Akamai Bot Manager Reviews

When it comes to my daily use case, I implement Akamai Bot Manager primarily to protect my public-facing web application and API from miscellaneous automated traffic. I was seeing issues with web scraping, excessive bot traffic, and automated abuse that impacted application performance and security. Akamai Bot Manager helps me distinguish legitimate users and good bots from malicious bots and allows me to block or challenge suspicious traffic while minimizing the impact on genuine customers. As a result, I improved security, reduced unwanted traffic, and gained better visibility into bot activity across my applications.

Apart from protecting my web application, I also use Akamai Bot Manager to monitor traffic patterns and identify emerging bot behavior. One of the most valuable aspects is the visibility it provides through detailed bot analytics and risk scoring. This helps me fine-tune my security policies over time and respond quickly to new threats without affecting legitimate users. The solution integrates well with my existing Akamai security stack, making it easier to manage bot protection alongside other web security controls.

Before adopting Akamai Bot Manager, I primarily relied on a combination of traditional security controls such as WAF rules, rate limiting, and custom detection logic to manage automated traffic. While those approaches provided some level of protection, they required more manual effort and were less effective against sophisticated bots that could mimic legitimate user behavior. I decided to move to Akamai Bot Manager because I needed more advanced bot detection capabilities, better visibility into bot activity, and a solution that could scale with my application.

In terms of best features, the best features of Akamai Bot Manager in my experience are its advanced bot detection capabilities, behavior analysis, and bot scoring. It does a good job of distinguishing legitimate users from malicious automated traffic by analyzing multiple signals rather than relying solely on IP address rules. I also find the real-time visibility and reporting very valuable because they help me understand traffic patterns and make informed policy decisions.

One additional feature worth mentioning is the quality of Akamai's threat intelligence network. Because Akamai has visibility across a large portion of global internet traffic, Akamai Bot Manager benefits from continuously updated intelligence on emerging bot behavior and attack patterns. This helps improve detection accuracy without requiring me to constantly create new rules myself.

Akamai Bot Manager has a positive impact on my organization by significantly reducing malicious automated traffic reaching my application. This improved both my security posture and overall user experience for legitimate customers. I saw fewer credential stuffing and scraping attempts, reduced unnecessary load on my infrastructure, and better protection of business-critical assets.

In terms of improvement, overall, Akamai Bot Manager is a strong solution, but there are a few areas where it could be improved. One is the learning curve for new users because the platform offers many configuration options and detailed analytics. It can take time for teams to become fully comfortable with tuning policies and interpreting reports. Another area for improvement is reporting and dashboard customization. While the existing visibility is very good, having more flexible and user-friendly reporting options would make it easier to create tailored views for different stakeholders. Additionally, more out-of-the-box guidance and recommendations for policy tuning could help organizations accelerate deployment and reduce the effort required during the initial setup.

One additional area for improvement would be simplifying policy management for organizations that have many applications and APIs. As deployment grows, having more automation and AI-driven recommendations for policy tuning could help reduce administrative effort.

One additional improvement I would mention is enhancing automation and operational efficiency. For example, more AI-driven recommendations for policy tuning, anomaly detection, and remediation actions could help the security team respond even faster to evolving bot threats.

I have been using Akamai Bot Manager for the last one year.

From a stability perspective, it has been quite stable for me, and I have never seen any downtime with this solution.

When I talk about scalability, I would say it has been highly scalable, and that is one of its key strengths because it operates on Akamai's global edge network. It could handle very large volumes of traffic without requiring me to scale my own bot detection infrastructure. As my application traffic grew, I did not have to make significant changes to the solution. It continued to provide consistent detection and mitigation capabilities during both normal operation and traffic spikes. This was particularly valuable for protecting high-traffic web applications and APIs where bot activity can increase rapidly.

My experience with customer support has been positive overall. The support team has been knowledgeable and responsive when I have needed assistance with configuration questions, policy tuning, or investigating specific traffic patterns. They have provided helpful responses.

I would say customization is relatively straightforward once you understand your traffic management and business requirements. Akamai Bot Manager provides flexible policy controls, bot categories, risk scores, and action settings. I can decide whether to allow, monitor, challenge, rate limit, or block a specific type of traffic. The real-time dashboard and reporting make it easy to analyze bot activity and adjust policies based on what I am seeing in production.

