Akamai App & API Protector vs. Cloudflare vs. F5 Distributed Cloud API Security

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

Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.

Incentivized

I believe it covers everything related to the applications' security aspects, but there are a lot of improvements that need to be made. For example, better granular controls like bot categories listed on the distributed console and a granular URL-based control for the rate-limiting option are needed.

Incentivized

• Web Security
• Bot managment
• Rate Control

Incentivized

• The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
• Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
• One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.

Incentivized

• It auto-discovers APIs, even the ones engineers forget to document. Then profiles them without needing changes to our codebase.
• Shadow API exposure.
• It's pretty decent at abnormal behavior detection.

Incentivized

• 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

• In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
• Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
• While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.

Incentivized

• More accurate detection of advanced persistent threats (APTs) targeting APIs.
• A greater emphasis on checking APIs' schema and contract may prevent them from accepting misconfigurations or malicious input.
• More customized, dynamic, and targeted protection for high-value APIs or high-risk user groups.

Incentivized

lower cost

Incentivized

F5 Distributed Cloud API Security provides robust API protection with solid threat detection, excellent visibility, and seamless integration into our architecture

Incentivized

Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.

Incentivized

Great product. Working with F5 for many years, we found the products F5 provided are all cutting edge technology. Although in F5 Distributed Cloud API Security we still have a lot to find out, but we believe this experience will be very good. Especially on the security side. Trust in F5.

Incentivized

In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.

Incentivized

Always available

Incentivized

Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.

Incentivized

The UI is cloud-native and generally responsive. Report generation is easy Integrates with cloud providers

Incentivized

Excellent product, Cloudflare is a true pioneer of the modern Internet, providing tools, services, and expertise that vastly improve the performance and security of web services. Any issues are resolved quickly with detailed RCA and follow-ups published publicly. I'm thankful to Cloudflare and use their services both at work and at home.

Incentivized

Lo hacemos mediante un partner We did it through a partner

Incentivized

Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.

Incentivized

F5 Distributed Cloud API Security is our company looking forward product. With more and more API is using in both on prem, private cloud, public cloud and multi cloud environment, we as a financial institution, we are keep into the security settings to protect the information. That's the main reason we want to use this product.

Incentivized

They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.

They have very good reputation.

They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.

Incentivized

We ran a short POC with Salt. Its data classification and attack replay features were impressive. What held us back was the limited support for hybrid deployments and poor integration into our CI/CD pipelines, as F5 did.

Incentivized

They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.

Incentivized

Centralized policy management: You can manage API security policies consistently across locations without duplicating effort, which supports scaling.


API discovery and monitoring at scale: It automatically discovers APIs and monitors them in real time across large and complex environments.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
• WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
• CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
• DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.

Incentivized

• F5 Distributed Cloud API Security mitigates many API-related security threats, including bot attacks, DDoS, data breaches, and unauthorized access attempts.
• F5 Distributed Cloud API Security uses robust threat detection, machine learning, and real-time monitoring for speedier identification.
• Reductions in security events result in fewer breaches, reduced downtime, and lower attack remediation costs.

Incentivized