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Akamai App and API Protector vs Prolexic 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
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (18th)
Akamai App and API Protector
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Cloud and Data Center Security (12th)
Prolexic
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
11th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 14.0%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai App and API Protector is 4.5%, up from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prolexic is 2.6%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare14.0%
Akamai App and API Protector4.5%
Prolexic2.6%
Other78.9%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
Gavin Pinho - PeerSpot reviewer
Privacy & Risk Management Vice President, Information Security at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Has provided strong protection against evolving threats but still needs support for configuration fine-tuning
The standout features of Akamai App and API Protector are rooted in it being the Web Application Firewall, where all traffic gets scanned, including the implementation of web firewall rules, and after this phase, traffic proceeds through the BMP, which is Bot Management. Akamai App and API Protector exceeds expectations in terms of AI capabilities, and it genuinely combines a plethora of advanced features. The area in which Akamai excels compared to other competitors with a WAF is in threat intelligence, as threats continually evolve, requiring ongoing updates to backend algorithms to effectively capture smart bots, and Akamai's commitment in that regard is backed by an excellent team, while other providers are still catching up.
Gavin Pinho - PeerSpot reviewer
Privacy & Risk Management Vice President, Information Security at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Has faced challenges with bot detection while benefiting from strong threat monitoring and compliance support
Akamai's most valuable features include being industry recognized and PCI compliant, which is really great; their cloud is PCI compliant, and having a vendor that is PCI certified is crucial for organizations focused on PCI compliance. We utilize the real-time monitoring of the solution. Real-time monitoring helps us identify network vulnerabilities by allowing us to see a spike in traffic and understand the traffic levels compared to this time last month or last week. If we notice a sudden increase, we investigate further to determine if it indicates a DDoS attack or a card testing situation. In terms of threat detection capabilities, they are very good because Akamai has a SOC service that we have tapped into for active threat detection and threat hunting, and they monitor everything carefully 24/7. Scrubbing is done by Akamai as a backend service, and we utilize their SOC, which is a service that you pay additional fees for, allowing us to have our queries prioritized. Prolexic features help maintain business continuity during high-volume attacks by having built-in threat detection capabilities in its bot detection and other functionalities, as attacks usually occur through intelligent bots trying to infiltrate the system.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"Cloudflare improves performance on my websites and is a great partner for cloud infrastructure for anyone who wants to use the security service and other features."
"This solution has improved the security of our organization."
"CloudFlare has positively improved my site's speed, performance and security."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"It's a reasonably priced solution that meets customers' needs and it's not too difficult to deploy."
"Akamai Web Application Protector is a good solution that provides basic web application protection."
"It is scalable for DDoS, keeps our sites up through any size of attack, and has a good breadth of controls."
"The product is user-friendly."
"The solution easily identifies, delays, or allows business traffic."
"Akamai App and API Protector exceeds expectations in terms of AI capabilities, and it genuinely combines a plethora of advanced features."
"They have a fantastic tool for analyzing and viewing your traffic."
"Site Defender service helps prepare, respond, and optimize against modern-day web attacks."
"Akamai Web Application Protector is exceptionally stable; after all, it is Akami."
"They've scrubbed DDoS traffic that was blasting us offline, thus allowing legitimate traffic through and letting our service return online."
"The solution does not have hardware or maintenance requirements and is very easy to scale."
"Akamai's most valuable features include being industry recognized and PCI compliant, which is really great; their cloud is PCI compliant, and having a vendor that is PCI certified is crucial for organizations focused on PCI compliance."
"The support from Akamai is great, and they provide excellent information and mitigation services."
"The solution does not have hardware or maintenance requirements and is very easy to scale."
"Prolexic technical support is second to none."
 

Cons

"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."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"CloudFlare doesn't provide the cache flush history. I am not able to find out the URL information of those I have recently flushed."
"Honestly the product has not really improved the way of my organisation."
"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"Flexible SSL is nothing more than an illusion of security that you're presenting to your visitors."
"I think they have failed with their technical support."
"More insight into analytics and threats would be a good place to start improving Cloudflare."
"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."
"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."
"Customer support has room for improvement."
"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."
"They should allow for multiple security configurations in one account which will enhance the scalability."
"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."
"The interface is a little bit clunky and can be improved."
"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."
"It's expensive, though."
"The solution needs additional product options for small and medium enterprises."
"The solution needs additional product options for small and medium enterprises."
"The web portal for checking status and traffic needs improvements."
"In bot management, there are times when attackers find ways to bypass Akamai, which is a continuously evolving challenge."
"The reports provided don’t give detailed information about DDoS mitigations, bandwidth utilization, etc."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"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."
"We are using the free version."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"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."
"Cost depends on the volume of traffic."
"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 solution is not expensive."
"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."
"Akamai is very expensive."
"There is no license at all for Akamai. They are going to charge us only for the usage."
"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 product’s price is high."
"The pricing is a pay-as-you-go model that is charged by the hour."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Performing Arts
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Comms Service Provider
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise18
No data available
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?
The tool's pricing is moderate. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expens...
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?
There are no significant areas for improvement on the WAF side or for Akamai App and API Protector solution; they are...
What is your primary use case for Akamai Web Application Protector?
The main use case for Akamai App and API Protector is serving as the WAF, Web Application Firewall.
What needs improvement with Akamai Prolexic Routed?
For the DDoS protection, I don't see any areas for improvement because they are pretty solid there, though in bot man...
What is your primary use case for Akamai Prolexic Routed?
The main use case for DDoS protection is to mitigate risks, and there are multiple ways Akamai provides DDoS protecti...
What advice do you have for others considering Akamai Prolexic Routed?
We have a couple of products, including DDoS protection, WAF, and Bot Manager. There are two ways Akamai does DDoS pr...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Akamai Web Application Protector, Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Kona DDoS Defender
Akamai Prolexic Routed
 

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
Fidor Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai App and API Protector vs. Prolexic and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
895,399 professionals have used our research since 2012.