In terms of pricing, setup cost, and licensing, my experience with the pricing and licensing was generally positive. Although Akamai Bot Manager is positioned as an enterprise-grade solution, it is not necessarily the lowest-cost option in the market. The pricing was justified by the level of protection, scalability, threat intelligence, and operational benefit it provides. From the setup perspective, the implementation required planning and policy tuning during the initial phase, but there were no major challenges. Once configured, ongoing management was relatively straightforward.

In terms of return on investment, I have seen a positive return on investment, although it is difficult to attribute it to a single metric. The biggest benefit has been reducing the amount of malicious bot traffic reaching my applications, which lowered the effort required to investigate and respond to bot-related incidents. From the time-saving perspective, my security and operation team has spent less time manually analyzing suspicious traffic because Akamai Bot Manager provides clear visibility and automated mitigation capabilities. Previously, analyzing and manually checking bot-related defects used to take five to six hours. While I don't have an exact number, I have seen an improvement in operational efficiency, better application performance during traffic spikes, and reduced risk from credential stuffing and account takeover attempts.

Before choosing Akamai Bot Manager, I evaluated a few alternatives as part of my selection process. I looked into solutions from companies such as Cloudflare, Imperva, and DataDome, along with the option of continuing to rely on a combination of WAF rules. While all these solutions had their strengths, I felt Akamai Bot Manager offered the best combination of advanced bot detection, global threat intelligence, scalability, and integration with the rest of the Akamai security ecosystem.

My advice would be to start by clearly understanding your bot-related challenges and defining what success looks like for your organization in terms of bots. Whether you are trying to prevent credential stuffing, stop web scraping, protect APIs, or reduce automated abuse, having clear objectives will help you configure the solution effectively. I would also recommend spending time during the initial deployment phase to analyze traffic patterns and fine-tune policies. I would say, take advantage of the reporting, analytics, and support resources available. Akamai Bot Manager is most effective when it is treated as an ongoing security capability rather than a set-and-forget tool.

Overall, Akamai Bot Manager has been a valuable addition to my security strategy. It provides strong protection against a wide range of automated threats while maintaining a good experience for legitimate users. The combination of advanced detection capabilities, global threat intelligence, scalability, and detailed visibility into bot activities makes it a mature and effective solution. I would rate this product a nine out of ten.

I'm working at an airline company, so Akamai Bot Manager has been used in our company for approximately 20 years.

Akamai Bot Manager is helping us understand how many bots are accessing our websites or applications. We can manage the dashboard to differentiate on a quick view and see how much good bots get access compared to bad bots trying to reach our website. The dashboard is really helpful at first sight. Of course, with bots we always need to deep dive and understand what exactly the commands and what the GET and POST commands the bot is trying to do on the website.

It's effective. Akamai Bot Manager is on my chain as my first layer to deny bad bots and allow good bots to go through. Because it's a CDN solution and we are a global company, Akamai Bot Manager is basically the first layer of defense for us.

Because we are an airline, we have various attacks on our website and application, and we really have to involve our experience and try to find attacks by ourselves. These days attacks are very sophisticated and they are trying to manipulate in the same way as humans, so the anomaly feature is not really helpful. Bots are very clever these days and they move through the website the way humans do.

We are not really using it because again, the attacks are sophisticated. We need something that involves different AI models that can try to find similarity in all the data that we are getting from Akamai Bot Manager to understand where exactly we can find similarities between the ways bots are reacting on the website.

The most valued feature these days is getting research on all the data as fast as possible and trying to find similarities to understand which bots are trying to manipulate or abuse my website. We are going toward AI solutions because it is the fastest, but it should be a very sophisticated model. Bots these days move the way humans do, so it's really hard to understand which of them is a bot and which is human. Bots can go through the challenges you are putting on the website, and it seems nothing can stop them.

We have been using Akamai Bot Manager for one year.

Akamai Bot Manager is not cheap, and it's even a bit expensive, but I don't really have this information because I'm not in the negotiation about the pricing.

We are using a service provider here in Israel, a reseller of Akamai Bot Manager, so we are using their support. We are not working directly with Akamai Bot Manager support.

