Akamai App and API Protector vs Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL] comparison

Akamai and TransUnion are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Additionally, 100% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of TransUnion users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL] and Akamai App and API Protector are both competitors in the digital security landscape. Akamai App and API Protector seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced security features and comprehensive protection capabilities.

Features: Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL] is known for reliable DDoS mitigation, scalability, and robust high-volume attack protection. Akamai App and API Protector provides a comprehensive security suite, API-specific defenses, and protection against a wide range of threats beyond DDoS.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL] offers a straightforward deployment process with standard support. Akamai App and API Protector offers a more user-friendly onboarding experience, exemplary support, and a flexible deployment model.

Pricing and ROI: Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL] is more cost-effective with lower setup costs, appealing to cost-conscious buyers. Akamai App and API Protector demands a higher initial investment but provides considerable returns through its extensive security features. Akamai's broader features offer greater long-term value.

To learn more, read our detailed Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Report (Updated: August 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

August 2026

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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

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal

General Manager at bKash Limited

Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility

From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.

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Gavin Pinho

Privacy & Risk Management Vice President, Information Security at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Has provided strong protection against evolving threats but still needs support for configuration fine-tuning

The standout features of Akamai App and API Protector are rooted in it being the Web Application Firewall, where all traffic gets scanned, including the implementation of web firewall rules, and after this phase, traffic proceeds through the BMP, which is Bot Management. Akamai App and API Protector exceeds expectations in terms of AI capabilities, and it genuinely combines a plethora of advanced features. The area in which Akamai excels compared to other competitors with a WAF is in threat intelligence, as threats continually evolve, requiring ongoing updates to backend algorithms to effectively capture smart bots, and Akamai's commitment in that regard is backed by an excellent team, while other providers are still catching up.

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Justin Thomas

Manager Strategic Planning at Endurance International Group

Identifies a request that comes up multiple times, block holds that particular IP, and lets the genuine traffic pass through

Genuine traffic coming in is still getting better. While I understand that it's some sort of algorithm that is written in this scale, that algorithm can be a little bit better because sometimes while we are doing DDoS mitigation, genuine traffic does get blocked. While it is one of the greatest features it can still be improved. I would like to see a dashboard that shows you the data that is transferred from which end. It's where people start looking at abuse management. People keep questioning when the mitigation is on what service it is and how many GBs are passing through. An end user dashboard that will help you identify all of these questions and that can be visible in your entire organization is something that would make sense.

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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

"There is no service as mature as Cloudflare that is also as easy to use, reliable, and hosted from excellent infrastructure."

"If it was not for CloudFlare, I would have to hire a dedicated resource to manage all this for me."

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."

"The technical support on offer is excellent; they are very helpful and responsive, and we are quite happy with the level of service they provide to their customers."

"Using the CDN of Cloudflare improved the speed significantly, reducing the page loading times to appropriate levels."

"Stability is great; I love their mechanisms, I love their GUI, I love their front end, I love their behind the scenes, algorithms and everything, it all makes sense."

"Cloudflare has positively impacted our organization by giving us flexibility to manage the DNS part, being quite fast, and allowing us to manage everything from a single dashboard, which is quite handy."

More Cloudflare pros

"If you compare it to other products in the market, it's quite holistic in terms of the features that it provides."

"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."

"It is scalable for DDoS."

"The support that we got from their technical team has been fantastic. I have never experienced this level of support from other CDN providers."

"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 product has a good user interface."

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

"The product has a good UI."

More Akamai App and API Protector pros

"In the DDoS it's difficult to validate what is a genuine request from an end user. We've started being able to do that with the logistics that they have set up. With the protection that they have provided, they are able to identify what is valid and what is not valid. We see that a person who is getting DDoS Neustar service is able to block that particular user. However, while they are doing that it doesn't affect other customers on the server."

"Scalability is awesome, and they have grown two folds or three folds since we started using them, with no concerns even as we protect close to 60,000 hosted sites for business and e-commerce customers."

Cons

"Eventually, things go sideways and require fixes when it would have been easier to prevent the issue initially."

"The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service."

"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."

"I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we have reported over the years."

"At the end, it is worth than giving your house keys to the NSA."

"We had to do a lot of digging and back-and-forth with technical support for specific use cases, and it might be helpful to have more screencasts or screenshots for common situations."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

More Cloudflare cons

"The custom rules were difficult to use."

"We are experimenting with EdgeWorkers to write our own code at the Edge level. It could grow to be much better."

"They should allow for multiple security configurations in one account which will enhance the scalability."

"I think there could be an improvement with the integration of more features for each security."

"Customer support has room for improvement."

"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's fine for a simple tool, but as I recall, if you encounter a lot of bots, scrapers, and other things, you'll need this tool bot and this other thing they offer called Bot Manager."

