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Akamai App and API Protector vs Sucuri 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 Web Application ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Akamai App and API Protector
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
23rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (10th), Cloud and Data Center Security (16th)
Sucuri
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
36th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (25th), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (25th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 3.8%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai App and API Protector is 2.9%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sucuri is 1.6%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall3.8%
Akamai App and API Protector2.9%
Sucuri1.6%
Other91.7%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
CTO at PlayNirvana
Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.
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.
JS
Hardware Engineer at Ministry of Defense
A cost-effective choice for website security and informative support with issues related to CDN quality
One area where they could improve is in providing real-time support options because now you need to open a support ticket and wait for their response. It would greatly benefit customers if they implemented an online chat or messaging system for quicker assistance. I have found their Content Delivery Network service to be lacking in quality, and it could certainly be enhanced to provide better performance. I would also like to see improvements in the deployment process, as it currently takes more time than desirable. Another significant concern is that their service when your website is down, turns it into a static site. This means that if customers try to visit your site during downtime, they will see old content from the static site, which is not ideal. The CDN and tracking services are areas that need improvement, as well as addressing their bandwidth limitations.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."
"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."
"The rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."
"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."
"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."
"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."
"Adaptive stream delivery and WAF protection are valuable."
"Akamai App and API Protector exceeds expectations in terms of AI capabilities, and it genuinely combines a plethora of advanced features."
"Akamai is a very reliable provider and a very safe bet that will suit most environments' needs."
"Site Defender service helps prepare, respond, and optimize against modern-day web attacks."
"The solution easily identifies, delays, or allows business traffic."
"All the solution's features are very good."
"I can attest to its benefits in terms of understanding and mitigating threats...The solution's technical support team seems to be pretty responsive."
"If you compare it to other products in the market, it's quite holistic in terms of the features that it provides."
"The most valuable part is the analytics and visualization."
"It significantly eases the workload and streamlines the initial setup required to protect a website."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"Rather than locate some things manually, the Sucuri plugin scans and allows us to pinpoint whether there is malware or some problem in the site."
"Domain name scanning since it allows us to scan all our domain names and determine whether it has malware or if is reported as phishing."
"I use it as a WAF, which is basically a web firewall to monitor and block traffic to our web server."
"The initial setup was straightforward. Straight forward because the plugin can simply be installed and then it does its job. It's not complex, there is no learning curve. The online scan is simple, you put in the website address and the scan gives us a report on the browser itself. It's simple to use."
"For people who own a personal website, this solution is worth trying out since their security solution is somewhat full-fledged."
 

Cons

"We don't even use Cloudflare Bot Management because it's too expensive; you need to pay per request, and it's much cheaper to get one or two additional machines."
"The reporting could be improved if it were more granular."
"Cloudflare should update the version of the ModSecurity core rule set that they run on."
"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."
"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."
"Support can be challenging at times."
"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"WAF doesn't directly affect bandwidth costs. It saves costs on protection. However, with the correct setup, it's difficult to determine if it saves costs overall due to the fixed enterprise plan fee."
"The interface is a little bit clunky and can be improved."
"I do not see any area for improvement. Akamai is already maintaining its own databases for the security concerns, vulnerabilities, and attacks that are there. If anything, they should have a solution in the infrastructure security area as well. They should not be only in cloud cybersecurity; they should also be in infrastructure security."
"They should allow for multiple security configurations in one account which will enhance the scalability."
"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."
"They are already very flexible, but room for improvement is there. Reports generation could be better and should be improved."
"The custom rules were difficult to use."
"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."
"It would be better if there weren't any issues with latency. We had latency issues, but I think they are all solved now."
"I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. The reason is that we have found sometimes customers or Google saying that there is something wrong with the website but Sucuri says that the site is clean so we do have to look at the site manually which means that the Sucuri scan does not pick up anything and everything."
"It would greatly benefit customers if they implemented an online chat or messaging system for quicker assistance."
"Sucuri could provide help for specific security alerts in-line instead of requiring users to search for it in the help section."
"In terms of improvement, the cost factor is always there."
"The main improvement I would like to see is support for .NET applications. If they could include this feature, I would include more sites in the protection."
"Confident score: Currently it does not have one and there are cases that most websites flagged are false-positives."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"It is not too pricey."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"Price-wise, I would say Akamai's pricing is competitive."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is not expensive."
"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."
"One reason not all people use Akamai is that it is a little bit more expensive than some other providers."
"Cost depends on the volume of traffic."
"It stands out as a more cost-effective option compared to other cloud-based security services like Cloudflare or JetPass."
"I’d simply say it’s really worth it."
"Sucuri offers different plans, both the standard plan and an advanced plan. So there are different plans to choose from."
"The ROI has been very good. Because of the solution, I have a tax break. The site developers were not always experienced people. We used to pay more for cleaning up the site when it was infected. Now, we have peace of mind knowing that the solution will clean up the site and that we won't have to go through the unnecessary process of restoring it from a backup. The protection on the WAF and the measures for backups have also prevented our site from going down."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Performing Arts
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise18
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...
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.
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...
Ask a question
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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
The Loft Salon, Tom McFarlin, WPBeginner, Taylor Town, Everything Everywhere, Financial Ducks in a Row, Chubstr, Real Advice Gal, Sujan Patel, Wallao, List25, School the World
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai App and API Protector vs. Sucuri and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.