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Akamai App and API Protector vs Check Point DDoS Protector comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
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
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (9th), Cloud and Data Center Security (10th)
Check Point DDoS Protector
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.4%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai App and API Protector is 4.1%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Check Point DDoS Protector is 1.0%, up from 1.0% 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.
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.
Petr Zemánek - PeerSpot reviewer
Protect from DDoS attacks with good management and easy setup
I have used Fortinet FortiDDoS. Fortinet is a little bit cheaper. Both solution was effective. The management of Check Point solution is a little bit better. It is 50 percent cheaper than Fortinet. It's very modern now to have an AI in the management for fast finding of attacks or investigation. Check Point have these features in a new releases.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's very user-friendly."
"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"The support that we got from their technical team has been fantastic. I have never experienced this level of support from other CDN providers."
"The product has a good UI."
"Akamai Web Application Protector is a good solution that provides basic web application protection."
"The CDN and the WAF features are the best."
"The most valuable feature is the DDoS protection, which is the main reason we got it."
"Traffic filtering and WAF are valuable."
"The dashboard is the most interesting feature of the Akamai portal where you can have a detailed analysis of all the attacks that are happening. You can drill down an issue and see exactly what is happening, who are the bad guys attacking your website, and how Akamai is protecting the website. That is the most valuable feature."
"We are getting security for each and every API."
"Currently, we have fewer incidents with viruses. We improved our IQ operations and security using this solution. Our company's better after using Check Point."
"From my experience, the best part of this solution is behavioral DDoS protection. The DDoS Protector can monitor the traffic, and based on the behavior, it can decide which traffic is malicious and which traffic is regular. It works dynamically, and it's a very good solution."
"One of its most outstanding functions is the zero-day DDOS."
"It uses several layers of security."
"Check Point detects and automatically mitigates attacks, which helps our organization protect our infrastructure."
"Check Point DDoS Protector is a product that uses machine learning and behavior analysis."
"The initial setup takes two hours."
"The is a really low level of the false-positive alerts (when the clean traffic is marked as DDoS) due to some advanced techniques used by Check Point under the hood."
 

Cons

"Integration involving API with other products could be more user-friendly."
"DNS Management."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."
"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."
"The pricing could be reduced a bit."
"We are experimenting with EdgeWorkers to write our own code at the Edge level. It could grow to be much better."
"In terms of precedence of Akamai rules, the last one is implemented. That is the one that is operational. If two rules contradict, the last one is implemented. We had a clash, but it was really tough to find that out. I would like to have a rulebook because, in their architecture documentation, it is not mentioned anywhere that if two rules clash, the last one works, and if it does not work, then what to do. This is something we were debating today with their tech support. With AWS, we get documents for the issues so that they do not occur in the future. Akamai's support and knowledge base needs to be improved."
"It's fine for a simple tool, but as I recall, if you encounter a lot of bots, scrapers, and other things, you'll need this tool bot and this other thing they offer called Bot Manager."
"They are already very flexible, but room for improvement is there. Reports generation could be better and should be improved."
"I do not see any area for improvement. Akamai is already maintaining its own databases for the security concerns, vulnerabilities, and attacks that are there. If anything, they should have a solution in the infrastructure security area as well. They should not be only in cloud cybersecurity; they should also be in infrastructure security."
"The solution could offer even more integrations."
"Akamai App and API Protector is very new to me, so I do not have any insights on improvement areas for the product. However, when we ask for some help, it can take some time. We understand that the job is done by professionals, but if that time can be reduced, it would be great."
"The product is expensive."
"The Check Point support language is only in English."
"The mitigation part could be improved."
"Check Point DDoS Protector does not provide the ability to upload data for the blacklist/whitelist in bulk, which is one of the big points that need to be improved to facilitate configurations."
"The public documentation is a detail that must be improved in order to have greater implementations with the best practices in this case of the Check Point manufacturer."
"For a long time, there was no software version of R80.10 available for the Check Point DDoS Protector software appliances, and we had to stay on the quite outdated R77.30 version."
"I would like applications for Android and IOS where we can follow the events, and, if necessary, make changes."
"It is an expensive tool for some companies."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"Akamai Web Application Protector is an expensive product."
"The price they are offering is quite reasonable for premium customers, but it's very expensive if you're a small and medium-sized enterprises."
"It's more expensive than others, but the ROI is good for large-scale infrastructure."
"The product is expensive, but it is worth the money."
"Its price is at the medium level. It is not very high. It is also not very low. It serves the purpose."
"Price-wise, I would say Akamai's pricing is competitive."
"The product’s price is high."
"If you want quality, you have to pay the price. Its price is fair. Their account managers are also very helpful. They help you a lot with pricing even though they are working with Akamai."
"I don't deal with the pricing, but it seems that you need to get basic support in order to upgrade the DDoS database for new attacks and so on."
"The appliance comes with a loaded hardware license, and additional options such as SSL can be purchased and enabled."
"It's an expensive solution. It's one of the most expensive solutions in the world. It's cheaper than Palo Alto and Cisco but these are expensive solutions. Fortinet is cheaper."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
32%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

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 is your primary use case for Check Point DDoS Protector?
The main use case is to protect bank from DDoS attacks. We have it as a service device in network and but it's a comm...
 

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
Boston Properties
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai App and API Protector vs. Check Point DDoS Protector and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,253 professionals have used our research since 2012.