"The solution could offer even more integrations."

More Akamai App and API Protector cons

"Genuine traffic coming in is still getting better because sometimes while we are doing DDoS mitigation, genuine traffic does get blocked."

"I would like to see a dashboard that shows you the data that is transferred from which end. It's where people start looking at abuse management. People keep questioning when the mitigation is on what service it is and how many GBs are passing through. An end user dashboard that will help you identify all of these questions and that can be visible in your entire organization is something that would make sense."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

"I give the price a five out of ten."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"Its price is at the medium level. It is not very high. It is also not very low. It serves the purpose."

"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."

"Its price is slightly high. Every company has a justification for the high price. Overall, it feels worth the money based on how the service has been structured, but we do negotiate it."

"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."

"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."

"Akamai is very expensive."

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

More Akamai App and API Protector pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Comms Service Provider

Performing Arts

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	26

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	18

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...

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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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.

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What needs improvement with Akamai Web Application Protector?

There are no significant areas for improvement on the WAF side or for Akamai App and API Protector solution; they are...

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What is your primary use case for Akamai Web Application Protector?

The main use case for Akamai App and API Protector is serving as the WAF, Web Application Firewall.

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What advice do you have for others considering Akamai Web Application Protector?

The primary way Akamai App and API Protector helps manage evolving cyber threats is by considering the impact on reve...

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Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 31% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Fastly vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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AWS Shield vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 9% of the time

AWS WAF vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 4% of the time

Radware Alteon vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 3% of the time

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F5 Silverline Managed Services vs Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL]

Compared 25% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL]

Compared 24% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL]

Compared 5% of the time

Lumen DDoS Mitigation vs Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL]

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL]

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

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Cloudflare

August 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Akamai App and API Protector

August 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

August 2026

Download Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL] product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

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

Neustar UltraDDoS, UltraDDoS

Overview

Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

Cloudflare

Akamai App and API Protector provides website security by preventing DDoS attacks, acting as an application firewall, managing content delivery, and monitoring APIs. It adapts to threat profiles and is used for fast media delivery and identifying malicious activities.

Akamai App and API Protector offers strong protection, adaptable security features, and efficient traffic management. Its WAF blocks IP addresses and country-specific threats while preventing SQL injections. Companies utilize it for scalable CDN services and comprehensive traffic analysis. Known for its cost-effectiveness and user-friendly dashboard, this protector stands out for its customizable rules and technical support. Users also highlight the ease of integration and detailed attack insights available through its advanced dashboard.

What are the key features of Akamai App and API Protector?

DDoS Protection: Strong defense against Distributed Denial of Service attacks.
Scalable CDN: Manages content delivery efficiently under high traffic loads.
WAF Capabilities: Blocks specific IPs and countries, prevents SQL injections.
Traffic Filtering: Analyzes and controls incoming requests to maintain security.
Adaptive Stream Delivery: Adjusts content delivery to meet bandwidth needs.

What benefits should users expect?

Cost-Effectiveness: Provides robust security tools at a competitive price.
Enhanced Security: Comprehensive protection against cyber threats.
Scalability: Easily handles increasing traffic and data loads.
Ease of Integration: Simple integration with existing systems.
Insightful Analytics: Offers data-driven insights into traffic and attack patterns.

In media, Akamai App and API Protector ensures smooth streaming by handling high bandwidth demands. E-commerce companies use it to guard against fraud and data breaches. Financial sectors rely on its ability to protect sensitive transactions. Implementations in healthcare focus on safeguarding patient data while maintaining compliance with regulations.

Akamai

Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL] is an enterprise-level DDoS protection service designed to safeguard online operations by mitigating attack risks. It provides comprehensive security features that ensure continuous online availability.

Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL] has been valued for its robust ability to protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks. It offers scalability and effective traffic analysis to detect potential threats swiftly. The system can be enhanced by addressing needs for customization and seamless integration with existing IT infrastructure. Despite being end-of-life, it set a standard for DDoS protection through proactive monitoring and advanced threat detection technologies.

What are the most important features of Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL]?

Advanced Traffic Analysis: Identifies and mitigates threats in real-time.
Scalability: Protects networks of all sizes from large-scale attacks.
Proactive Monitoring: Continuously scans for vulnerabilities and potential threats.

Which benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

Reduced Downtime: Ensures constant access to services during attacks.
Cost Efficiency: Limits financial losses by maintaining operations.
Enhanced Security: Provides peace of mind with comprehensive threat management.

In industries like finance and e-commerce, Neustar UltraDDoS [EOL] was crucial for maintaining transaction integrity and service reliability. It provided peace of mind to businesses by ensuring network stability, allowing them to focus on growth without disruption concerns.

TransUnion

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

Choxi

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

August 2026

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