Akamai App and API Protector vs F5 Silverline Managed Services comparison

Akamai and F5 are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Akamai is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.7, while F5 is ranked #27 with an average rating of 7.3. Additionally, 100% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of F5 users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

F5 Silverline Managed Services and Akamai App and API Protector are products competing in security services for applications and APIs. Akamai App and API Protector seems to have the upper hand in overall performance due to its comprehensive feature set, providing a worthwhile investment despite higher costs.

Features: F5 Silverline Managed Services provides customizable security rules, robust DDoS protection, and flexible cloud-based deployment, appealing to enterprises needing high-level customization. Akamai App and API Protector offers advanced threat intelligence, granular analytics, and seamless API integration, appealing to businesses prioritizing detailed security insights and streamlined integration.

Room for Improvement: F5 Silverline Managed Services could enhance its real-time threat intelligence, analytics depth, and API coverage integration. Akamai App and API Protector might focus on pricing flexibility, improving customer support consistency, and offering more customization in security policies.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 Silverline’s deployment is praised for its adaptability and strong support, ensuring smooth integration into diverse environments with reliable customer service. Akamai App and API Protector’s deployment is efficient, integrating seamlessly with existing infrastructure, though some feedback suggests that the F5's support experiences may be more consistently favorable.

Pricing and ROI: F5 Silverline Managed Services presents a cost-effective setup with flexible pricing options, yielding promising ROI for businesses aiming for controlled budget strategies. Akamai App and API Protector involves higher initial setup costs, but the comprehensive security features justify the expense, resulting in a substantial ROI for organizations prioritizing thorough protection.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai App and API Protector vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai App and API Protector vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

January 2025

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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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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Bharat Chandra

Head of DevOpps at Indian express

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.

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DejanBlagojevic

Presales Engineer at Exclusive-networks

Mitigates more bot activity when defending web applications than any other vendor but comes at a price

F5 Silverline Managed Services is expensive. You do get world-class quality of mitigation, but I think it is still pricey. You can find similar services, potentially of slightly lower quality, from other vendors like Cloudflare or Akamai for about half the price. When you compare what you get for the money you spend at Cloudflare or Akamai, you do get less protection but you are not dishing out too much for it. On the other hand, at F5 Silverline Managed Services, you do get better protection but, but you are paying double for it. We have had mixed feedback from our clients about this. Most of them would rather pay less for a bit of a lower-quality defense than overshoot their budget. The most common piece of feedback we receive is that the difference in protection levels is not reflected in the price.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."

"Cloudflare has many features."

"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."

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"The technical support is good."

More Cloudflare pros

"All the solution's features are very good."

"They have a fantastic tool for analyzing and viewing your traffic."

"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."

"Adaptive stream delivery and WAF protection are valuable."

"The product has a good UI."

"It gives us a report of traffic. It gives us a report of the day-to-day URL traffic, and it also gives an individual report. If we reach out to Akamai, they give us the IPs as well."

"The features are powerful and better than F5."

"We are getting security for each and every API."

More Akamai App and API Protector pros

"F5 technical support is really good."

"The stability of the solution is very good."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is its cloud-native functionality and the high level of protection it provides."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is it becomes similar to a distributed architecture."

"Its flexibility is the most valuable because it is a managed service. The good part is that you don't need to set it up. It just needs DNS routing, which is the easiest thing. Our client had Akamai for certain websites because they were using CDN features. They had NetScaler on the internal zone, F5 AWAFs on the data centers, and no WAF at all in the cloud. One of the main activities of the project was to move all these policies into a single WAF so that we could control and use that as a choke point. That exercise itself was very easy because it was a managed service and F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall does that for you. That's the best thing about F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall. It is easy to apply policies on-premises. If you have AWAF on-premises and you want to replicate some policies on F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, other than the policies that it applies by itself, it is easy because you have a team that supports it. F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works perfectly fine. It pretty much does everything that an Advanced WAF on-premises should do."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is the benchmark performance."

"The most important feature is that they have seven firewall protection, to protect our web servers."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services pros

Cons

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."

"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."

"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."

More Cloudflare cons

"There are some issues with pushing configurations across a network. It still takes about 20 minutes and that means to retract it's another 20 minutes."

"The solution could offer even more integrations."

"The custom rules must be improved."

"One thing I asked them is to integrate the API discovery product that they have and push that data into Akamai App and API Protector so that we do not have two types of reviews to identify the type of traffic. We already know the APIs that are frequently getting used, so analysis becomes easier. We can integrate both products and use them."

"The product should provide a secure NTP."

"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."

"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 pricing could be reduced a bit."

More Akamai App and API Protector cons

"We need to have support for cloud protection, which is not offered by this solution."

"There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution."

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, being a new product in the market or comparatively related to a new product, currently supports less number of PoPs. They should introduce more PoPs. The current number of PoPs that they have is around 10 or 12, which is still relatively less as compared to 2,400 plus PoPs that Akamai offers. The user latency or the number of hops a user needs before reaching the actual web application is less in Akamai because it has its internal fabric to route the traffic. They need to spin up more data to increase its traffic handling capability. They can also include the bot detection capability, though it is a pretty advanced functionality. If they could include DataDome like functionality, that is, bot prediction, then F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall will be top-notch in the market."

