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Akamai App and API Protector vs Nexusguard DDoS Protection comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (18th)
Akamai App and API Protector
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th), Cloud and Data Center Security (12th)
Nexusguard DDoS Protection
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
24th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 14.0%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai App and API Protector is 4.5%, up from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nexusguard DDoS Protection is 1.8%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare14.0%
Akamai App and API Protector4.5%
Nexusguard DDoS Protection1.8%
Other79.7%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Gavin Pinho - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
ShashikaKodikara - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Cybersecurity at Technovage Solution
A solution requiring straightforward maintenance while remaining cost-effective compared to its competitors in the market
I am not in a position to speak about the areas where the solution needed improvement because I resigned during the implementation phase. At that time, the implementation was ongoing, and everything seemed to be going well. Using the solution, our team managed to transfer a couple of routers through a few areas. However, I believe the migration is still ongoing. Nonetheless, the first phase of the implementation was successful before my departure. There was a certain level of performance degradation in the solution, which I don't know if it can be tuned. This is because I was working for a short period on the solution. In my experience, it is an area that can be improved while also considering the stability and scalability aspects of the solution. If one wants to scale up, then one needs to change their plan. However, the thing is, one can always go for the larger scale based on one's anticipation of future traffic.

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 the web application firewall."
"The setup and configuration is also easy to perform and their support is excellent."
"Cloudflare's DNS services deliver the best performance in terms of speed and reliability."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"Cloudflare makes it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple users and multiple clients, and basically go in and access their account, make the changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"It enables us to move faster with new products because we have this layer of protection set up in our infrastructure."
"Akamai Web Application Protector is exceptionally stable; after all, it is Akami."
"All the solution's features are very good."
"It is scalable for DDoS."
"The most valuable feature is the custom rules feature, because many of our customers require a lot of custom rules and, because it's a very customized project for our customers, I think they have the best of everything already."
"It's a very good solution."
"The CDN and the WAF features are the best in this solution."
"Akamai is a very reliable provider and a very safe bet that will suit most environments' needs."
"The managed service allows us to confidently rely on Nexusguard’s professional team to take relevant actions as and when required to make sure DDoS attacks are successfully mitigated, ensuring 100% uptime of our service."
"Nexusguard has given us confidence that we are protected against any outside attacks."
"The support team was helpful."
"Based on the support received for implementation, I rate the solution's technical support a nine out of ten."
"The managed service allows us to confidently rely on Nexusguard’s professional team to take relevant actions as and when required to make sure DDoS attacks are successfully mitigated, ensuring 100% uptime of our service."
"Filters can be customized depending on the characteristics of the attack traffic. This feature has made it easier for Nexusguard's SOC team to further isolate any specific attack that can't be blocked by pre-configured mitigation."
"Nexusguard has exponentially improved the availability of our services because we don't have to worry much about any threats or DDoS attacks towards our services."
"Cloud Diversion is another good feature packaged with the whole solution. When attack traffic is detected, Cloud Diversion triggers to automatically route our prefix to Nexusguard’s scrubbing center, ensuring that all attack traffic is dropped in the shortest time possible."
 

Cons

"Technical support is not well developed. While there are good engineers, Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model."
"We experienced some downtime in the fall of 2013, causing us to switch to Incapsula."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"However, what I still fail to understand is that why aren't they offering domains themselves."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"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."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"Could integrate more features for each security."
"The product really isn't very user-friendly."
"They should allow for multiple security configurations in one account which will enhance the scalability."
"They are already very flexible, but room for improvement is there. Reports generation could be better and should be improved."
"It could have better analytics and reporting visibility in the OEM console."
"The performance of the cloud monitoring tool is low."
"They should allow for multiple security configurations in one account which will enhance the scalability."
"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."
"One of the features that should be added to the next release is report generation."
"One thing that we would like to improve from them is to provide more training to SOC team for them to have a deep understanding of the solution so that they would always be ready to answer anything without the need to escalate queries to senior personnel."
"The mitigation scope of Origin Protection is not fully efficient as there could be delays in activating the countermeasures."
"One thing that we would like to improve from them is to provide more training to SOC team for them to have a deep understanding of the solution so that they would always be ready to answer anything without the need to escalate queries to senior personnel."
"The mitigation scope of Origin Protection is not fully efficient as there could be delays in activating the countermeasures."
"One of the features that should be added to the next release is report generation. Currently, reports can be downloaded every month and are only available at the beginning of each month. It would be nice to generate the reports based on specific dates that we prefer and not have to wait until the next month for the current month’s report."
"There was a certain level of performance degradation in the solution, which I don't know if it can be tuned...In my experience, it is an area that can be improved while also considering the stability and scalability aspects of the solution."
"The solution must provide features for the post-processing of the traffic type and the traffic quality."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"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."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"We are using the free version."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"One reason not all people use Akamai is that it is a little bit more expensive than some other providers."
"It's more expensive than others, but the ROI is good for large-scale infrastructure."
"The product’s price is high."
"The solution is expensive."
"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."
"Akamai Web Application Protector is an expensive product."
"There is no license at all for Akamai. They are going to charge us only for the usage."
"Cost depends on the volume of traffic."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one represents a cheap option, and ten represents an expensive option, I would rate the solution a seven in terms of cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Performing Arts
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
40%
Media Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Educational Organization
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise18
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?
The tool's pricing is moderate. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expens...
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?
There are no significant areas for improvement on the WAF side or for Akamai App and API Protector solution; they are...
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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Also Known As

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

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
21st Century Technologies, Netpluz, REDtone, SNOC, StarHub, aamra
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai App and API Protector vs. Nexusguard DDoS Protection and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.