Positive

Akamai Bot Manager is straightforward to set up. However, because we have all the AI in a gigantic box, these days we have a huge challenge to understand which bots are good and which are bad. Akamai Bot Manager is fine to use, but because we have huge challenges with bots everywhere these days, we still have to manage and understand and do research to understand which bots are good for us and which are bad.

Akamai Bot Manager is not cheap. From what I know, Akamai Bot Manager is not so cheap.

I think overall, not only about the product, I've seen some solutions with the buzzword today being AI, where AI can supposedly do everything and try to have a deep inspection of AI. It's still very hard to understand and find the difference between good bots and bad bots.

I'm in a corporation where big changes happen very rarely, and if we are talking about CDN, we are still with Akamai Bot Manager.

It's SaaS, of course.

My review rating for Akamai Bot Manager is 8 out of 10.

Day-to-day when I open Akamai Bot Manager, the first thing I do is check the dashboard for any unusual traffic patterns. I look for spikes in suspicious bot activity and then I drill down to see which rules need adjusting or which IP ranges are triggering alerts.

Since we implemented Akamai Bot Manager, our team is saving about 10 hours a week on manual monitoring, and we estimate a cost reduction of around 15% in fraud-related losses. It has been a significant efficiency boost.

It has definitely changed how my team works together and improved collaboration a great deal. We now have a shared dashboard so the security team, IT, and even some developers can all see the same insights and act faster together.

The main reason I chose Akamai Bot Manager specifically over those alternatives was Akamai's broad global network and their advanced machine learning capabilities. It provided us more precise bot detection, plus the integration with our existing setup of other security tools we already use.

I would advise someone considering Akamai Bot Manager who has a similar workflow to start with a clear understanding of their traffic patterns and set up a solid pilot first. This will help fine-tune the rules and avoid any surprises. Additionally, it is worthwhile to test the reporting capabilities because those insights can drive a lot of your decisions. I would rate Akamai Bot Manager an eight on a scale of one to ten.

My main use case for Akamai Bot Manager includes API security, hostname security, application security, web security analytics, bot management, DDoS mitigation, and OWASP top 10 security.

Once I log in to Akamai Bot Manager, I go into the web security configuration and check for the configuration that we have and also the hostnames we have onboarded. On a daily basis, we do monitoring for all the hostnames and all the critical endpoints that are hosted. We do analysis of the traffic and a regular traffic check for the bots and determine if the traffic is legitimate or look for potential cyber attacks.

The best features are bot management and DDoS mitigation, and the BMP and SOC recommendation from Akamai get used the most.

Using Akamai Bot Manager, we detect all the attacks on our site, any application-related attack, and any DDoS or bot-related attacks, which can be anonymous traffic as well. Based on the attacks and best practices, we take recommendations from our internal team and then we make the changes accordingly.

I wish it had features to address what is the purpose of this call.

I have been familiar with Akamai Bot Manager for three years.

I have not experienced any frustration with Akamai Bot Manager.

Before I landed on Akamai Bot Manager, we did some implementation of change requests for the service team. For the application owners as well as the infra owners, we onboarded some hostnames and we manually did analysis for that traffic. We also did whitelisting of the IPs or whitelisting of the user agent and various parameters which are identified in Akamai Web.

When I first implemented Akamai Bot Manager, it took thirty minutes to get up and running.

We needed formal training on Akamai Bot Manager.

We use Akamai Bot Manager as a team of four members who are admins.

While evaluating options, I considered Kona Site Defender in Akamai.

I think one of the concerns in our company was managing frauds, where we used to face multiple instances related to bots and other instances of VPNs, which we wanted to contain. In our company, we implemented Akamai Edge Platform. Our company's DNS routes through Akamai Cloud and then comes back into our production network. The tool filters and inspects the traffic, and then it reroutes back to us. One of the better experiences with Akamai is that it is PCI compliant. As my company accepts payments, we need to make sure that our vendors are also PCI compliant.

The features of the tool are associated with the licensing part, so my company uses Akamai Bot Manager for account takeovers. The aforementioned area consists of functionality related to the product, which is available straight out of the box. The product is very straightforward. One of the features of the product is associated with the fact that it allows us to automate the blocking of countries, like Russia, that have some serious criminal records or where the crimes are high, so my company uses IP geo protection as a function. VPNs from areas that are used by some bots to potentially launch attacks are blocked by automating certain processes through Akamai. Akamai has a database of blacklisted IPs, URLs, and users.

