We performed a comparison between Akamai Kona Site Defender and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I like that the charges are all based on usage and labor costs. For the time that we spend onboarding almost 252020 FQDN, Akamai charges us only for the traffic usage, but it's only charging us for the labor costs for onboarding."
"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 solution can scale extremely well."
"The features are powerful and better than F5."
"The main reason that we suggest this product to our clients is the great integration with other security tools, such as IBM Guardium."
"We enjoy its overall ease of use."
"F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) improves the resilience and quality of the application itself, the speed and the user experience for the application. The data that the users need from the application is actually acquired faster. So, it provides faster data acquisition."
"BIG-IP LTM's most valuable feature is that it allows you to seamlessly add more servers without impacting your application's configuration."
"The solution has good load balancing capabilities."
"The load balancing function, the monitors that you can create, and iRules programmability are most valuable."
"The solution is easy to install. It's a straightforward process."
"The web application firewall feature is the most valuable and useful feature. It is a leading industry product when it comes to load balancing. Its user interface is very simple. There isn't a steep learning curve. When we initiate someone to F5, they start using it quickly."
"Support and the pricing need to improve."
"It would be better if there weren't any issues with latency. We had latency issues, but I think they are all solved now."
"The pricing could be reduced a bit."
"They are already very flexible, but room for improvement is there. Reports generation could be better and should be improved."
"My only point of contention would be that it is a little pricey."
"It is a hardware load balancer, and its installation procedure is more complex than a software load balancer. There are pros and cons of using hardware load balancing. You have to have specific hardware deployed in your data center to activate this load balancer. They never came up with any software-based load balancing solution. It is all hardware-based."
"The initial setup can take a long time."
"Its price can be better. It is a bit expensive."
"The price for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is very high. This aspect could be improved."
"Right now, there are a lot of products within F5's portfolio. They acquired a couple of companies like NGINX and Volterra. Some features and technologies overlapped when this acquisition occurred. They need to refine it and come up with a single, proper solution. F5 should focus more on zero trust network access (ZTNA).They should be more focused on that framework because the industry is moving towards that. Everyone is talking about SASE and zero trust."
"Its GUI could be a bit better. Other than that, it's already pretty good. We don't use it in a high-performance environment. So, we don't really care so much about too many features."
"It requires a particular skill or training before being able to manage it."
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Akamai Kona Site Defender is ranked 12th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 4 reviews while F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is ranked 1st in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) with 46 reviews. Akamai Kona Site Defender is rated 8.0, while F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Akamai Kona Site Defender writes "Great technical support, scales extremely well, and is very stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) writes "Great support, helpful documentation, and is user-friendly". Akamai Kona Site Defender is most compared with AWS WAF, Akamai Prolexic Routed, Cloudflare Web Application Firewall, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and F5 Advanced WAF, whereas F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, NGINX Plus, Citrix NetScaler, Fortinet FortiADC and HAProxy. See our Akamai Kona Site Defender vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) report.
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