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Akamai Bot Manager vs Cloudflare comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Bot Manager
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Bot Management (1st)
Cloudflare
Average Rating
8.4
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) (11th)
 

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 27.8%, down 29.1% compared to last year.
Cloudflare, on the other hand, focuses on Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection, holds 19.8% mindshare, down 20.6% since last year.
Bot Management
Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Gavin Pinho - PeerSpot reviewer
May 8, 2024
Offers a good user experience and has a straightforward initial setup phase
The features of the tool are associated with the licensing part, so my company uses Akamai Bot Manager for account takeovers. The aforementioned area consists of functionality related to the product, which is available straight out of the box. The product is very straightforward. One of the features of the product is associated with the fact that it allows us to automate the blocking of countries, like Russia, that have some serious criminal records or where the crimes are high, so my company uses IP geo protection as a function. VPNs from areas that are used by some bots to potentially launch attacks are blocked by automating certain processes through Akamai. Akamai has a database of blacklisted IPs, URLs, and users.
Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 1, 2022
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of Akamai Bot Manager are the seamless integration and accuracy with which it detects the bots that can make attacks."
"Akamai Bot Manager has more advanced rules that allow it to detect and block bot scrapers."
"Akamai Bot Manager is very easy to scale. Adding new domains or subdomains is a super easy process."
"Akamai Bot Manager has two valuable features: BMS (Bot Manager Standard) and BMP (Bot Manager Premier)."
"In terms of the security provided, the benefits from the use of the product are immediately visible."
"Based on the telemetry, Akamai Bot Manager gives a rough estimate of all the hits and requests we get, which are suspected bots."
"The best feature is the BNP. That is what Manager Premium does, protection of transactional endpoints."
"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"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."
"The UI is good."
"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."
"The technical support is good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"The tool is user-friendly."
 

Cons

"Akamai Bot Manager Premier has some additional functionalities, particularly for web telemetry, but they don't have it for app telemetry."
"We cannot block illegitimate web scrapers because Akamai Bot Manager does not provide detailed information about various origins and remote VPNs they come through."
"There are other rules that are user-friendly, however, many of the things have a learning curve. This is not something you enter into lightly."
"In my opinion, the UI of Akamai Bot Manager is a bit unconventional and not as intuitive as one might expect."
"I feel that customer support has certain concerns where improvements are required."
"There is a clear need for improvement. Over the past year or so, we've observed an increase in the sophistication of attacks, with some occurring at the start of this year or even extending back one and a half years. Despite having ample resources, particularly with the advent of advanced AI, these entities can now execute basic bot attacks."
"I would say there is definitely a need of improvement because I think some start of this year or even, like one and a half years. But now have enough resources at their end especially with the, advanced AI and everything. So they have enough resources to launch basic bot attacks. And whenever we do some type of fine tuning, they are always somehow able to evade it or just fly under the threshold. And from our end, we also have to maintain those threshold so that we still do not start blocking the real general customer. So every time when they try to do something else, we have to see their traffic patterns and then find you in our solution.When these bot attacks happen, what we have to do is we have to check their, traffic patterns, their IT sees and then do the proper analysis. And based on that, the fine tuning is done. So I would say, like, based on these bot traffic, if there is a automatic fine tuning. With the help of machine learning at all, then that would be much more easier of beneficial. So this needs improvement."
"Akamai Bot Manager can improve by having better SDK integration. SDK would be required to integrate with any mobile applications and if they are able to make that more seamless, it will help."
"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."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"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."
"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."
"Technical support is lacking."
"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."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Akamai Bot Manager requires a separate license that sits on top of Kona or Akamai Web Application Protector."
"You buy a license of the product based on a certain volume, but if you hit the volume and go above it, then you are charged additional for each GB you use. I think you need to pay 20,000 per month."
"The price of Akamai Bot Manager could improve."
"We have to pay a bundled cost."
"Akamai Bot Manager is a very expensive solution."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"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."
"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."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 6, 2013
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Akamai Bot Manager?
The best feature is the BNP. That is what Manager Premium does, protection of transactional endpoints.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai Bot Manager?
You buy a license of the product based on a certain volume, but if you hit the volume and go above it, then you are charged additional for each GB you use. I think you need to pay 20,000 per month.
What needs improvement with Akamai Bot Manager?
In terms of the need for improvement, I feel that it is a continuous cycle where Akamai keeps updating the databases. There are new emerging threats, risks, and sources from which threats can emerg...
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 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.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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Cloudflare DNS
 

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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 Akamai, F5, Cloudflare and others in Bot Management. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.