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Akamai App and API Protector vs Comodo cWatch comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Akamai App and API Protector
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (9th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Cloud and Data Center Security (10th)
Comodo cWatch
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
CDN (13th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (27th)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Bharat Chandra - PeerSpot reviewer
Exceptional support, protects our sites, and provides visibility into traffic
We did a PoC of Akamai and Cloudflare. 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. Other things are good in Akamai. That is why we are using Akamai. Only the captcha part should be implemented.
Bernardo Murillo - PeerSpot reviewer
Alerts organizations if any malware is detected and removes it quickly
The solution allows me to change my logo. It gives me a white-label portal because I am a partner. OWASP has been the most effective in malware prevention. It can detect if the headers are okay and do FTP scans. We get alerts if we have some malware. It is removed very quickly.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"The technical support is good."
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"It enables us to move faster with new products because we have this layer of protection set up in our infrastructure."
"It gives us a report of traffic. It gives us a report of the day-to-day URL traffic, and it also gives an individual report. If we reach out to Akamai, they give us the IPs as well."
"The most valuable feature is the DDoS protection, which is the main reason we got it."
"I can attest to its benefits in terms of understanding and mitigating threats...The solution's technical support team seems to be pretty responsive."
"We are getting security for each and every API."
"The product has a good user interface."
"I like that the charges are all based on usage and labor costs. For the time that we spend onboarding almost 252020 FQDN, Akamai charges us only for the traffic usage, but it's only charging us for the labor costs for onboarding."
"Akamai Web Application Protector is a good solution that provides basic web application protection."
"The FIM feature, the information in the new management system, and their support are the most valuable features. The scanned results are quite fast as compared to other platforms compared to scanning timing. It takes about a minute or two minutes. Also, the results of the Comodo scan results are in detail."
"We get alerts if we have some malware."
"The solution is pretty stable. I've never faced pressing issues or hanging issue."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"The pricing could be improved."
"Customer support has room for improvement."
"It would be better if there weren't any issues with latency. We had latency issues, but I think they are all solved now."
"It could have better analytics and reporting visibility in the OEM console."
"In terms of precedence of Akamai rules, the last one is implemented. That is the one that is operational. If two rules contradict, the last one is implemented. We had a clash, but it was really tough to find that out. I would like to have a rulebook because, in their architecture documentation, it is not mentioned anywhere that if two rules clash, the last one works, and if it does not work, then what to do. This is something we were debating today with their tech support. With AWS, we get documents for the issues so that they do not occur in the future. Akamai's support and knowledge base needs to be improved."
"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."
"One thing I asked them is to integrate the API discovery product that they have and push that data into Akamai App and API Protector so that we do not have two types of reviews to identify the type of traffic. We already know the APIs that are frequently getting used, so analysis becomes easier. We can integrate both products and use them."
"It would be nice if Akamai Web Application Protector's price is lowered and made cheaper."
"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."
"A small problem is from the support team. Sometimes they are a bit delayed."
"The solution needs to build better performance, specifically in the hardware resources."
"The portal is a little slow."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"We are using the free version."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"One reason not all people use Akamai is that it is a little bit more expensive than some other providers."
"Based on the billing discussions in the DevOps team, Akamai's cost does not seem to be a major thing. However, LOE is an issue. When it comes to support, we know that even all the competitors do this. For a 30-minute issue, they give us a LOE of one or two hours. That is a basic practice, but that is something we worry about."
"The product is expensive, but it is worth the money."
"The solution is not expensive."
"Price-wise, I would say Akamai's pricing is competitive."
"There is no license at all for Akamai. They are going to charge us only for the usage."
"It's more expensive than others, but the ROI is good for large-scale infrastructure."
"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."
"Comodo cWatch’s first level, which has fewer features, costs $7."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai Web Application Protector?
The price is higher than others. It could be about 80% to 70% more expensive than other tools. So, it’s not just a sl...
What needs improvement with Akamai Web Application Protector?
It could have better analytics and reporting visibility in the OEM console.
What needs improvement with Comodo cWatch?
The portal is a little slow. I have to wait for it to load all the information. CDN's performance must be improved.
What is your primary use case for Comodo cWatch?
I use the solution to detect vulnerabilities in the site.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Comodo cWatch?
Comodo cWatch’s price is very good compared to Cloudflare’s. The first level of Cloudflare costs us about $20. The ne...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Akamai Web Application Protector, Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Kona DDoS Defender
cWatch
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Douglas Omaha Technology Commission, ZALORA, PrintPlanet
Xerox, Intel, HP, UPS, Western Union, Western Digital
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai App and API Protector vs. Comodo cWatch and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.