Akamai App and API Protector vs Imperva Web Application Firewall comparison

Akamai App and API Protector vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall

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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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Deepesh Singh

Senior Engineering Manager Cybersecurity at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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Abdullah Jin

Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Offers bot protection and DDoS Protection and protects public-facing portals

Support is one thing I wish Imperva could improve. They follow the phone model and keep rotating you from one customer service person to another. The layer one support isn't very clear about the workings of the product. My feedback is primarily about Imperva Cloud, not on-premise. On-premise is a whole new story. Support is the issue for Imperva Cloud. It's also a bit pricey. It's a premium service and very expensive. The licensing model is not very straightforward. Every feature is priced separately, and to enjoy maximum protection, you'll have to spend a lot of money. The licensing model is a bit complex, and each feature is very pricey. For example, API security and web application protection are two separate license packages.

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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

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"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 technical support is good."

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

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

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

More Cloudflare pros

"Adaptive stream delivery and WAF protection are valuable."

"Traffic filtering and WAF are valuable."

"Everything will be handled by Akamai's system before it reaches our infrastructure."

"I can attest to its benefits in terms of understanding and mitigating threats...The solution's technical support team seems to be pretty responsive."

"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."

"It is scalable for DDoS."

"The most valuable feature is the custom rules feature. This is because many of our customers require a lot of custom rules. Because it's a very customized project for our customers, I think they have the best of everything already."

"The product is user-friendly."

More Akamai App and API Protector pros

"We can prevent attacks or issues even before they happen."

"Compared to other web application firewalls in the market, Imperva does things in the most accurate way."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall is stable."

"It is easy to use and has good security."

"There are a number of features that are valuable such as the account takeover and various antivirus features."

"The most important feature I have found to be the ease in how to do the backup and restores."

"I am impressed with the product's scalability, availability, easy management, and security. We were able to integrate the product with Azure and Sentinel."

"Its inline transferring mode is the most valuable because it is 100% transparent. When you change the IP, there is no change on the network side. If you can't and want to try to reach an IP, you can reach the server IP. There are many other advanced security features in it. The smallest appliances of Imperva can handle the highest traffic at a customer site. For example, a smaller appliance from Imperva can provide you the same security as an F5 product."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

Cons

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."

"Technical support is lacking."

"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"Could integrate more features for each security."

"Customer support has room for improvement."

"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."

"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 WAF features definitely have a lot of room for improvement. A lot of the WAF is really basic. For some products or some of our solutions, we need to run a second layer of more advanced WAF. If it had better layer seven protection then we would not need a second WAF."

"We are experimenting with EdgeWorkers to write our own code at the Edge level. It could grow to be much better."

"The performance of the cloud monitoring tool is low."

"The product should provide a secure NTP."

More Akamai App and API Protector cons

"The user interface could be better."

"An improvement for Imperva WAF would be to reduce the number of false positives and create more strong use cases based on AI/ML or behavioral analytics."

"I would like the solution to improve its support response time."

"It's a complicated tool to keep."

"The tool's UI is complicated. It would be best to have a more accessible UI dashboard to make the job easier."

"I think that better bot protection is needed in this solution."

"It is complicated to integrate the solution's on-cloud version with other platforms."

"The product's customization capabilities are a bit problematic, requiring support cases for backend modifications."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

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

"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."

"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 solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"We are using the free version."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"Cost depends on the volume of traffic."

"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."

"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 not expensive."

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

"Its price is at the medium level. It is not very high. It is also not very low. It serves the purpose."

More Akamai App and API Protector pricing and cost advice

"Imperva Web Application Firewall's pricing is expensive."

"There are a couple of different licensing models."

"Make sure you understand the way that Imperva charges. It's very affordable. However, I would like to see a package with the Virtual Patching included. You get to do patching separately."

"It's an excellent product, but it can be very costly."

"Imperva’s pricing is a bit higher in the market since it offers a full-blown WAF."

"The price of this solution is a little bit high compared to competitors."

"The tool is expensive."

"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

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 do you like most about Akamai Web Application Protector?

The product is user-friendly.

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.

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

My recommendation is Imperva.

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...

DDoS solutions: Any other solutions to consider aside from Radware DefensePro and F5 Silverline DDoS Protection?

You can have a look to Imperva Cloud WAF, the anti-DDoS mitigation is under 1s and works very well. I observed a lot ...

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 48% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 14% of the time

AWS WAF vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 12% of the time

Prolexic vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 7% of the time

Google Cloud Armor vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 3% of the time

More Akamai App and API Protector Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 17% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 15% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 14% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 10% of the time

Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 2% of the time

More Imperva Web Application Firewall Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

Akamai App and API Protector

Download Akamai App and API Protector product report

Imperva Web Application Firewall

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

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

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Cloudflare

Akamai

Imperva

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

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.

Imperva Web Application Firewall is a versatile solution that protects web applications and databases from various attacks, including DDoS, cross-site scripting, and SQL injection attacks. It offers data security, availability, and access control and can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud.

The solution has good security against web attacks and offers advanced bot protection, API security, and mitigation features. Imperva WAF is easy to configure and deploy; it has good customer service and an excellent user interface.

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

BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens

Akamai App and API Protector vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall