F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs Prolexic comparison

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.  

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network 
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for 
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every 
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this 
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the 
information requests are always only seconds away. 

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to 
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official 
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project 
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to 
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in 
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device) 
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology 
available to them at all times. 

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement 

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities 

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare 
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and 
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your 
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a 
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage 
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare 
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“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.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is a high-performance, full-proxy network security solution designed to protect networks and data centers against incoming threats that enter the network. Built on F5’s industry-leading BIG-IP hardware and software platforms, BIG-IP AFM provides a scalable platform that delivers the flexible performance and control needed to mitigate aggressive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and protocol attacks before they overwhelm and degrade applications and infrastructure availability.

For service providers, BIG-IP AFM IPS does even more, protecting the network edge and performing traffic inspection and protocol adherence for prevalent service provider protocols such as SS7, Diameter, HTTP/2, GTP, SCTP and SIP traffic coming into the network over UDP, TCP, and SCTP.

Akamai Prolexic is a cloud-based DDoS protection solution that defends your data center and hybrid infrastructure to ensure availability and uptime. It provides comprehensive port and protocol protection against the broadest range of DDoS attacks, including high-bandwidth sustained attacks and complex multi-vector attacks. Prolexic is available as an always-on or on-demand service, contains a Network Cloud Firewall, and offers flexible integration models based on your desired security posture across hybrid origins. Prolexic is backed by a proven platform with more than 20 Tbps of dedicated DDoS defense capacity and our 24/7/365 global SOCC for a fully managed solution.

Prolexic stops DDoS attacks closer to the source to maximize performance for users and to maintain network resiliency through cloud distribution. Instead of originating advertisements for your prefixes from your cloud/data centers, you’ll make either a border gateway protocol route advertisement change or DNS redirection (A record or CNAME record) to originate from one of many Akamai scrubbing centers globally. Your intended traffic is then routed to the user via Anycast through the closest scrubbing center. Prolexic will inspect the traffic to determine if it is good or bad, and apply proactive and/or custom mitigation controls designed to stop attacks instantly if needed. This ensures fast and accurate DDoS protection. Clean traffic is then returned to the customer origin via GRE tunnels, Layer 2 VLAN connections, and/or VIP-to-origin back-end mapping with little perceived latency. Prolexic also features a Network Cloud Firewall that allows IT teams to auto generate or manually manage access control lists.