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Akamai Bot Manager vs Cloudflare comparison

 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Akamai Bot Manager improves security, saves time, and reduces fraud, offering a 15% cost reduction and increased operational efficiency.
Sentiment score
6.2
Cloudflare's services enhanced security and efficiency, resulting in significant ROI, cost savings, and improved WordPress performance for businesses.
We estimate a cost reduction of around 15% in fraud-related losses.
Cyber Security Sales Executive at EVSPL
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.
Owner at Hga consulting
The return on investment for me is significant as time is the critical aspect.
Senior Network and Security Expert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Akamai Bot Manager provides responsive, knowledgeable support and intuitive navigation, with higher satisfaction for larger, enterprise accounts.
Sentiment score
6.9
Cloudflare's support is responsive and knowledgeable, with varying experiences depending on the plan and need for faster escalation.
We did have a short formal training session with Akamai, but once we got hands-on, the interface was easy to navigate.
Cyber Security Sales Executive at EVSPL
Akamai Bot Manager is not cheap, and it's even a bit expensive.
Infrastructure Securiy & Cyber Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
Senior Consultant CDN at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.
Owner at Hga consulting
We use other solutions where support is available through Slack channels and is more interactive, with someone responding within a couple of minutes or seconds.
General Manager at bKash Limited
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.0
Akamai Bot Manager is scalable, adaptable, financially flexible, and promising for company-wide deployment, enabling efficient domain management.
Sentiment score
7.9
Cloudflare excels in scalability, supporting seamless transitions and performance during high-traffic periods, highly rated by users.
Once we learn more, we will expand it to the entire company.
Cyber Security Sales Executive at EVSPL
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
Cloudflare's scalability is quite good; it is very easy to scale whenever we want to include multiple domains.
Senior Network and Security Expert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Akamai Bot Manager is stable and reliable when properly configured, but initial setup takes two to three weeks.
Sentiment score
7.5
Cloudflare is reliable with high stability ratings, minimal issues, improved network connectivity, and praised fast DNS services.
The implementation went smoothly after the initial setup.
Cyber Security Sales Executive at EVSPL
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
Cloudflare's reliability and uptime has met my expectations; it has been quite good in general.
Senior Network and Security Expert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Users find Akamai Bot Manager difficult to use due to unintuitive UI, ineffective anomaly detection, and insufficient real-time customization.
Users suggest improvements in Cloudflare's features, pricing, support, analytics, documentation, and partner relations for better service experience.
We need something that involves different AI models that can try to find similarity in all the data that we are getting from Akamai Bot Manager to understand where exactly we can find similarities between the ways bots are reacting on the website.
Infrastructure Securiy & Cyber Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
If I could change one thing, I would add more real-time customization so we could adjust thresholds on the fly.
Cyber Security Sales Executive at EVSPL
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.
General Manager at bKash Limited
There are some performance considerations when it comes to dynamic content that involves fetching data from databases or using APIs.
Senior Solutions Architect at Think Power Solutions
What Cloudflare is doing internally is that it is stepping ahead in areas like detection and protection.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

Akamai Bot Manager is costly, charging based on data usage, requiring a separate license, and costing around $20,000 monthly.
Cloudflare provides cost-effective, feature-rich plans for varying traffic needs, offering significant value compared to competitors like Akamai.
Akamai Bot Manager is not cheap.
Infrastructure Securiy & Cyber Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
I find it to be cheap.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
Senior Solutions Architect at Think Power Solutions
The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Akamai Bot Manager enhances bot detection and blocking with real-time classification, fraud management, and seamless integration for threat protection.
Cloudflare offers superior caching, DNS management, and security, enhancing performance, global reach, and domain management with innovative features.
Because it's a CDN solution and we are a global company, Akamai Bot Manager is basically the first layer of defense for us.
Infrastructure Securiy & Cyber Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The best feature of Akamai Bot Manager is the real-time bot classification.
Cyber Security Sales Executive at EVSPL
Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.
Senior Solutions Architect at Think Power Solutions
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Most of our DNS records that are presented to the internet are proxied whenever possible, providing another layer of defense from our perspective.
Senior Security Engineer at ManpowerGroup
 

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Bot Manager
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Bot Management (2nd)
Cloudflare
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (3rd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Services solutions, they serve different purposes. Akamai Bot Manager is designed for Bot Management and holds a mindshare of 10.8%, down 18.1% compared to last year.
Cloudflare, on the other hand, focuses on Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection, holds 14.0% mindshare, down 19.1% since last year.
Bot Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Akamai Bot Manager10.8%
Imperva Application Security Platform15.7%
Cloudflare One9.3%
Other64.2%
Bot Management
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare14.0%
Imperva Application Security Platform8.5%
Arbor DDoS7.2%
Other70.3%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Denis Burnaev - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Securiy & Cyber Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Uses real-time dashboards to manage bot traffic and has provided a reliable first layer of defense
Because we are an airline, we have various attacks on our website and application, and we really have to involve our experience and try to find attacks by ourselves. These days attacks are very sophisticated and they are trying to manipulate in the same way as humans, so the anomaly feature is not really helpful. Bots are very clever these days and they move through the website the way humans do. We are not really using it because again, the attacks are sophisticated. We need something that involves different AI models that can try to find similarity in all the data that we are getting from Akamai Bot Manager to understand where exactly we can find similarities between the ways bots are reacting on the website. The most valued feature these days is getting research on all the data as fast as possible and trying to find similarities to understand which bots are trying to manipulate or abuse my website. We are going toward AI solutions because it is the fastest, but it should be a very sophisticated model. Bots these days move the way humans do, so it's really hard to understand which of them is a bot and which is human. Bots can go through the challenges you are putting on the website, and it seems nothing can stop them.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Retailer
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai Bot Manager?
Akamai Bot Manager is not cheap. From what I know, Akamai Bot Manager is not so cheap.
What needs improvement with Akamai Bot Manager?
Because we are an airline, we have various attacks on our website and application, and we really have to involve our experience and try to find attacks by ourselves. These days attacks are very sop...
What is your primary use case for Akamai Bot Manager?
I'm working at an airline company, so Akamai Bot Manager has been used in our company for approximately 20 years.
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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
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 expensive.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Cloudflare DNS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Luisa Via Roma, Gymgrossisten, Rakuten, U.S. News & World Report, Japan Airlines
Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva, Akamai, Cloudflare and others in Bot Management. Updated: April 2026.
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