Balancer has positively impacted our operation, as it gives us true redundancy for our UAGs for remote access."
"Avi Networks Software Load Balancer can improve the way some organizations function because the platform is agile."
"From my experience, VMware Avi Load Balancer has become a critical component for our application delivery infrastructure, and features such as health monitoring and centralized management and SSL offloading and detailed analytics have reduced the troubleshooting time and improved the application availability."
"The solution is entirely virtual, SDDC technologies drive it, and the integration with other projects is compelling."
"The integration into the host environment is the most valuable aspect right now."
"The features I find most valuable in VMWare Avi Load Balancer are the load balancing part and the WAF part."
 

Cons

"The product must provide more flexibility."
"Log management should display data for more than two months."
"It is very expensive. The pricing is expensive in that it is only an add-on."
"Regarding the pricing of VMWare Avi Load Balancer, I believe it is expensive. We use the basic version, which is stripped down and allows only two vCPUs and about 10 services per service engine."
"In my opinion, VMWare Avi Load Balancer is a complicated tool with many advanced features that can be beneficial, but policies are powerful yet difficult to debug when traffic behaves unexpectedly or becomes heavy."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"VMWare Avi Load Balancer can be improved in various ways, as it follows a pay-as-you-go model, which still makes it quite pricey and a little expensive for startups or small-scale industries."
"The scalability of VMWare Avi Load Balancer is not great, but it does what it needs to do in the single appliance we have, so that is acceptable."
"One struggle with Avi Networks Software Load Balancer is its integration with other VMware products."
"The network analytics and monitoring features are not effective."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is expensive."
"With Avi Networks, you can buy a 10-Gig license and, if your primary data center goes down, in the flick of a switch you can move that license to your backup data center and it will generate the traffic... there are a lot of cost-effective measures."
"The tool is expensive."
"I rate the solution price a four to five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high, since it is an affordable tool."
"The licensing costs for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer are really variable. The product can be sold from a bandwidth utilization perspective. It can be sold from a per CPU perspective, depending on if you're looking at on-premises or hyperscale environments. Licensing costs vary quite a bit if you're familiar with the AWS Calculator, where you can see that it can widely vary per licensing model. On a scale of one to five, with one being not very good value for the money and five being great, I would rate the pricing for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer a five because its pricing is extremely competitive. Not all features are included with the license, for example, there's single licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Comms Service Provider
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Educational Organization
9%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai Ion?
The billing cycle is monthly, however, payment is done yearly. While expensive, it provides value for the services offered.
What needs improvement with Akamai Ion?
Log management should display data for more than two months. The traffic report needs to be more flexible. The response time of technical support should be improved.
What is your primary use case for Akamai Ion?
We are using Akamai Ion primarily for CDN services. It is more about delivery configuration, and for security, we use Akamai WAF security controls and Botman.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Avi Networks Software Load Balancer?
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, senior administrators manage this aspect, and I am not fully aware of it. However, I can say that compared to other products, the pricing for VMWare Av...
What needs improvement with Avi Networks Software Load Balancer?
VMware Avi Load Balancer is actually a mature and reliable product, but there are areas where it could improve, such as improving the cloud environments. I would like to see more automated root-cau...
What advice do you have for others considering Avi Networks Software Load Balancer?
I would like to give the rating of nine out of ten for VMware Avi Load Balancer because it is an excellent product with centralized management where we can manage every virtual machine in one conso...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Avi Software Load Balancer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Eurail, Boston Scientific
Palo Alto Networks, DGDean, Swisslos
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Ion vs. VMWare Avi Load Balancer and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.