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Akamai App and API Protector vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

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.
No sentiment score available
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.
 

Room For Improvement

Sentiment score
4.9
Users suggest Cloudflare improve analytics, CDN errors, support, DNS, APIs, pricing, server access, DDoS features, and documentation.
Sentiment score
4.9
Akamai App and API Protector needs enhancements in flexibility, UI, customer support, documentation, and advanced protection features.
No sentiment score available
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.
 

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.
No sentiment score available
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.
 

Setup Cost

Sentiment score
6.1
Cloudflare provides free and paid plans from $20, with straightforward pricing catering to small, medium, and enterprise businesses.
Sentiment score
5.1
Akamai App and API Protector is expensive yet considered worth the cost by large enterprises for its quality services.
Sentiment score
6.0
Microsoft Azure Application Gateway offers competitive, usage-based pricing appealing to enterprises for scalability without hidden costs.
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.
 

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.
No sentiment score available
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.
 

Valuable Features

Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare provides speed enhancement, security, and ease of use with CDN, DDoS protection, SSL, and traffic analytics for website optimization.
Sentiment score
8.3
Akamai App and API Protector delivers scalable security, ease of use, and cost-effective protection with advanced features like DDoS defense.
No sentiment score available
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
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Akamai App and API Protector
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (8th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Cloud and Data Center Security (10th)
Microsoft Azure Application...
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd)
 

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.
Sami - PeerSpot reviewer
High stability with built-in rules that reduce alerts and are easy to configure
The graphical interface needs improvement because it is not user friendly. There isn't a standardized process for blocking IPs. IPs need to be blocked individually, whether one or one hundred. A normal scenario would be to copy and paste multiple IPs at the same time but the solution does not offer this option. Updating takes a long time and is up to the WAF. In most cases, we prepare scripts to handle these updates.
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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
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?
We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...
How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Akamai Web Application Protector, Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Kona DDoS Defender
Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway
 

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
Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai App and API Protector vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.