In terms of the need for improvement, I feel that it is a continuous cycle where Akamai keeps updating the databases. There are new emerging threats, risks, and sources from which threats can emerge. The aforementioned area consists of all the challenges that our company has outsourced to Akamai, so we rely heavily on the tool. Continuous improvement needs to happen all throughout, irrespective of the solution.

I feel that customer support has certain concerns where improvements are required.

I have been using Akamai Bot Manager for a year. My company has a business relationship with Akamai.

Though the product offers scalability, you get charged based on the volume you use, so I think it is pretty flexible. Taking into account the flexibility offered by the product by removing the price aspect, I would rate the tool at nine out of ten. The product is very scalable, and users do not need to do anything to be able to use it.

I rate the technical support an eight and a half out of ten.

Positive

My company did not use a similar product to Akamai Bot Manager, but we did use Barracuda as more of a WAF tool. Akamai Bot Manager saves us the trouble of managing internal updates and upgrades. The tool is also PCI-compliant, so it meets all the security criteria.

The product's initial setup phase is straightforward compared to some of the products that we used. The cloud services offered by the tool are pretty straightforward. Akamai support is available to help with the setup phase. You obviously need to buy some professional services to help you with the setup phase.

I don't think that security is an area where you need to look into the cost-saving aspect. It is more important to ensure that my company's client is safe and secure. My company wouldn't want to be hit by security risks. Akamai Bot Manager is a good solution for a company.

In terms of the security provided, the benefits from the use of the product are immediately visible.

You buy a license of the product based on a certain volume, but if you hit the volume and go above it, then you are charged additional for each GB you use. I think you need to pay 20,000 per month.

Cloudflare had been hit by DDoS, and there was some kind of breach some time ago, so for those reasons, my company had to go with a more mature tool. If you look at Gartner's Magic Quadrant future, Akamai and Imperva are the two leading products in the market.

In terms of how the tools' signatures update process helps with our company's security measures, I would say that my company purchased the product as a service and shows that the implementation of the security measures is Akamai's responsibility. My company purchased the product as a SaaS solution. The product is a cloud-hosted solution hosted by Akamai. Akamai does the maintenance, management, and updates, while the company just leverages the services provided by the tool.

My company does not take care of product maintenance since it is taken care of by Akamai.

I think the user experience with the tool has been great. Performance has been great with the product because you don't get any bad traffic as Akamai filters it out.

I recommend the product to others especially if you have a business that is dependent on payments or collection of personal information. You need a product that will safeguard you are business and I feel that Akamai Bot Manager has some capabilities that seem magical.

I don't know how the product would ever integrate with AI, considering that it is mostly used for bot management. The product can introduce the eye as a part of threat modeling, but that is something that is done in the back end, and users won't get to see it.

I rate the tool an eight and a half out of ten.

Bot manager consists of two versions: Bot Manager Standard and Bot Manager Premium. The Standard version handles regular requests, assessing for anomalies such as proper cookies, headers, and the legitimacy of the browsing source. It serves as protection against standard threats, allowing us to discern between genuine users and bots based on headers or cookies.

On the other hand, Bot Manager Premium offers heightened security by delving into more advanced settings. This feature relies on a selection process. Akamai facilitates this by sending two types of cookies when accessing a specific page. One cookie operates as a short-term collector, gathering data during typical site browsing, while another serves as a long-term cookie, analyzing user behavior, including keyboard and mouse movements. This comprehensive approach enables the collection of behavioral telemetry for a more thorough understanding of user interactions with the site.

The best feature is the BNP. That is what Manager Premium does, protection of transactional endpoints.

There is a clear need for improvement. Over the past year or so, we've observed an increase in the sophistication of attacks, with some occurring at the start of this year or even extending back one and a half years. Despite having ample resources, particularly with the advent of advanced AI, these entities can now execute basic bot attacks.

Fine-tuning our defenses is an ongoing challenge, as they consistently find ways to evade detection or operate just below our predefined thresholds. At the same time, we must maintain these thresholds carefully to avoid inadvertently blocking legitimate customer traffic. Each time these entities attempt new tactics, we analyze their traffic patterns meticulously to refine our solution.

