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Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs ShieldX comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 14, 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

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
Ranking in Microsegmentation Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (1st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (11th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (6th)
ShieldX
Ranking in Microsegmentation Software
13th
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Microsegmentation Software category, the mindshare of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is 26.9%, up from 25.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ShieldX is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsegmentation Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation26.9%
ShieldX0.4%
Other72.7%
Microsegmentation Software
 

Featured Reviews

Uday Varma - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers granular control and ease of policy creation with features like telemetry and micro-segmentation but incident tagging is missing
Our customers use the solution for micro-segmentation within the data center or cloud environments. One customer uses it for their on-premises infrastructure, deployed at the code level across their massive network. Another customer uses it in a data center to monitor microsegmentation for their 500-node workload. Moreover, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has helped our customers manage and secure traffic between different applications or workloads. Earlier, they were using VMware NSX-v, which offered good logging for distributed services on an analytical level. However, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides them with better overall visibility and granular control over-segmentation, even for inter-application and inter-routing traffic.
MP
Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance
The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput. The traffic through our website depends on holiday bookings. It's very quiet in November through January, and then our traffic picks up quite rapidly and, at our peak, we will take in excess of a million pounds of business a day through our website. The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides. Uptime on the system has been 648 days and we do very little to it because it self-updates and alerts. It does everything that we need it to do, so the administration side of it is zero. One of the beauties about ShieldX is that it's such a good "fire-and-forget" product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is very scalable, especially when connected to the cloud resources."
"Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see microsegmentation as distributed services."
"The interface and dashboard are amazing."
"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."
"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the maps and ring fencing that help monitor events."
"This tool greatly helps in understanding the footprint of the attacks."
"The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"ShieldX has been designed from the very beginning to work well in cloud environments. It understands autoscaling, automation, and auto-configuration. These are the things which are important in today's operating environment."
"...It takes the exact same policies that you would apply to your on-premise environment and enables you to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
"The Adaptive Intention Engine is fantastic. It allows us to develop security policies using the language of our internal customers. It's machine-learning applied to security workflows. That allows us to much more easily construct the policies that will protect those workflows."
"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput."
"The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides."
 

Cons

"The product needs a few features like enhanced user policies and payload-level inspection to improve the offering."
"They can maybe improve their customer service just because they are kind of a small organization, and customer service isn't as big as others such as VMware."
"Clients would like to see that the security policies of GuardiCore can continue to be comparable to all the major firewall players out there."
"Sometimes, the speed needs improvement, especially when it comes to the generation of maps, where it can be a bit slow."
"Guardicore Centra should incorporate automation so that we don't require to write custom scripts and APIs. The tool also has limitations on rules where it allows only sixty thousand rules. Our clients have also commented that there are too many manual clicks and effort to do changes. I think that the incorporation of automation can help our clients make changes with confidence and without the possibility of human error."
"Customers would want to see the cost improved."
"Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it."
"Incident tagging could be improved. Other vendors offer semi-automatic tagging, which Guardicore doesn't yet have."
"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so. As the vendor continues to evolve and add future functionality, we want to make sure that we are still keeping up with the integrations, etc. Time will be the key factor here. The proper support for some of the latest technologies, Docker containers, etc. They need to keep up with threat landscape, so we will see how the security get layered. This is what we are going to be keeping an eye on."
"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."
"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."
"There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."
"The pricing is too high."
"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."
"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."
"The customer would complain about the cost."
"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."
"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."
"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."
"We are very happy with the pricing and licensing. It's about getting a site-wide license. One of the challenges that we've had with our previous vendor had been the cost of licensing."
"For a three-year deal we paid £55,000 plus tax... But, and this is a big "but," this was over two years ago. ShieldX had only just hit the market. We were the first company in Europe to buy ShieldX."
"ShieldX ensures that we can have the separation needed for our environment to avoid drastically increasing the cost on the licensing side. From this perspective, it's been very positive and helpful."
"We are actually expecting our costs to drop in the coming year, but it is just a matter of the licensing expiring. That is going to happen in the next six months or so. Then, we will start to see a decrease in overall spend."
"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX. It might not be the big name out there, but it does everything that you are looking for in microsegmentation at a very low price."
"ShieldX also enables us to migrate to cloud environments faster. That is an important part of it for sure because it takes the exact same policies that we would apply to our on-premise environment and enables us to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
"Security policies are now applied as applications are going up. Because it's automated, we don't have the three to four week delay. The insertion of applications in the cloud for us dropped from an average of three to four weeks to a couple of days."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise9
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?
I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. I know other micro-segmentation tools like Cisco or Illumio, and so I think they are in the middle.
What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?
Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see mi...
What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?
When we have more than one interface, we can only have one policy for both interfaces. Normally, you have assets with a production interface and a server interface that are only for management. But...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore
APEIRO, ShieldX APEIRO
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE
Iowa State University
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. ShieldX and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.