

Find out in this report how the two Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
Aikido Security caught a critical remote code execution vulnerability in my Python machine learning pipelines before it reached production.
Since we got rid of that, our productivity has increased, I believe, by thirty-two percent.
We were expecting to complete the compliance in a month, but I figured out Aikido Security could do it within a week for all our 13 repositories.
I would estimate the cost was reduced by approximately 30 percent in the first year.
There is definitely a return on investment in F5 Distributed Cloud Services.
I do find F5 Distributed Cloud Services to be cost-effective, as it brings benefits and a strong return on investment.
Aikido Security was the easiest to use, the easiest to onboard, and the one with the most active customer support.
Their team proactively reached out after signup to ensure we were set up correctly.
Customer support is good; if you raise a query, hardly within a day, your issues get resolved.
There is a lot of support from F5 Distributed Cloud Services and the knowledge on the page is very good and reliable.
I would provide 9.5 for support.
Email services are good, but they need to have a good human-based interaction with the call centers.
That kind of reliability becomes invisible when it works well, which is exactly what you want from a security tool running in your CI/CD pipelines.
Aikido Security scales well by supporting multiple projects, repositories, and development teams on a single platform.
You can deploy it on your team, and if you have a large team, it works very well.
I need the traffic management environments in distributed management, which have a very good goal to manage very difficult traffic in the world.
We have not hit any major scalability limitations so far.
The platform has been reliable and provides accurate security findings.
It remains stable even when generating a large amount of code.
I won't face any issues with stability as a concern because it provides the load balancers and all redundancy, so it's very unlikely that we have any downtime.
I would love to see a Terraform module for Aikido Security.
I had a certain object with a UUID that was being considered as a private secret key or API key, which was not the case.
Aikido Security tells you what is vulnerable, but sometimes the fix suggestions are generic.
Making it easier to follow the traffic path and quickly see where something is going wrong would be a great enhancement.
The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF.
For availability, they have added additional clusters across all the regional edges in the Kubernetes clusters to enhance availability.
I used the free trial, which was sufficient for evaluating the platform and its core features.
Aikido Security has a plan for $4,200 annually for up to 10 users.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the pricing is reasonable and based on the repository; they charge accordingly.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable.
I believe the prices are much higher than I expected, but for the time being, the customer is still paying.
We were able to get all codebase vulnerability fixes within a week for all our 13 or 14 repositories that we had.
Security shifted left, meaning issues were caught during development rather than after deployment.
My favorite feature is the dependency vulnerability scanning because it quickly identifies the risk in third-party packages, which saves me time in finding vulnerabilities.
The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well.
Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Aikido Security | 0.5% |
| F5 Distributed Cloud Services | 1.9% |
| Other | 97.6% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 6 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
Aikido Security is the no-nonsense platform that empowers developers by centralizing code-to-cloud security issues and providing rapid guidance for fixing vulnerabilities.
With over 6,000 teams utilizing its features, Aikido Security prioritizes effective security management by consolidating 11 comprehensive scans into one platform. This approach translates complex vulnerabilities into understandable insights, targeting non-enterprise SaaS businesses with engineering teams of 10-500 developers. It focuses on delivering security management without excessive costs or complexity through a product-led growth model.
What are the standout features of Aikido Security?In industries like software development and cloud services, Aikido Security is implemented to provide clear insights, enabling teams to focus on rapid product growth while maintaining robust security. Its product-led growth strategy, including a freemium offering, allows developers to experience benefits firsthand without initial investment.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services excel in enhancing security, optimizing web application delivery, and ensuring robust network performance. Users value its integrated Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, global server load balancing, and intuitive management interface. It boosts organizational efficiency, reduces operational costs, and scales seamlessly, making it essential for businesses operating in distributed environments.
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