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Akamai App and API Protector vs Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.0
Cloudflare improves speed, security, and stability, leading to significant financial benefits with an ROI of 318% for businesses.
Sentiment score
5.8
Akamai App and API Protector offers superior traffic management, security, and cost savings for large infrastructures, despite higher costs.
Sentiment score
7.3
Akamai Connected Cloud offers cost-effective infrastructure solutions, enhancing flexibility, client acquisition, and career opportunities for users and businesses.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
We have had ROI with the tool's use since it never gave us downtime and made us lose millions.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Cloudflare's support is praised for responsiveness, though non-paying users and regions without local offices face challenges.
Sentiment score
7.7
Customer service is excellent, while technical support has mixed reviews with praise for expertise but needs improved availability.
Sentiment score
7.7
Customers praise Akamai Connected Cloud support for its prompt, professional, responsive service with human interaction and personalized attention.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
We'd like a dedicated account manager.
They respond with relevant and easy-to-follow solutions.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare efficiently handles increased traffic and growth, offering scalability, robust network performance, and seamless expansion for enterprises.
Sentiment score
8.1
Akamai App and API Protector excels in scalability, seamlessly handling extensive user demands and large-scale deployments with stability.
Sentiment score
7.2
Akamai Connected Cloud offers flexible scalability, ideal for small to medium applications, with easy upgrades but challenges in scaling down.
I would rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten since I didn't encounter any issues with it.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten because I had no issues with it.
I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Cloudflare is generally stable and reliable, but occasional issues with downtime, speed, and DDoS protection are reported.
Sentiment score
8.4
Akamai App and API Protector is highly stable and reliable, with no reported outages or issues over years of use.
Sentiment score
8.0
Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) is praised for reliability, proactive communication, and minimal downtime, maintaining strong service availability.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
 

Room For Improvement

Cloudflare needs analytics, threat insights, improved support, user-friendly dashboards, and simplified pricing, with consistent caching and security features.
Akamai App and API Protector needs enhancements in flexibility, UI, customer support, documentation, and advanced protection features.
Akamai Connected Cloud requires upgrades in security, global availability, performance, and features to match major providers' offerings.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
the ability to integrate with the on-site active directory instead of just AD through Azure AD
The main area for improvement is the lack of a backup feature to the local hard disk or storage.
It would be useful to have the option to sort or group by tags on the domains page.
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare offers flexible pricing with plans for small businesses to enterprises, balancing cost with comprehensive features and protection.
Akamai App and API Protector is expensive yet considered worth the cost by large enterprises for its quality services.
Akamai Connected Cloud offers predictable, cost-effective pricing with reliable support, valued for its price-to-performance ratio compared to Azure and AWS.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
I find it to be cheap.
It's cost-effective, but I think they should have a custom pricing model for enterprise customers based on the features you use.
I find Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode)'s pricing very competitive.
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare offers caching, DDoS protection, and CDN services, enhancing website speed and security with intuitive interface and global reach.
Akamai App and API Protector delivers scalable security, ease of use, and cost-effective protection with advanced features like DDoS defense.
Akamai Connected Cloud offers fast, cost-effective cloud services with global coverage, user-friendly interfaces, and efficient server management.
Our scenario consisted of two web servers in different allocations to control access demands, and the load balancer did the job as expected, bringing security and stability to access points.
For me, the valuable feature is DDoS protection.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) is easy to use and has a fair price, making it accessible and straightforward, which is crucial when compared to other complex solutions.
Their support is really good. I can ask anything at any time, and they are able to resolve issues like reinstating deleted Linodes.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Akamai App and API Protector
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (9th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Cloud and Data Center Security (10th)
Akamai Connected Cloud (Lin...
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (7th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Bharat Chandra - PeerSpot reviewer
Exceptional support, protects our sites, and provides visibility into traffic
We did a PoC of Akamai and Cloudflare. One area where Akamai can improve is the captcha part. Cloudflare provides a captcha if there are a certain number of threats. For example, I can assign that if there are 10 requests within a second from a single IP, it should send a captcha to the user. The user should fill in the captcha, and only after that, the user should be able to access our website. This captcha feature should be built into Bot Manager. I love this captcha feature of Cloudflare. Other things are good in Akamai. That is why we are using Akamai. Only the captcha part should be implemented.
Julio Graham - PeerSpot reviewer
Helpful automation scripts, good documentation, responsive support, easy to use and manage
The ability to fire up a virtual machine, use it, and then kill it, is quite a valuable feature for me. They have a lot of startup scripts, I think they are called stack scripts, whereby you can install something at a click of a button. For instance, you can install a whole server at the click of a button. Linode gives the users a lot of control. Another thing that I use quite a lot is their documentation. They have documentation on how to perform tasks and often, I use that to educate a client on how to do something or on how to maintain something, et cetera. This is because a lot of customers are used to simpler systems like an iPhone, where if you want an app then you just download it from a store, press a button and it installs, or press a button and it updates. The truth of the matter is that with servers and things like that, whilst people like the push button idea, it's a lot more complex than that. With these stack scripts, the people at Linode have thought about all of the things that a new user would not think about. They do all of that stuff and then walk you through it, and that's where Linode's documentation is really good. They walk you through what you have to do to secure a server, what you have to do to run a patch, or whatever. They've got all those sorts of knowledge bases of information, which I think is invaluable, especially for clients who are uneducated in these things. It's extremely important to me that Linode offers worldwide coverage via multiple data centers, for various reasons. One is that because we live in this global world, our customers are everywhere. Secondly, for people who need geo-redundancy, with for example a server in China and one elsewhere as a backup, it's great. It's also nice because if they were just US-based, I wouldn't be able to use them because I would need to go through a whole process of trying to certify the data integrity in other regions. I'm sure that most people wouldn't bother with this because of all of the EU laws and the UK laws around data privacy. The US's data privacy laws are far more relaxed than what they are on my side of the world. The fact that I can have a server in London means that I don't have to bother with all of that. My physical location of that server is in London and to me, it is really important. When you compare Amazon, they claim to have infrastructure all over the place but I think that the bulk is centered in Germany. Even if it is in a few different places, everything gets backed up to the US, which is a problem for a lot of people.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai Web Application Protector?
The price is higher than others. It could be about 80% to 70% more expensive than other tools. So, it’s not just a sl...
What needs improvement with Akamai Web Application Protector?
It could have better analytics and reporting visibility in the OEM console.
What do you like most about Linode?
When I started using Linode, I found its functionality easy to navigate, user-friendly and responsive to my needs. It...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Linode?
I find Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode)'s pricing very competitive. They never charge extra without improvements. I al...
What needs improvement with Linode?
There was an option to sort domains by tags, which seems to have been removed. It would be useful to have the option ...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Akamai Web Application Protector, Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Kona DDoS Defender
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

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