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Akamai App and API Protector vs FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF) 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.4
Cloudflare WAF delivers immediate ROI by securing e-commerce and banking platforms, ensuring operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Sentiment score
5.8
Akamai App and API Protector offers superior traffic management, security, and cost savings for large infrastructures, despite higher costs.
Sentiment score
7.3
FortiWeb enhances security, cuts costs, saves resources, offering a 70% ROI and improving financial and operational efficiency.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.1
Cloudflare's support is praised for responsiveness and effectiveness, though some Indian users face communication challenges and prefer local help.
Sentiment score
7.7
Customer service is excellent, while technical support has mixed reviews with praise for expertise but needs improved availability.
Sentiment score
6.7
FortiWeb's customer service is inconsistent, with varied experiences in responsiveness, regional support, and subscription cost concerns.
The technical support of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall rates between five and seven at maximum.
Their support is truly exceptional when I compare it with similar large-sized companies.
The back-end development team is available, and if any issue arises, they will help us immediately by providing solutions when contacted.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is praised for its scalability, flexibility, automation, and superior advantages compared to open-source solutions.
Sentiment score
8.1
Akamai App and API Protector excels in scalability, seamlessly handling extensive user demands and large-scale deployments with stability.
Sentiment score
7.2
FortiWeb WAF is scalable, supporting diverse users, with high ratings but some licensing flexibility challenges noted.
The scalability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall rates between 8 to 9, as it depends upon the use cases and what exactly the client needs.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is highly stable and reliable, ensuring uninterrupted, effective protection and user satisfaction.
Sentiment score
8.4
Akamai App and API Protector is highly stable and reliable, with no reported outages or issues over years of use.
Sentiment score
8.1
FortiWeb is seen as stable, routinely scoring high, but users suggest using FortiAnalyzer for enhanced security management.
 

Room For Improvement

Cloudflare WAF must update features, improve documentation and support, reduce false negatives, and enhance usability, integrations, and visibility.
Akamai App and API Protector needs enhancements in flexibility, UI, customer support, documentation, and advanced protection features.
FortiWeb WAF requires improvements in integrations, performance, support, scalability, and more enterprise features to compete with competitors.
The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available.
They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long.
If inbuilt larger logging capability is added, it would enhance usability, and features like clickable options to unblock or create exceptions would greatly assist customers in managing their websites.
If some of my customers want to migrate from F5 to Fortinet Firewall, or the Fortinet WAF solution, there are some migration issues.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall competitively priced, reasonable, and transparent despite starting fees and optional features.
Akamai App and API Protector is expensive yet considered worth the cost by large enterprises for its quality services.
FortiWeb Web Application Firewall offers flexible pricing, core and advanced features, and scalable licensing for cost-efficient protection.
If the customer has multiple websites, the price reduces automatically because it depends on the number only.
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare WAF offers API configurability, comprehensive features, robust security, scalability, with strong integration and technical support.
Akamai App and API Protector delivers scalable security, ease of use, and cost-effective protection with advanced features like DDoS defense.
FortiWeb Web Application Firewall provides user-friendly setup, protection against attacks, scalability, and cost-effective security features like machine learning.
The custom rules and the geo-redundant geographical rule feature, which allows me to implement geographical rules for customers, add significant value.
The best features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall are multiple, including the WAF, rate limiter, and bot attack protection.
If any user tries to input any text format in a web form mistakenly using SQL queries, the web solution detects the input, checking whether it's impacting or analyzing queries in the database.
Fortinet's pricing is way more competitive than Cisco or Palo Alto.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare Web Application ...
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Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Akamai App and API Protector
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th), Cloud and Data Center Security (10th)
FortiWeb Web Application Fi...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
15th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 7.3%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai App and API Protector is 3.7%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF) is 1.2%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

SachidDoshi - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a huge signature repository and is superiorly effective in mitigating DDoS attacks
The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced, which presently stands at two or three months. The product has a custom rule set that users can modify and manifest as needed. The vendor can probably shorten the learning curve using cutting-edge technologies like AI. The solution provider can also work around the web applications and identify the toolset that needs to be implemented to deploy the solution in less time. The vendor has launched a SASE product that can function with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall, but many improvements are needed in terms of features, such as the web filtering feature, and CASB has not yet been added.
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.
Martin Ellmann - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides users with ease of policy configuration and good integration capabilities
The solution helps protect our company's web applications against common threats up to 99 percent. We feel very safe with the tool. Speaking about how the tool has effectively mitigated web security threats for an application, I would say that it is an application behind the web portal, so there are about a hundred or thousand people who can access a website. If it is a sensitive application, and we have to watch every access to it to make it really safe, that is the reason why we need WAF on the application. My company doesn't use AI with the tool. I recommend the product to others. I would say that others need to have it if they have a shopping website or something similar. I know it is hard to sell because we find it quite hard whenever my company tries to do so. The solution offers 100 percent integration with other Fortinet security products. The ease of policy configuration in the tool is okay. I rate the tool a nine to ten out of ten.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
The product has a valuable security control functionality.
What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I cannot say much about areas of improvement for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall because I haven't gone through d...
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 do you like most about FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)?
The most valuable features of the solution are SD-WAN, filtration, web filter, application filter, and IPS.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)?
The pricing for FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF) is reasonable. That said, it depends on how many websites we ...
What needs improvement with FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)?
Their AI technology is good. Overall, Fortinet is only good. The improvement needed is in their response time. In the...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
Akamai Web Application Protector, Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Kona DDoS Defender
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Douglas Omaha Technology Commission, ZALORA, PrintPlanet
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai App and API Protector vs. FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF) and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.