Contrasting Fastly (NASDAQ:FSLY) and Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ:AKAM)

Fastly (NASDAQ:FSLY) and Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ:AKAM) are both technology companies, but which is the superior investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their analyst recommendations, dividends, institutional ownership, profitability, risk, valuation and earnings.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent recommendations and price targets for Fastly and Akamai Technologies, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Fastly	2	5	7	1	2.47
Akamai Technologies	2	9	13	0	2.46

Fastly presently has a consensus price target of $27.42, indicating a potential downside of 6.43%. Akamai Technologies has a consensus price target of $150.10, indicating a potential upside of 40.34%. Given Akamai Technologies’ higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe Akamai Technologies is more favorable than Fastly.

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares Fastly and Akamai Technologies”s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Fastly	$624.02 million	7.48	-$121.68 million	($0.53)	-55.28
Akamai Technologies	$4.21 billion	3.65	$452.03 million	$2.78	38.47

Akamai Technologies has higher revenue and earnings than Fastly. Fastly is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Akamai Technologies, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Profitability

This table compares Fastly and Akamai Technologies’ net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Fastly	-11.80%	-6.31%	-4.04%
Akamai Technologies	9.51%	11.32%	4.47%

Insider and Institutional Ownership

79.7% of Fastly shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 94.3% of Akamai Technologies shares are owned by institutional investors. 4.2% of Fastly shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 2.3% of Akamai Technologies shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Risk and Volatility

Fastly has a beta of 0.31, meaning that its stock price is 69% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Akamai Technologies has a beta of 0.62, meaning that its stock price is 38% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Summary

Akamai Technologies beats Fastly on 11 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Fastly

Fastly, Inc. operates an edge cloud platform for processing, serving, and securing its customer's applications in the United States, the Asia Pacific, Europe, and internationally. The edge cloud is a category of Infrastructure as a Service that enables developers to build, secure, and deliver digital experiences at the edge of the internet. The company offers network services to speed up and optimize the delivery of web and application traffic; device detection and geolocation; content delivery network, such as dynamic site acceleration, origin shield, instant purge, surrogate keys, programmatic control, content compression, reliability features, fanout, domainr, privacy, and modern protocols and performance services; and video/ streaming solutions and services, including live streaming, video on demand, and media shield. It also provides security solutions, such as DDoS protection, next-gen WAF, bot management, API and ATO protection, advanced rate limiting, and compliance services; load balancing; image optimization; transport layer security (TLS), platform TLS, and certainly; and origin connect. It serves customers operating in digital publishing, media and entertainment, technology, online education, travel and hospitality, and financial services industries. The company was formerly known as SkyCache, Inc. and changed its name to Fastly, Inc. in May 2012. Fastly, Inc. was incorporated in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

About Akamai Technologies

Akamai Technologies, Inc. provides cloud computing, security, and content delivery services in the United States and internationally. The company offers cloud solutions to keep infrastructure, websites, applications, application programming interfaces, and users safe from various cyberattacks and online threats while enhancing performance. It also provides web and mobile performance solutions to enable dynamic websites and applications; media delivery solutions, including video streaming and video player services, game and software delivery, broadcast operations, authoritative domain name system, resolution, and data and analytics; and cloud computing services, such as compute, storage, networking, database, and container management services to build, deploy, and secure applications and workloads. In addition, the company offers content delivery solutions; and an array of service and support to assist customers with integrating, configuring, optimizing, and managing its offerings. It sells its solutions through various channel partners. Akamai Technologies, Inc. was incorporated in 1998 and is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.