Akamai App & API Protector vs. Layer7 API Security vs. Salt Security API Protection Platform

Akamai Kona Site Defender KSD, works fine for any website or mobile application (Native/JDK), it can be used as a WAF, a rate limiting tool, or a bot management tool all in one, plus you will get all the benefits of the Akamai CDN (Content distribution network) as well

Incentivized

Well suited for publishing internal services with very high security, protecting against attacks, and managing on-demand load. Also good for transform messages and SQL to Rest services. Not appropriate for business logic implementation.

Incentivized

Salt is highly recommended for anyone who wants to discover, monitor and protect their APIs against various types of attacks. Salt should not be used as a SIEM.

• Web Security
• Bot managment
• Rate Control

Incentivized

• SOAP to Rest / Rest to SOAP web services transformation.
• Secure authorization and authetication (JWT, OpenIP Connect, OAuth, SAML and more). WASP Features as injection protection.
• Easy rule writing without coding.

Incentivized

• PII identification in API traffic.
• Divergence between API traffic and documentation (swagger files).
• Potential attacks with information to take counter measures.

• Custom rules might be hard to configure
• For some cases you will need to contact the Akamai team to adjust the backend
• Interface might feel laggy if used in a non-powerful PC

Incentivized

• It would be nice to have an integration with services like Github for managing projects and versions.

Incentivized

• The platform could have more options for exporting detailed data from attackers' dashboards.
• The Attackers dashboard could also have more options of filters in order to support the investigations of the attack.
• The OAS analysis could present a more detailed view of the found issues.

The Layer7 API Management is a great solution, but, sometimes the documentation is not clear or has lack of examples.

Incentivized

The support team is good and the response time is reasonable, but (there is always a but), when support inquiries are made by someone experienced, and the question is not trivial, it is boring and takes a long time to get the case escalated to the next level of support.

Incentivized

We evaluated 3 tools and decided on Layer7 API Management because it had the shortest implementation times and fastest learning curve, without losing power of customization and scalability.

Incentivized

We tried controls offered by the IaaS providers but these were hard to manage and did not provide the visibility we wanted. We also protected APIs with a normal WAF but this was only helpful for assets we knew about and API attacks were not caught by the WAF.

• Fair Security investment
• An attack impact would be higher
• Support contract is not cheap

Incentivized

• Very fast implementation and is easy to learn & use.

Incentivized

• Salt Security API Protection Platform has provided detailed information that is helping us to identify and investigate attacks in our environment