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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
7.1
Number of Reviews
72
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) (8th), Cloud and Data Center Security (10th)
Check Point DDoS Protector
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
11th
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 February 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.8%, down from 19.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai App and API Protector is 4.0%, down from 4.6% 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.
Robert Plese - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good protection, works dynamically, and analyzes traffic for any suspicious behavior
This is the worst type of support for me from Check Point. I work with many Check Point equipment and not only DDoS. Their support for DDoS Protector is not so good because this is basically Radware equipment. There is a very big delay between my questions or open requests and the solution. It doesn't matter whether it's software-related, configuration-related, or replacement-related. There has been an instance where Check Point needed to replace the equipment in five days, but I received the replacement after thirty days. The reason for such a service seems to be a mixture of incompetency and a lot of to-and-fro between Check Point and Radware. In my opinion, Check Point doesn't have skilled people for DDoS, and they forward all the questions and problems to Radware and wait for them to solve the problem. Check Point is only a proxy for such type of support in my opinion. Other customers might have a different opinion.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"It's very user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"Traffic filtering and WAF are valuable."
"Adaptive stream delivery and WAF protection are valuable."
"I can attest to its benefits in terms of understanding and mitigating threats...The solution's technical support team seems to be pretty responsive."
"I have contacted the support team of Akamai... I am happy with their responses and answers to my problems."
"The features are powerful and better than F5."
"I like that the charges are all based on usage and labor costs. For the time that we spend onboarding almost 252020 FQDN, Akamai charges us only for the traffic usage, but it's only charging us for the labor costs for onboarding."
"All the solution's features are very good."
"The product has a good UI."
"Check Point DDoS Protector is a product that uses machine learning and behavior analysis."
"This comprehensive tool validates and exploits complex vulnerabilities that other vendors fail to find and resolve to increase security."
"Check Point detects and automatically mitigates attacks, which helps our organization protect our infrastructure."
"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."
"The initial setup takes two hours."
"It uses several layers of security."
"This product uses auto-learning and behavioral analysis to establish baselines for legitimate traffic, and automatically detects and blocks traffic behavior that does not conform."
"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."
 

Cons

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"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."
"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"DNS Management."
"Customer support has room for improvement."
"It would be better if there weren't any issues with latency. We had latency issues, but I think they are all solved now."
"The product should provide a secure NTP."
"The performance of the cloud monitoring tool is low."
"If we talk about application layer attacks, including WAF, CloudFlare is leading. Akamai can focus a bit more on the application layer attacks and how to protect them."
"The custom rules must be improved."
"Support and the pricing need to improve."
"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."
"I would like applications for Android and IOS where we can follow the events, and, if necessary, make changes."
"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."
"The Check Point support language is only in English."
"It does not provide the capability to upload data for blacklisting/whitelisting in bulk."
"Monitoring and reporting are the things that can be introduced in the future."
"It is an expensive tool for some companies."
"The solution should greatly improve its interface."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"Its price is slightly high. Every company has a justification for the high price. Overall, it feels worth the money based on how the service has been structured, but we do negotiate it."
"Its price is at the medium level. It is not very high. It is also not very low. It serves the purpose."
"The product’s price is high."
"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."
"The solution is not expensive."
"Price-wise, I would say Akamai's pricing is competitive."
"Akamai is very expensive."
"One reason not all people use Akamai is that it is a little bit more expensive than some other providers."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
Comms Service Provider
29%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Security Firm
9%
 

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.
 

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: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.