Akamai App and API Protector vs NGINX App Protect comparison

Akamai App and API Protector vs. NGINX App Protect

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Categories and Ranking

Akamai App and API Protector

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

8th

Average Rating

8.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection (3rd), Cloud and Data Center Security (10th)

NGINX App Protect

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

13th

Average Rating

8.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Container Security (16th), API Security (3rd)

Featured Reviews

PallaviSharma

Platform Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Oct 30, 2023

A scalable and reliable solution that has effectively secured our apps

With Akamai App and API Protector, we can define all our APIs, and we can use the solution for different purposes. It is the way we use API gateways like Kong. We can define our keys here, and we can define a limit at which we can start throttling traffic. With BMP, we can protect our transaction…

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Ntwrkengine0887

Senior Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 6, 2022

Flexible and high availability

NGINX App Protect has improved the flexibility of services in our company and distributed new escalation applications. The downtime in our network has decreased substantially. In a short time, we can republish and resolve issues in our network The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its…

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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

"We are getting security for each and every API."

"Everything will be handled by Akamai's system before it reaches our infrastructure."

"Adaptive stream delivery and WAF protection are valuable."

"All the solution's features are very good."

"The solution can scale extremely well."

"The most valuable feature is the custom rules feature. This is because many of our customers require a lot of custom rules. Because it's a very customized project for our customers, I think they have the best of everything already."

"The features are powerful and better than F5."

"Akamai Web Application Protector is a good solution that provides basic web application protection."

More Akamai App and API Protector pros

"The most valuable feature is that there is a link in the system that will help to analyze the security of an application when something abnormal is found."

"It is a stable solution."

"The stability of the product is very impressive since it handles 60,000 to 70,000 requests or transactions per second."

"NGINX App Protect has complete control over the HTTP session."

"NGINX App Protect's best features are auto-learning, which creates a profile of applications that are deployed, bot protection, and force protection, which lets you configure your brute force policy and alert for and prevent brute force attacks."

"WAF is useful to track mitigation, inclusion, prevention, and the parametric firewall."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is the reverse proxy."

"It has the best documentation features."

More NGINX App Protect pros

Cons

"There are some issues with pushing configurations across a network. It still takes about 20 minutes and that means to retract it's another 20 minutes."

"The WAF features definitely have a lot of room for improvement. A lot of the WAF is really basic. For some products or some of our solutions, we need to run a second layer of more advanced WAF. If it had better layer seven protection then we would not need a second WAF."

"It would be better if there weren't any issues with latency. We had latency issues, but I think they are all solved now."

"One area where Akamai can improve is the captcha part. Cloudflare provides a captcha if there are a certain number of threats. For example, I can assign that if there are 10 requests within a second from a single IP, it should send a captcha to the user. The user should fill in the captcha, and only after that, the user should be able to access our website. This captcha feature should be built into Bot Manager. I love this captcha feature of Cloudflare."

"I do not see any area for improvement. Akamai is already maintaining its own databases for the security concerns, vulnerabilities, and attacks that are there. If anything, they should have a solution in the infrastructure security area as well. They should not be only in cloud cybersecurity; they should also be in infrastructure security."

"The custom rules must be improved."

"The solution could offer even more integrations."

"Could integrate more features for each security."

More Akamai App and API Protector cons

"The configuration needs to be more flexible because it is difficult to do things that are outside of the ordinary."

"The setup of NGINX App Protect is complex. The full process took one week to complete. Additionally, we had to change the network infrastructure platform which took one month."

"It's challenging if you need to go for a high throughput."

"I encountered issues with NGINX App Protect while trying to upgrade custom rules."

"Currently, the policies have to be handled manually, and you have to create from scratch, which can be a bit time-consuming, in a large environment."

"The product's user interface is an area with shortcomings as it can be quite confusing for users, making it an area where improvements are required."

"The price of NGINX App Protect could improve."

"Areas for improvement would be if NGINX could scan for vulnerabilities and learn and update the signatures of DoS attacks."

More NGINX App Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"One reason not all people use Akamai is that it is a little bit more expensive than some other providers."

"Price-wise, I would say Akamai's pricing is competitive."

"The product is expensive, but it is worth the money."

"The price they are offering is quite reasonable for premium customers, but it's very expensive if you're a small and medium-sized enterprises."

"The solution is expensive."

"Akamai is very expensive."

"There is no license at all for Akamai. They are going to charge us only for the usage."

"If you want quality, you have to pay the price. Its price is fair. Their account managers are also very helpful. They help you a lot with pricing even though they are working with Akamai."

More Akamai App and API Protector pricing and cost advice

"The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."

"There is a monthly or annual subscription to use NGINX App Protect. There are not any additional costs to the subscription."

"NGINX App Protect is expensive."

"NGINX is not expensive."

"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."

"The price of NGINX App Protect is approximately $3,000 annually. All of our licenses are observed by a managed service partner."

"Really understand the licensing model, because we underestimated that."

"Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."

More NGINX App Protect pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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787,779 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Akamai Web Application Protector?

The product is user-friendly.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai Web Application Protector?

The product is expensive, but it is worth the money.

What needs improvement with Akamai Web Application Protector?

The custom rules must be improved. If we have a domain to be monitored, we can use the solution to alert us if a certain specification is met. If we need only 20,000 transactions, but there are 40,...

What do you like most about NGINX App Protect?

It's very easy to deploy.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?

NGINX App Protect is expensive.

What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?

The solution needs to be improved in the e-commerce portal.

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Akamai App and API Protector

Comparisons

Compared 21% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 14% of the time

AWS WAF vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 10% of the time

Prolexic vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 10% of the time

AWS Shield vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 6% of the time

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Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 17% of the time

AWS WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 14% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 13% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 12% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 8% of the time

More NGINX App Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Akamai App and API Protector

Download Akamai App and API Protector product report

NGINX App Protect

Download NGINX App Protect product report

Also Known As

Akamai Web Application Protector, Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Kona DDoS Defender

NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall

Learn More

Akamai

Overview

Akamai App & API Protector brings together web application firewall, bot mitigation, API security, and Layer 7 DDoS protection into a single solution. It quickly identifies vulnerabilities and mitigates threats across your entire web and API estates — even for the most complex distributed architectures. Recognized as the leading attack detection solution on the market, App & API Protector is easy to implement and use. It delivers automatic updates for security protections and provides holistic visibility into traffic and attacks.

NGINX App Protect application security solution combines the efficacy of advanced F5 web application firewall (WAF) technology with the agility and performance of NGINX Plus. The solution runs natively on NGINX Plus and addresses some of the most difficult challenges facing modern DevOps environments:

Integrating security controls directly into the development automation pipeline
Applying and managing security for modern and distributed application environments such as containers and microservices
Providing the right level of security controls without impacting release and go-to-market velocity
Complying with security and regulatory requirements

NGINX App Protect offers:

Expanded security beyond basic signatures to ensure adequate controls
F5 app‑security technology for efficacy superior to ModSecurity and other WAFs
Confidently run in “blocking” mode in production with proven F5 expertise
High‑confidence signatures for extremely low false positives
Increases visibility, integrating with third‑party analytics solutions
Integrates security and WAF natively into the CI/CD pipeline
Deploys as a lightweight software package that is agnostic of underlying infrastructure
Facilitates declarative policies for “security as code” and integration with DevOps tools
Decreases developer burden and provides feedback loop for quick security remediation
Accelerates time to market and reduces costs with DevSecOps‑automated security

Sample Customers

Douglas Omaha Technology Commission, ZALORA, PrintPlanet

Information Not Available

Akamai App and API Protector vs. NGINX App Protect