"We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough."

"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by adding features that Palo Alto has."

"Sometimes tech support can be slow. They take more time assigning engineers to complex issues, however, they resolve the issues by joining me to fix them."

"I just hope the price can be cheaper."

"The product could be improved on the global load and the integration with the other solution like Cisco and Dell. As a representor of the operation, we prefer to have one platform which can accommodate all type of integration. We are also looking for more improvements in the security policy configuration."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"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."

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The solution is expensive."

"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."

"The product is expensive, but it is worth the money."

"There is no license at all for Akamai. They are going to charge us only for the usage."

"One reason not all people use Akamai is that it is a little bit more expensive than some other providers."

"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."

"Based on the billing discussions in the DevOps team, Akamai's cost does not seem to be a major thing. However, LOE is an issue. When it comes to support, we know that even all the competitors do this. For a 30-minute issue, they give us a LOE of one or two hours. That is a basic practice, but that is something we worry about."

More Akamai App and API Protector pricing and cost advice

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better, they are not very flexible. The price of the solution is based on the requirements of the enterprise."

"The product’s pricing is reasonable."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works based on your bandwidth. They look at the clean bandwidth and do the pricing. 20% of a total pipe would be a clean bandwidth. The list price or a non-negotiated price for F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall would be around $2,200 per application per year for everything that you need. When you get into an enterprise kind of a setup, they negotiate this to the last bit. I would easily take 20% on that, which would be the cost, but it should cover all your Advance WAF features, bot protection, tech campaign, etc. It is built as a package and gives you most of the capability. You don't get the mobile SDK, which is an additional license. Mobile SDK is required only if you're buying or if you have a mobile application, and you are going to instrument F5 or Imperva into your mobile appliance. This anyways would be an additional module. It doesn't come within the WAF, but it is a WAF feature."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Insurance Company

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Akamai Web Application Protector?

The product is user-friendly.

See all answers

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...

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What needs improvement with Akamai Web Application Protector?

It could have better analytics and reporting visibility in the OEM console.

See all answers

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you hav...

See all answers

What do you like most about F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The initial setup is straightforward.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The product’s pricing is reasonable.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 13% of the time

AWS WAF vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 12% of the time

Prolexic vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 8% of the time

F5 Shape Security vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 4% of the time

More Akamai App and API Protector Competitors

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 19% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 12% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 3% of the time

More F5 Silverline Managed Services Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Akamai App and API Protector

February 2025

Download Akamai App and API Protector product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Silverline Managed Services

February 2025

Download F5 Silverline Managed Services product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Akamai Web Application Protector, Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Kona DDoS Defender

F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“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.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Akamai App and API Protector provides website security by preventing DDoS attacks, acting as an application firewall, managing content delivery, and monitoring APIs. It adapts to threat profiles and is used for fast media delivery and identifying malicious activities.

Akamai App and API Protector offers strong protection, adaptable security features, and efficient traffic management. Its WAF blocks IP addresses and country-specific threats while preventing SQL injections. Companies utilize it for scalable CDN services and comprehensive traffic analysis. Known for its cost-effectiveness and user-friendly dashboard, this protector stands out for its customizable rules and technical support. Users also highlight the ease of integration and detailed attack insights available through its advanced dashboard.

What are the key features of Akamai App and API Protector?

DDoS Protection: Strong defense against Distributed Denial of Service attacks.
Scalable CDN: Manages content delivery efficiently under high traffic loads.
WAF Capabilities: Blocks specific IPs and countries, prevents SQL injections.
Traffic Filtering: Analyzes and controls incoming requests to maintain security.
Adaptive Stream Delivery: Adjusts content delivery to meet bandwidth needs.

What benefits should users expect?

Cost-Effectiveness: Provides robust security tools at a competitive price.
Enhanced Security: Comprehensive protection against cyber threats.
Scalability: Easily handles increasing traffic and data loads.
Ease of Integration: Simple integration with existing systems.
Insightful Analytics: Offers data-driven insights into traffic and attack patterns.

In media, Akamai App and API Protector ensures smooth streaming by handling high bandwidth demands. E-commerce companies use it to guard against fraud and data breaches. Financial sectors rely on its ability to protect sensitive transactions. Implementations in healthcare focus on safeguarding patient data while maintaining compliance with regulations.

Akamai

F5's Silverline Managed Services is a SaaS solution delivering DDoS protection, managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) services, and managed Shape Security Fraud and Anti-bot solutions.

Silverline services include 24x7 access to F5's Security Operations Center (SOC). F5's expert security professionals use F5 products with state-of-the-art security tools to ensure the best protection possible. As an add-on to Silverline DDoS or WAF services, Silverline Threat Intelligence integrates dynamic lists of threatening IP addresses to give context for policy decisions.

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

City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office

Buyer's Guide

Akamai App and API Protector vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

January 2025

Free Report: Akamai App and API Protector vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai App and API Protector vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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See our list of best Web Application Firewall (WAF) vendors and best Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection vendors.

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