In the event of bot attacks, our response involves scrutinizing their traffic patterns and IT signatures, followed by conducting a thorough analysis. This analysis serves as the basis for fine-tuning our defenses. To streamline this process, it would be beneficial if there were an automatic fine-tuning mechanism leveraging machine learning. This would significantly ease the ongoing task of managing and adapting to evolving bot traffic patterns.

I have been using Akamai Bot Manager since 2018.

We've had some stability issues this year. I would rate the stability seven out of ten. 

It is a scalable solution. Ten to twelve people are in charge of the solution. 

The support team is good and helpful.

Positive

If one has a little technical knowledge then the initial setup is straightforward. 

We have to pay a bundled cost. 

We've done POCs for other products, but the one we're currently using stands out because it combines CDN functionality with security features. Some companies excel in CDN services, offering efficient offloading and comprehensive security features. Alternatively, certain companies might have robust web features, yet they may lack a significant point of presence that can contribute to enhancing our performance or facilitating the upload of our origin sector.

I would rate the overall solution a seven out of ten. 

We use Akamai Bot Manager mainly to mitigate the botnets, including the malicious and advanced botnets. We use the solution for monitoring the elementary information, the difference between humans and bots. We also use the solution to stop all kinds of bot attacks.

The main benefit is to get the insight of each request reaching the domain. In Bot Manager Premier, we have the capability and facility to see the real-time traffic globally, reaching from any destination. In that, we can segregate inch by inch the level of all the information, the IPs, the domains, and the paths. Based on that, we have the facility to check if it's a false positive or false negative.

Akamai Bot Manager has two valuable features: BMS (Bot Manager Standard) and BMP (Bot Manager Premier). The Bot Manager Standard helps us monitor web scrapers. I was working on one of the airlines' projects. They used to web scrap the client's website, get the price information, and post it on their website to get some discounts. The Bot Manager Standard helps us monitor web scrapers, but Bot Manager Premier is specific to the endpoint.

When you log in to an airline's website, you need to give your username and password. That particular API alone will be protected in Bot Manager Premier. Bot Manager Premier is well advanced, where you have the information to be monitored. If you log in, Bot Manager Premier will monitor your particular information.

When you hit a domain using Akamai Bot Manager, it's unclear where it's coming from. If you search with an IP, it may show a different domain, which is not the origin domain exactly. That is where Akamai promised that they're working on change, which may be another few months or years, which they can promise, but they're working on it.

We cannot block illegitimate web scrapers because Akamai Bot Manager does not provide detailed information about various origins and remote VPNs they come through. They could access from one location different destinations with different IPs. That kind of information is not visible on Akamai Bot Manager.

I have been using Akamai Bot Manager for five years.

Akamai Bot Manager is a stable solution.

Akamai Bot Manager is a scalable solution. As an admin, I have given access to more than 400 users.

The availability from their technical support end is a challenge because they don't have enough resources. That doesn't mean they are not available, but they do take their time. Let's say that you are under attack, and you reach out to the technical support team. They have their own SLAs, and they take their own time. Hence, we need to escalate a couple of times to receive assistance from the support team.

Positive

I previously worked with AWS.

Akamai Bot Manager's initial setup is neither too easy nor too complex.

The domain that has to be protected by Akamai Bot Manager has to come through Akamai CDN first, then through Akamai WAF, and then it comes to us. Akamai WAF is not mandatory, but it would be good if you have that one as well. To integrate it, we need all the information about the domain, the path, the step code, the method, the API, and the purpose. We can integrate it using an Excel sheet provided by Akamai, where all the information has to be pre-filled.

The integration step is pretty simple. Once you have this information, the domain and path that need to be protected will be added there. The paths of sensitive information like username, password, and photos will be added to the integration part. Based on that, we add the status code and the method. We have it in alert mode for 15 days to ensure it's not triggering any false positives.

Akamai Bot Manager's deployment time depends on the scenario. A few cases took more than a week due to the complication of the integration, as the required domain information was not provided. However, it can be integrated within a day if you have all the information.

We have seen a return on investment with Akamai Bot Manager.

