Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

AWS Shield vs Akamai App and API Protector comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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
6.7
Businesses see financial benefits from Cloudflare through improved uptime, security, and performance, enhancing returns despite measurement challenges.
Sentiment score
5.8
Akamai App and API Protector offers superior traffic management, security, and cost savings for large infrastructures, despite higher costs.
No sentiment score available
I mean when your website is offline, you first lose money like daily revenue, around 400$ for us, but you also lose your customer loyalty, and there are many more issues.
CloudFlare provided a solution for all the above, which indirectly affects and improves our business, our ROI has greatly increased.
However, if I have a company that has online sales and sends out many newsletters, then they need to have a CDN.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Customer service is highly rated, especially for Enterprise plans, but response times could improve for complex issues.
Sentiment score
7.4
Customer service is excellent, while technical support has mixed reviews with praise for expertise but needs improved availability.
Sentiment score
8.0
AWS Shield's customer service excels with responsive support and proactive solutions, earning praise from both new and experienced users.
The representatives are knowledgeable and online documentation is great.
Enterprise support is amazing. It's 10 out of 10.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare is highly regarded for its scalability, smoothly accommodating various user needs and handling significant traffic across business sizes.
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
7.6
AWS Shield provides excellent scalability by automatically adjusting to traffic demands, satisfying users with both high and low needs.
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.
Scalability is not a problem for CloudFlare since they are a cloud based solution.
They're expanding and have enough resources worldwide.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudflare is generally praised for stability and reliability, despite occasional issues and past outages, requiring proper configuration for best performance.
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
8.5
Users consistently rate AWS Shield highly for its stability and reliable performance with no significant issues over the years.
There were a few times when some of their CDN nodes would fail, creating serious speed issues with the site without any warning or notification from their side.
Once the webserver is installed with CloudFlare, it should work like a charm.
Since we switched to the business plan, we encounter no problems.
 

Room For Improvement

Users suggest Cloudflare improve analytics, CDN errors, support, DNS, APIs, pricing, server access, DDoS features, and documentation.
Akamai App and API Protector needs enhancements in flexibility, UI, customer support, documentation, and advanced protection features.
AWS Shield is costly and complex, lacking flexibility, custom reporting, and detailed insights, with limited traffic and anomaly detection.
In CloudFlare's case, I need to get an external server, set up the redirection there using Apache or NGINX and put my own SSL certificates there.
The feature shows a cached version of your live site if your host is offline.
Hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud.
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare provides free and paid plans from $20, with straightforward pricing catering to small, medium, and enterprise businesses.
Akamai App and API Protector is expensive yet considered worth the cost by large enterprises for its quality services.
AWS Shield offers scalable pricing, with costs varying by traffic and organization size, seen as fair despite feature gaps.
currently we are using the $20 a month plan
The monthly cost is around $30 for three sites using the Business Cloudflare plan.
You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level.
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare provides speed enhancement, security, and ease of use with CDN, DDoS protection, SSL, and traffic analytics for website optimization.
Akamai App and API Protector delivers scalable security, ease of use, and cost-effective protection with advanced features like DDoS defense.
AWS Shield provides seamless DDoS protection, easy management, deployment, and operational transparency while safeguarding applications from web threats.
The aggressive caching and DDOS mitigation are the most valuable features offered by Cloudflare.
DDoS protection is what CloudFlare is known for.
Web optimization features such as ‘Automatic Content Caching’, ‘Rocket Loader’, and ‘AutoMinify’, which help to minimize the website loading time and increase the website response.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Akamai App and API Protector
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (8th), Cloud and Data Center Security (10th)
AWS Shield
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.9%, down from 20.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai App and API Protector is 4.3%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 5.9%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

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.
Deepesh  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Bot Manager and different features to manage threats
As a product, it has good capabilities, including professional support. However, it's risky for us to rely on AI for real-time traffic management. We use in-house analytics but avoid automatic actions due to their high impact. For example, I live in a developing country. Everyone has different types of phones, apps, and everything else. So, if someone is using a legacy phone, that is still a use case here. If AI decides that this is an end-of-life phone or end-of-life Android operating system, it starts blocking that traffic. We may potentially lose millions or probably thousands and hundreds of thousands of hits per second. Everything is all about how well we serve payments because we're into payments. So, AI is used for analytics but not for real-time decisions. We can't afford to block traffic based on AI models due to the variety of devices and operating systems our users have.
SteveNg - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution automatically scales according to traffic, only takes minutes to deploy, and is maintenance-free
Ultimately, the cost of the solution goes up as we add features, but I believe over time AWS has been adding more frequently asked features. Depending on the website, if our website has more transactions, more sensitive information, and more value, then, of course, we need more features. For us, we only require basic information, a website, some custom consumer, end user, and front-facing purposes. We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need. The pricing of the solution can be improved.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 AWS Shield?
We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't de...
What needs improvement with AWS Shield?
The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced. The tool has a few parameters based on which it tries to understa...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Akamai Web Application Protector, Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Kona DDoS Defender
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Douglas Omaha Technology Commission, ZALORA, PrintPlanet
netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Shield vs. Akamai App and API Protector and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.