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Akamai App and API Protector vs Radware DDoS comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 18, 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
7.0
Cloudflare improves speed, security, and stability, leading to significant financial benefits with an ROI of 318% for businesses.
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
6.7
Radware DDoS offers crucial protection, preventing major financial losses and service disruptions, with ROI of 20% to 30%.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
The hybrid approach optimized infrastructure costs and personnel resources.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Cloudflare's support is praised for responsiveness, though non-paying users and regions without local offices face challenges.
Sentiment score
7.7
Customer service is excellent, while technical support has mixed reviews with praise for expertise but needs improved availability.
Sentiment score
7.0
Radware DDoS customer service is praised for expertise and quick response, though improvements are needed in communication and response time.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
We'd like a dedicated account manager.
Providing assistance almost instantly when needed.
Ensuring less than one second mitigation for L3/L4 and less than ten seconds for L7.
Before using Radware, I experienced some delays with another product, but with Radware, we have immediate connections with high-level technical support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare efficiently handles increased traffic and growth, offering scalability, robust network performance, and seamless expansion for enterprises.
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
7.7
Radware DDoS is highly scalable, offering flexible cloud architecture, easy licensing, and effective support for seamless organizational growth.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten because I had no issues with it.
I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
Scalability is well-supported by Radware.
It is scalable and user-friendly.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Cloudflare is generally stable and reliable, but occasional issues with downtime, speed, and DDoS protection are reported.
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
8.4
Users praise Radware DDoS for its stability and reliability, despite occasional challenges, with ratings between eight and ten.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
In my opinion, there is no downtime experienced with Radware DDoS Protection Service due to external network redundancy.
 

Room For Improvement

Cloudflare needs analytics, threat insights, improved support, user-friendly dashboards, and simplified pricing, with consistent caching and security features.
Akamai App and API Protector needs enhancements in flexibility, UI, customer support, documentation, and advanced protection features.
Radware DDoS needs better scalability, integration, AI, documentation, interface, response, pricing, customization, SSL management, and support availability.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
In future releases, one thing that would be great is if Cloudflare could provide basic WAF rules and security recommendations based on website scanning.
I suggest improvements to the user interface to make it easier to use and to find the necessary data for analysis.
I think Radware DDoS Protection Service could be improved by enhancing the network analytics features.
I want to improve the blocking time; it should be within 10 seconds because 18 seconds allows multiple transactions in the financial industry.
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare offers flexible pricing with plans for small businesses to enterprises, balancing cost with comprehensive features and protection.
Akamai App and API Protector is expensive yet considered worth the cost by large enterprises for its quality services.
Radware DDoS offers effective security with flexible pricing, appealing to those prioritizing robust protection despite higher costs.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
I find it to be cheap.
It's cost-effective, but I think they should have a custom pricing model for enterprise customers based on the features you use.
Radware pricing is on the high end, suitable more for larger organizations.
I didn't check pricing of other providers in depth but verified with two, and found Radware to be significantly cheaper compared to F5.
We have a premium cost setup to align with a tier four uptime certified data center, storing and protecting critical infrastructure.
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare offers caching, DDoS protection, and CDN services, enhancing website speed and security with intuitive interface and global reach.
Akamai App and API Protector delivers scalable security, ease of use, and cost-effective protection with advanced features like DDoS defense.
Radware DDoS offers robust, automated protection with seamless integration, advanced analytics, and user-friendly features to enhance system stability.
Our scenario consisted of two web servers in different allocations to control access demands, and the load balancer did the job as expected, bringing security and stability to access points.
For me, the valuable feature is DDoS protection.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
The support from Radware is also exceptional, as they are always willing to jump on a call to help solve issues and improve our network design.
The ERT feeds, which are based on Radware intelligence services, have been beneficial to my organization because they block a lot of malicious IP addresses and botnets.
The best feature of Radware DDoS Protection Service is the automation.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
Akamai App and API Protector
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (9th), Cloud and Data Center Security (10th)
Radware DDoS
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.6%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai App and API Protector is 4.2%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Radware DDoS is 8.4%, up from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

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.
Tanuj-Garg - PeerSpot reviewer
Multi-layered defense ensures robust protection and optimized resources
Radware DDoS Protection Service is valued for its multi-layered defense protection, always-on and on-demand service, zero-day protection with adaptive behavioral-based mitigation, DNS and infrastructure protection, and SSL attack mitigation. The solution's multi-layer protection covers volumetric, protocol-based, and application layer attacks. They offer a very effective response against DNS attacks. Regarding behavior-based detection technology, in terms of real-time detection, it has been able to reduce false positives. We have pretty good experience with them. The geolocation is pretty good for an organization such as ours. We can block anything from certain regions, like North Korea or China, etc, cetera. It works alongside machine learning. They can update policies globally in less than ten seconds, which really helps with false positives. During a DDoS attack, it ensures legitimate users are not affected. We're working on a hybrid solution, so we have Defence Pro devices on our side and unlimited mitigation capabilities on the cloud.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
Educational Organization
36%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 do you like most about Radware Cloud DDoS Protection Service?
The most important part is that Radware DDoS integrates seamlessly and provides anomaly identification, real-time not...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Radware Cloud DDoS Protection Service?
For Radware Cloud DDoS Protection, the pricing model can vary based on a number of factors such as the scale of the b...
What needs improvement with Radware Cloud DDoS Protection Service?
The time it takes to upload a site to the cloud is critical when under attack. If a site is down, a quick response to...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Akamai Web Application Protector, Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Kona DDoS Defender
Radware DDoS Protection Service, Radware DefensePro, Radware DefenseFlow
 

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
Myntex, APAC retailers
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai App and API Protector vs. Radware DDoS and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,471 professionals have used our research since 2012.