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

Cloudflare vs Prolexic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

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
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Prolexic
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.8%, up from 17.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prolexic is 3.5%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cloudflare18.8%
Prolexic3.5%
Other77.7%
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.
Gavin Pinho - PeerSpot reviewer
Has faced challenges with bot detection while benefiting from strong threat monitoring and compliance support
Akamai's most valuable features include being industry recognized and PCI compliant, which is really great; their cloud is PCI compliant, and having a vendor that is PCI certified is crucial for organizations focused on PCI compliance. We utilize the real-time monitoring of the solution. Real-time monitoring helps us identify network vulnerabilities by allowing us to see a spike in traffic and understand the traffic levels compared to this time last month or last week. If we notice a sudden increase, we investigate further to determine if it indicates a DDoS attack or a card testing situation. In terms of threat detection capabilities, they are very good because Akamai has a SOC service that we have tapped into for active threat detection and threat hunting, and they monitor everything carefully 24/7. Scrubbing is done by Akamai as a backend service, and we utilize their SOC, which is a service that you pay additional fees for, allowing us to have our queries prioritized. Prolexic features help maintain business continuity during high-volume attacks by having built-in threat detection capabilities in its bot detection and other functionalities, as attacks usually occur through intelligent bots trying to infiltrate the system.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"It's very user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"The solution does not have hardware or maintenance requirements and is very easy to scale."
"Akamai's most valuable features include being industry recognized and PCI compliant, which is really great; their cloud is PCI compliant, and having a vendor that is PCI certified is crucial for organizations focused on PCI compliance."
 

Cons

"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."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"The solution needs additional product options for small and medium enterprises."
"In bot management, there are times when attackers find ways to bypass Akamai, which is a continuously evolving challenge."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The pricing is a pay-as-you-go model that is charged by the hour."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
871,469 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 6, 2013
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Comms Service Provider
16%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
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 needs improvement with Akamai Prolexic Routed?
For the DDoS protection, I don't see any areas for improvement because they are pretty solid there, though in bot management, there are times when attackers find ways to bypass Akamai, which is a c...
What is your primary use case for Akamai Prolexic Routed?
The main use case for DDoS protection is to mitigate risks, and there are multiple ways Akamai provides DDoS protection; one is application-based DDoS protection and the other is volumetric DDoS pr...
What advice do you have for others considering Akamai Prolexic Routed?
We have a couple of products, including DDoS protection, WAF, and Bot Manager. There are two ways Akamai does DDoS protection; one is through their product that we already have as an add-on license...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Akamai Prolexic Routed
 

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.
Fidor Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Prolexic and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
871,469 professionals have used our research since 2012.