Likelihood to Recommend Akamai is a well-established brand name with a great product. It meets and many time exceeds the needs for global content delivery and security management layer at the edge. Fine grain security tuning seems cumbersome as the definition of the app keeps changing. It also requires an investment of time for the setup which doesn't necessarily make sense for smaller scale scenarios. Some products offered by AWS, Azure or the Google Cloud can be more tightly integrated with cloud provider offerings thus easier to configure.
Read full review F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense is well suited for large Enterprises that face advanced bot attacks from Web Scraping, Credential Stuffing, Carding/Credit Card Stuffing, Fake Account Creation, and more where the collection of the Client-Side signals helps clearly show if the attackers are telling lies vs. other bot solutions that place a lot of the responsibility on their customers to tune bot scores.
Read full review Pros Content offloading - once rules are set up within Akamai you don't need to even think about how many images or large JavaScript or CSS files (for example) are being served from your own estate, Akamai takes care of it all via rules that are quick, easy and flexible. Page caching - for pages that don't change very often Akamai allows you to set up rules, quickly and easily, to serve up your page content for you, which takes even more load away from your origin servers. Quick rollback - the Akamai system allows easy testing of rules and changes via a staging system, and also offers a quick rollback option, which is perfect for the rare occasions when something has been set up incorrectly. Read full review Quickly helps mitigate the retooling and newer advanced bot attacks Excellent customer service from our f5 bot Defense team/partners Easy to do Traffic Analysis/False Positive reviews with their dashboard of data Our F5 Security/Solutions Architect and TAM is always there for us whenever we need them First class service by the F5 Distributed Cloud Bot DefenseSOC, the Tactics Team, the F5 Testing person that helps us, the mobile SDK experts, the Client-Side Signals experts and F5 management Industry best Threat Briefings Not only is F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense great at stopping the advanced bot attacks, they also have protection against any tampering or replay attacks. Read full review Cons The interface in their control centre could be a bit more user-friendly with some of the settings in places that you wouldn't expect them to be. The search offsets this problem to an extent but it's still sometimes slower than you'd like to find what you are looking for. Read full review On a technical side, we've had a lot of deployment issues. This is not a one-sprint solution. We ran into undocumented failure modes and had to rely on L2 and L3 customer support, delaying troubleshooting significantly [in our experience]. Accurate log ingestion is a larger challenge than one would want in a security tool. Read full review Support Rating Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.
Read full review Support is quick to respond. They help guide you through any issues you have and ensure everything has been resolved before disconnecting. Wait times can vary, but it depends on the time of day. Eventually, excellent support is reached, and you can learn a few things from them as well.
Read full review Implementation Rating F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense and our partners are great at helping us with in-depth Traffic Analysis of protected endpoints first in Monitoring Mode. After 7-14 days of Traffic Analysis/False Positive reviews, we can clearly tell when we are ready to place protected endpoints into Mitigation Mode.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more likely to suggest
CloudFlare (which has a free tier) or an integrated offering from a cloud provider, like Cloudfront.
Read full review We have tried a whole bunch of solutions before we got Shape bot defense solution. But non of them worked for us the way F5 Shape solution worked
Read full review Return on Investment Akamai RoI improved over a period of times since it comes with heavy costs, however global deliveries in over 100 counties and global web platforms usage helps improve RoI With the complex UI challenges, ROI could be impacted negatively when you have to invest in operations and time. Read full review [F5] Shape [Security] established a clear negative trend line in bot traffic to our retail site. [F5] Shape [Security's] anti-automation has moved our business out of reach for ROI for attackers. So far, [F5] Shape [Security] has not caused any incidents as a technology, and has stifled attacks which would have certainly landed as a Sev 2 without this protection. Read full review ScreenShots