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Akamai API Security vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 4, 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

Akamai API Security
Ranking in API Security
1st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Ranking in API Security
8th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
CDN (10th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the API Security category, the mindshare of Akamai API Security is 9.5%, down from 20.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 5.6%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Security Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Akamai API Security9.5%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services5.6%
Other84.9%
API Security
 

Featured Reviews

RR
Incident Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Unified API visibility has transformed governance and now supports compliance reporting
The tool is blocking and only the person who has access to the tool can actually see how many DDoS attacks were blocked. Since I do not log in to the portal myself, I am unaware of this capability. I heard the word Akamai's anomaly detection from my team that they use this, but I don't know about it on the technical aspect. I am unaware of Akamai API Security's ability to adjust security policies in real-time. I am also unaware of which feature of Akamai API Security has helped us monitor API usage trends. Someone who is actually hands-on using Akamai API Security might know this.
Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Assosiate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management
F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Akamai API Security has made a positive difference for our organization by improving our security posture and saving our team time, as we can actually prioritize tasks unless there are some false positives, but it is definitely saving a lot of time."
"The support from Akamai API Security is good, the employment and support are of excellent quality."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its integration with API gateways, WAP and with part of their SDLC."
"The API part is effective."
"What I already appreciate about Akamai API Security is that initially we were struggling with how to get this configured, but after that everything went smoothly."
"API throttling is the most valuable feature of Akamai API Security."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."
"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."
"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."
 

Cons

"More features would be beneficial."
"It would be beneficial to use machine learning and API throttling together to identify how the APIs are called and whether it's coming from the right person or the wrong person."
"The main challenges we had with Akamai API Security were how to set it up on the AWS cloud environment and how to access this portal."
"The challenge I found was with contextualization and how analytics are generated."
"I think it would be good if they can integrate more with API gateways as this is currently limited."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."
"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."
"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a limit to the number of APIs we can use inside a bundle, and we have to pay extra if we exceed that limit."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai API Security?
It is not expensive. It is practical to use and represents an excellent solution.
What is your primary use case for Akamai API Security?
I use Akamai API Security. I downloaded a report comparing WAF Akamai and WAF Azure to understand the real differences. I studied the solution to comprehend how it detects bots. For example, with A...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
I am not involved in sales, so I do not deal with the pricing aspect directly. I give the cost of the solution a four out of ten since it is not a cheap product.
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
It's a long way to be perfect, of course, as with all solutions. The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the pers...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
There are two main use cases for Distributed Call Services: DDoS or Distributed attacks protection and WAF web application security or firewall.
 

Also Known As

Noname Security
No data available
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai API Security vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.