Akamai Bot Manager is a very expensive solution.

Akamai Bot Manager works on data usage and doesn't work on licensing. If you have integrated, it doesn't mean you have to pay for it. The solution charges you based on the data usage. You can integrate any number of domains, but Akamai Bot Manager will charge you only if the domain has a data hit.

Before choosing the solution, we evaluated Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is straightforward, easy to integrate, and more suited for small and medium businesses. Akamai Bot Manager has been in the market for a long time, and they have their own data centers everywhere globally. So, that's a huge plus point. However, its integration is not that easy compared to Cloudflare. Akamai Bot Manager is more suited for large businesses.

Akamai Bot Manager works purely based on the domains. For example, if you have Facebook.com, that domain needs to be integrated into Akamai CDN. To have anything productive with Akamai bot manager, it has to come through Akamai CDN first. It doesn't make sense to protect internal-facing domains. So, Akamai Bot Manager provides support for external-facing domains only.

Akamai Bot Manager is mostly deployed on the cloud. The domains may be set on the on-prem server. Irrespective of that, if it's a public-facing domain, it will be protected by Akamai Bot Manager.

Akamai Bot Manager is one of the top security products that I would recommend to other users.

Since Akamai Bot Manager is very expensive, users must ensure they really need it before integrating. Akamai Bot Manager is a good tool, and I can definitely recommend it. In case of an attack, Akamai has to ensure that users get the support on time, but that won't improve very soon.

Overall, I rate Akamai Bot Manager an eight out of ten.

We use Akamai Bot Manager to onboard and secure our APIs from any kind of unprecedented attacks and create mitigation rules. We have APIs for different business functionalities.

Based on the telemetry, Akamai Bot Manager gives a rough estimate of all the hits and requests we get, which are suspected bots. Akamai Bot Manager has an engine that automatically defines or decides whether a request is a suspected bot or not. They have a lot of standard categories for good and bad bots. Since a lot of web crawlers are added to the block list by default, we ideally don't need to do much work on our APIs or requests. The solution also helps with fraud management to some extent.

Akamai Bot Manager Premier has some additional functionalities, particularly for web telemetry, but they don't have it for app telemetry. If there are specific hits, Akamai Bot Manager won't be smart enough to handle it. We have to create our own mitigation or custom whitelist and blacklist bots.

I have been using Akamai Bot Manager for two years.

Stability is something no product can guarantee. Akamai Bot Manager is roughly 85% to 86% stable, but I can't say it is 100% stable. Since web requests and APIs are very dynamic, stability depends on the client's configuration and setup. If the requirement falls under the scope of Akamai Bot Manager, then it would fit in well.

Akamai Bot Manager is scalable because we have enough capping for having multiple endpoints configured in the solution. I do feel it is a scalable solution, but it also involves billing, where you need to pay a certain amount.

I work for a team in my organization, where I'm solely responsible for any services of Akamai. As far as the Akamai project management is concerned, I am the only one for my project. We do have different projects wherein they use Akamai Bot Manager. We have one account for one project. We have a couple more accounts, and different accounts have different domains, properties, and onboarding. I completely manage my account.

I rate the solution's technical support an eight or nine out of ten. Akamai has a very good professional service, and we get responses as quickly as possible. The support depends on how you have the commercial setup. If you have a big account and are working for a bigger client, they will probably provide better service. You have standard support, which has a protocol to respond to any support ticket case created within 24 hours. You will also get live support if you go with an extended service.

Positive

There are two aspects involved with Akamai Bot Manager's initial setup. I take care of the product perspective of Akamai Bot Manager. We also have the development perspective, which involves Akamai's SDK integration and is done by a separate team. From my side, onboarding the APIs, having them in the WAF, the security configuration, and the bot manager is not time-consuming. If we are clear on the road map, it won't take more than a day or two to complete and set up the configuration. Then, we can proceed with the sanity check.

Akamai Bot Manager is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

Akamai Bot Manager reduces external vulnerabilities to some extent than other solutions.

I would recommend Akamai Bot Manager to other users because it falls under the budget and ensures data security. We have a lot of modules, and each module has different APIs. After onboarding them on Akamai Bot Manager, the amount of DDoS has considerably reduced by 70% to 75%. No APIs are 100% safe from DDoS. Security breaches have become very common, especially after the COVID times.

