Fastly vs Prolexic comparison

Fastly and Akamai are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Fastly is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.0, while Akamai is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.0. Fastly holds a 2.7% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Akamai’s 3.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Fastly users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Akamai users who would recommend it.

Fastly

Read 9 Fastly reviews

2,044 Views
818 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Prolexic

Read 5 Prolexic reviews

1,390 Views
1,362 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Fastly

Prolexic

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Prolexic and Fastly compete in internet security and content delivery. Prolexic's pricing and support are favored, while Fastly's robust features give it an edge despite higher costs.

Features: Prolexic offers comprehensive DDoS protection, seamless integration with existing security tools, and effective traffic management. Fastly provides real-time content delivery, advanced caching capabilities, and powerful VCL configuration for ultimate flexibility.

Room for Improvement: Prolexic could improve by enhancing feature updates and expanding integration capabilities. Simplifying the user interface and reducing latency in response times may also be beneficial. Fastly might focus on simplifying deployment processes, expanding customer education resources, and improving cost transparency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Prolexic offers straightforward deployment with dedicated support, enhancing client onboarding. Fastly provides flexible deployment that requires a learning curve. Both are noted for commendable customer service, though Prolexic is highlighted for more accessible support.

Pricing and ROI: Prolexic is perceived as cost-effective with a favorable ROI for security-focused organizations. Fastly's setup costs are higher, but its expansive feature set provides strong returns for content delivery-focused enterprises.

To learn more, read our detailed Fastly vs. Prolexic Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Prolexic

December 2025

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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

Fastly

Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

10th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

CDN (8th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th)

Prolexic

Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

11th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Fastly is 2.7%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prolexic is 3.1%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Fastly	2.7%
Prolexic	3.1%
Other	94.2%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

Patel Parth

Technical support engineer at Adobe

Optimized ecommerce performance and improved access control through image handling and IP filtering

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP addresses instead of POP IPs. Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list. Additionally, a POP address should be there with a wide range of IP addresses provided, public static IP addresses, so customers can integrate egress IPs. Fastly should provide WebP image processing on the backend instead of on the fly. It would be a very useful feature to avoid unnecessary time for browser to browser and local cookies. I believe that Fastly service has a few gaps. We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers. There should be transparency.

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Gavin Pinho

Privacy & Risk Management Vice President, Information Security at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"Fastly combines both the CDN side and the Signal Sciences next-generation WAF, which is closely integrated with the CDN, allowing us to use both products seamlessly."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."

More Fastly pros

"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

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Support is not that great."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."

"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

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"It is an expensive solution."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"The pricing is a pay-as-you-go model that is charged by the hour."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

28%

Comms Service Provider

17%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	5

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fastly?

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

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What needs improvement with Fastly?

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 22% of the time

Cloudflare vs Fastly

Compared 20% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fastly

Compared 7% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 4% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Akamai App and API Protector vs Prolexic

Compared 20% of the time

Cloudflare vs Prolexic

Compared 20% of the time

Cloudflare One vs Prolexic

Compared 12% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs Prolexic

Compared 11% of the time

AWS Shield vs Prolexic

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

January 2026

Download Fastly product report

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

January 2026

Download Prolexic product report

Also Known As

No data available

Akamai Prolexic Routed

Overview

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Fastly

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.

Akamai

Sample Customers

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

Fidor Bank

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Prolexic

December 2025

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