Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Akamai App and API Protector vs Arbor DDoS comparison

Sponsored
 

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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Cloudflare enhanced speed, security, and data protection, providing significant ROI and improved operations and client satisfaction 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
Arbor DDoS ensures 100% uptime and cost-effective threat mitigation, boosting revenue and reputation for Polish telecoms and ISPs.
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.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Cloudflare's customer service is efficient for paying users, but responses can vary in speed and effectiveness for others.
Sentiment score
7.7
Customer service is excellent, while technical support has mixed reviews with praise for expertise but needs improved availability.
Sentiment score
7.5
Arbor DDoS support is competent and recommended, despite some delays, and receives ratings between seven and nine.
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.
The key factor is the language in which the support is offered, which, in this case, is in Thai.
The technical support team is very effective in resolving issues.
Although the team is good, they are not fast, and they lack the skills to manage dynamic attackers.
Support for Arbor DDoS deserves a rating of 10 because when there is a problem with implementation, the people I work with are the best.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Cloudflare is praised for seamless scalability, managing enterprise-level traffic efficiently and earning high customer satisfaction during peak events.
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
7.3
Arbor DDoS is praised for scalability, effective management, and seamless integration, despite some concerns about pricing.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
This would enhance the knowledge about scalability options available for Arbor DDoS, making it more accessible and useful for users.
They need to purchase boxes monthly to expand their bandwidths, and these new boxes can be added to the installed base very easily.
I find Arbor DDoS to be very scalable.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudflare is widely regarded as stable and reliable, with improvements noted in uptime and performance on higher plans.
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
8.3
Arbor DDoS is highly stable and effective, with minor issues during setup, and typically rated eight or nine out of 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.
It is a very stable product.
Arbor DDoS is very stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Cloudflare requires improvements in analytics, CDN speed, API, technical support, DNS management, documentation, pricing clarity, and international and reseller support.
Akamai App and API Protector needs enhancements in flexibility, UI, customer support, documentation, and advanced protection features.
Arbor DDoS needs improved scalability, user interface, integration, pricing, support, and automation for better legitimate traffic protection.
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.
Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version.
I would like to see an option to decrypt the traffic with Arbor DDoS, as some clients are interested in this, particularly for application layer attacks on port 443.
Enhancing the handshakes between Arbor DDoS and third-party solutions is essential for obtaining better and real-time data that supports any organization’s support team effectively.
I would like to see a roadmap for one or two years, and it is tough to predict what will happen in that timeframe without a clearer description.
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare offers cost-effective, scalable plans with no setup fees, starting from free for small businesses to enterprise-level solutions.
Akamai App and API Protector is expensive yet considered worth the cost by large enterprises for its quality services.
Arbor DDoS pricing is high, catering to enterprises with options like perpetual and subscription, yet needs more competitive pricing.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
I find it to be cheap.
I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high.
The prices for Arbor DDoS are expensive.
For some customers, the cost is expensive, but for enterprises looking to protect their services, it is affordable.
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare enhances security, speed, and SEO with easy-to-use features like CDN, SSL, DDoS protection, and centralized management.
Akamai App and API Protector delivers scalable security, ease of use, and cost-effective protection with advanced features like DDoS defense.
Arbor DDoS provides robust attack mitigation with a user-friendly GUI, AI capabilities, and real-time traffic visualization for enhanced security.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
That is an attack over 10 gigabit per second, and if an attack enters the telecommunication network, that will be a disaster for their customer, their services, and so on.
We have many updates for the library of different attacks, and they have artificial intelligence that automatically learns the process during different attacks.
The platform offers quick mitigation of attacks because Arbor DDoS uses BGP Flowspec, enabling very quick mitigation.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
76
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) (8th), Cloud and Data Center Security (10th)
Arbor DDoS
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.6%, up from 19.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai App and API Protector is 4.3%, up from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 13.1%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
Deepesh  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Bot Manager and different features to manage threats
As a product, it has good capabilities, including professional support. However, it's risky for us to rely on AI for real-time traffic management. We use in-house analytics but avoid automatic actions due to their high impact. For example, I live in a developing country. Everyone has different types of phones, apps, and everything else. So, if someone is using a legacy phone, that is still a use case here. If AI decides that this is an end-of-life phone or end-of-life Android operating system, it starts blocking that traffic. We may potentially lose millions or probably thousands and hundreds of thousands of hits per second. Everything is all about how well we serve payments because we're into payments. So, AI is used for analytics but not for real-time decisions. We can't afford to block traffic based on AI models due to the variety of devices and operating systems our users have.
Hamada Elewa - PeerSpot reviewer
Users have experienced comprehensive protection against DDoS threats while enjoying seamless integration
The most valuable feature of Arbor DDoS is that it is based in most of the ISPs all over the world, and Egyptian ISPs are one of them. If a customer who is getting internet connectivity from one of the ISPs has an Arbor at the end, it will be integrated with the ISP Arbor. It's some sort of closing all the cycle with Arbor DDoS, from the ISP sides and from your side as a customer. Traffic analysis with Arbor DDoS is very good; it is brilliant. They act in a different way compared to others, and the vendor support is very good. The main benefits Arbor DDoS provides to users include stopping DDoS attacks, which is the biggest nightmare for all customers.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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.
Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
I would say if it’s an ISP that will build a scrubbing center, Netscout/Arbor is a good solution. In all other soluti...
Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Arbor would be the best bid, apart from Arbor, Palo Alto and Fortinet have good solutions. As this is an ISP, I would...
What do you like most about Arbor DDoS?
The quality of the technical support provided by Arbor DDoS is premium.
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Akamai Web Application Protector, Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Kona DDoS Defender
Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT
 

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
Xtel Communications
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai App and API Protector vs. Arbor DDoS and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.