Overall, I rate Akamai Bot Manager a seven out of ten.

It has a bot detection methods and options for you to do more work blocking specific traffic. That is exactly what the Bot Manager does.

Akamai Bot Manager has more advanced rules that allow it to detect and block bot scrapers. 

The problem is that because I have both, Akamai Bot Manager and Akamai Web Application Protector, I can't remember which features came from which because they are mixed. 

When you go to Akamai's website and have both, it doesn't really say which is a Web Application Protector feature and which is a Bot Manager feature, or it doesn't say it easily. It's a little difficult to tell which feature is which, and which feature comes from which package.

There are other rules that are user-friendly, however, many of the things have a learning curve. This is not something you enter into lightly. 

It's not easy. I didn't just jump into it and start using it. There is a lot to learn here.

I've never used anything else. It works for me the majority of the time, and it serves its purpose.

Akamai Bot Manager is a stable solution. If everything is set up correctly, it should work. I don't see anything going down. This is not something that occurs in Akamai.

I can't think of anything to compare it to. Cloudflare has the closest offerings that are similar to all of this.

I've never come across another Bot Manager. We put it in place and it worked, so we stuck with it.

I will have to get a Cloudflare demo at some point to see what else is available.

There is no need for maintenance once you have it dialed in. It just runs and blocks your traffic.

Minor adjustments are required from time to time, but I would say there is no real maintenance.

We don't have a weekly review process in place. It just works.

It's difficult to calculate our return on investment on this. How do you even calculate ROI on a service? 

Assume you pay $1000 per month. In contrast, if I didn't have this service, I would have to spend $15,000 per month of my time battling bots, scrapers, and whatever else comes in the door, and they would have downtime to consider.

We absolutely require a WAF and a Bot Manager, and this service is operational. It's working and has been for some time, and we need it. In that sense, it's a keeper.

Akamai Bot Manager requires a separate license that sits on top of Kona or Akamai Web Application Protector.

I would rate Akamai Bot Manager a six out of ten. It could really do more.

There are some things that I would like the Bot Manager to do, but would be very expensive to customize. I didn't think those things were too difficult, but we didn't do them.

The Akamai Bot Manager provides us with a variety of custom rules, such as whitelists and blocklists for specific bots. These rules are particularly useful as we work with numerous third-party vendors, each with its own unique use cases and incoming traffic. With the Bot Manager, we can effectively mitigate bot traffic while simultaneously allowing whitelisted traffic that we recognize as legitimate. Additionally, Akamai's identification of known and unknown bots is immensely beneficial as we better understand our traffic, including the volume of bot traffic. Overall, the Bot Manager is an essential tool for managing our traffic and ensuring that we maintain a strong client reputation.

In my opinion, the UI of Akamai Bot Manager is a bit unconventional and not as intuitive as one might expect. However, once you become familiar with the various features' layout and location, it functions well and meets expectations. I feel that the UI could be improved and made more user-friendly compared to other SaaS platforms. Please note that I am not comparing Akamai Bot Manager with Akamai CDN but rather referring to other similar platforms. I am not comparing it with Akamai CDN. I am just saying that its UI is not so intuitive, but it does work.

I have a little experience with Akamai Bot Manager since we use it within our organization. I am more familiar with Akamai Bot Manager.

Akamai Bot Manager is the only leader in CDN. So, it is pretty stable.

Akamai Bot Manager is very easy to scale. Adding new domains or subdomains is a super easy process.

The customer support for the solution depends on the plan you have. In my case, I have an enterprise plan, and I would rate the support a nine out of ten because I have no complaints about it.

The quality of support can depend on your plan, as those on the enterprise plan tend to receive better support. With a new upgrade or any workload, the response time is within the threshold set by the enterprise plan. Overall, I have been satisfied with Akamai's support level.

Positive

I have experience with Fastly.

The initial setup was straightforward. So, Akamai Bot Manager has known bots and unknown bots. Also, it does have a very solid configuration. If you want to tweak it, Akamai still does work. It keeps updating all the known bots and unknown bots. Akamai Bot Manager works effectively right out of the box. However, if you need to create custom use cases, you must adjust your settings and tools accordingly.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.