AWS Shield vs Prolexic comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Akamai are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.4, while Akamai is ranked #17. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 7.1% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Akamai’s 3.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Akamai users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Prolexic and AWS Shield are competing products in the domain of DDoS protection services. AWS Shield seems to have the upper hand due to its seamless integration with the AWS ecosystem, making it more attractive for existing AWS customers.

Features: Prolexic's strengths lie in its tailored defense strategies, high-volume attack handling, and detailed analytics. It offers extensive reporting features for network security professionals. AWS Shield's key features include native AWS integration, automatic scaling during attacks, and real-time threat mitigation, which benefit businesses already using AWS platforms.

Room for Improvement: Prolexic could benefit from a more streamlined integration process with third-party services and greater automation capabilities. Its reporting interface, while detailed, may improve in user-friendliness. AWS Shield could enhance customization options, provide more granular control beyond the AWS ecosystem, and offer a more transparent billing model for advanced services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Prolexic provides comprehensive deployment support with detailed guidance, suitable for enterprises needing hands-on configuration and robust customer service offering personalized assistance. AWS Shield simplifies deployment through its integration with AWS services, ensuring efficient onboarding and automated protection; however, support tends to align with standard AWS service protocols, which may be less personalized than Prolexic.

Pricing and ROI: Prolexic generally involves higher upfront costs but delivers significant ROI for enterprises requiring robust protection and customization, especially for frequent large-scale attacks. AWS Shield offers cost-effective solutions with its Standard option included with AWS services, appealing to businesses seeking basic DDoS mitigation. Its Advanced tier incurs additional costs but enhances security and integration benefits for AWS-centric operations.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Shield vs. Prolexic Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. Prolexic

January 2025

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.9%, down from 19.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 7.1%, down from 7.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prolexic is 3.6%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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Manikandan-R

Senior Project Manager at Synopsys Inc

Solution provides essential protection with good support and a simple setup

I have noticed a pattern developing in approximately five minutes. If it were possible to provide these patterns with historical data spanning six months, three months, or two months directly from the console, it would be extremely beneficial. It would allow for easy inquiries and facilitate the retrieval of relevant parts without having to manually check logs or examine movements. Instead, if all historical data were available, I could consult six months' worth of identified patterns efficiently through AWS without relying on external sources. This solution is particularly suitable for startups or medium-sized startups. I would rate the overall solution eight out of ten.

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ÖS

Rasman

Senior Network & Security administrator at a hospitality company with 201-500 employees

Eliminated DDOS attacks, provides excellent mitigation service

I rate it eight out of 10. It would get a nine if the web portal was better and 10 if the price was lower. We have been using it for three years. We canceled the contract recently and are looking into using another vendor to reduce the price by two-thirds.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

More Cloudflare pros

"It is quite scalable, and we have not faced any issues with its scalability."

"The product is easy to use."

"The solution's ease of use is the most valuable feature."

"I am impressed with the product's multiple features like security."

"We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't degrade the performance of our solution. Additionally, it's easy to configure, which is crucial for us. It's easy to use and set up and stops attacks on our servers. We haven't encountered any attack problems because the solution stops them in real-time. AWS Shield specifically focuses on defending against denial-of-service attacks, making it a great solution for that type of threat."

"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."

"The solution operates smoothly at its baseline level, and we do not encounter any issues at that level."

"It is integrated with AWS. So, it gives you a good first step."

"The solution does not have hardware or maintenance requirements and is very easy to scale."

Cons

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"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."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."

More Cloudflare cons

"The product is expensive."

"The product needs to improve its logs and reports to make it read better."

"The product should give users more flexibility to customize their security policies according to their requirements."

"The management of it is a bit hard. If you don't engineer it on the front side, it is hard to go back in and change it. It could be improved in terms of architecture requirements and then ongoing support requirements as a secondary component to it. People tend to set up things like this, and they just expect it to work without the care and feeding that needs to go back into it either from an application team or a network environment team."

"The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced."

"We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need."

"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced."

"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a situation is normal or abnormal."

"The solution needs additional product options for small and medium enterprises."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"A free version of the solution is available."

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."

"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 solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The cost depends on traffic each month, so on average, it costs us between US$200 and US$300 per month."

"We pay $3000 per month for the solution."

"The tool's pricing is good."

"The tool is cheap."

"It depends on your subscription level and the volume that you're spending with AWS. So, it is very relative to the consumption alignment in your subscription level. It is a well-constructed, scalable pricing option, but it is relative to how much you're spending on AWS. Because the more you spend, typically, the more you get off on services like this. I find it to be comparable to other solutions."

"The pricing is a pay-as-you-go model that is charged by the hour."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Comms Service Provider

Insurance Company

Educational Organization

31%

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about AWS Shield?

We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't de...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Shield?

The tool is cheap.

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Shield?

Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a si...

See all answers

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Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Azure DDoS Protection vs AWS Shield

Compared 25% of the time

Cloudflare One vs AWS Shield

Compared 23% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs AWS Shield

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs AWS Shield

Compared 3% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs AWS Shield

Compared 2% of the time

More AWS Shield Competitors

Akamai App and API Protector vs Prolexic

Compared 24% of the time

Cloudflare One vs Prolexic

Compared 19% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs Prolexic

Compared 16% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs Prolexic

Compared 5% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Prolexic

Compared 4% of the time

More Prolexic Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

March 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield

March 2025

Download AWS Shield product report

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

February 2025

Download Prolexic product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Akamai Prolexic Routed

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“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.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Akamai Prolexic is a cloud-based DDoS protection solution that defends your data center and hybrid infrastructure to ensure availability and uptime. It provides comprehensive port and protocol protection against the broadest range of DDoS attacks, including high-bandwidth sustained attacks and complex multi-vector attacks. Prolexic is available as an always-on or on-demand service, contains a Network Cloud Firewall, and offers flexible integration models based on your desired security posture across hybrid origins. Prolexic is backed by a proven platform with more than 20 Tbps of dedicated DDoS defense capacity and our 24/7/365 global SOCC for a fully managed solution.

Prolexic stops DDoS attacks closer to the source to maximize performance for users and to maintain network resiliency through cloud distribution. Instead of originating advertisements for your prefixes from your cloud/data centers, you’ll make either a border gateway protocol route advertisement change or DNS redirection (A record or CNAME record) to originate from one of many Akamai scrubbing centers globally. Your intended traffic is then routed to the user via Anycast through the closest scrubbing center. Prolexic will inspect the traffic to determine if it is good or bad, and apply proactive and/or custom mitigation controls designed to stop attacks instantly if needed. This ensures fast and accurate DDoS protection. Clean traffic is then returned to the customer origin via GRE tunnels, Layer 2 VLAN connections, and/or VIP-to-origin back-end mapping with little perceived latency. Prolexic also features a Network Cloud Firewall that allows IT teams to auto generate or manually manage access control lists.

Akamai

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code

Fidor Bank

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. Prolexic

January 2025

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