Kentik and Akamai App and API Protector are both leaders in network analysis and security. Kentik seems to shine in network visualization and analysis, while Akamai is prominent in DDoS protection and scalability.
Features: Kentik is recognized for its SaaS delivery model, providing extensive NetFlow visualization and robust real-time visibility for network monitoring. Additionally, it supports detailed traffic analysis and customization of alerts. Akamai App and API Protector is noted for its strong DDoS protection, scalability, and seamless integration of security controls, including a customizable WAF and detailed traffic filtering.
Room for Improvement: Kentik could enhance user permissions granularity and API usability, while making its visualization dimensions more intuitive. Users would also benefit from improved automation and mitigation feature integration. Akamai could refine its WAF interface, advance its reporting capabilities, and improve pricing competitiveness and intelligent dashboard monitoring.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Kentik is praised for its proactive customer support and offers deployment flexibility, including on-premises and private cloud. Akamai, focusing on public cloud deployment, also enjoys positive feedback for its support, although experiences with response times vary. Kentik supports traditional data center models, whereas Akamai is oriented towards cloud integration.
Pricing and ROI: Kentik is seen as cost-effective with significant ROI, particularly in traffic insights and transit cost optimization. Akamai, though considered expensive with usage-based pricing, justifies its cost through a comprehensive feature set attractive to larger enterprises. Both could benefit from more flexible pricing and billing models to reach diverse customers.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.
The return on investment for me is significant as time is the critical aspect.
If we had, for example, a contracted capacity from Vivo of 50 GB and we were using 40, with Kentik we reduced this usage from 40 to 20.
In production environments, especially for service providers on IP networks and data centers, Kentik helps in reducing the time to identify and resolve issues.
I believe the return on investment has been mainly time savings in performing troubleshooting.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.
We use other solutions where support is available through Slack channels and is more interactive, with someone responding within a couple of minutes or seconds.
I have mostly used forums for any support needed because the setup is straightforward and the documentation is quite good.
They have monthly calls and discuss the product roadmap with us to determine what is needed.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
Cloudflare's scalability is quite good; it is very easy to scale whenever we want to include multiple domains.
Kentik's integration with Kubernetes makes scaling easier.
Kentik's scalability is effective; the platform can handle these large volumes.
Kentik's scalability depends on how it is contracted.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
Cloudflare's reliability and uptime has met my expectations; it has been quite good in general.
In production, however, dimensioning of the underlying platforms is something to be mindful of.
Based on stability, I would give Kentik a nine.
I can say it is so great for us because if we configure it with Flowspec, the orchestration that we use, which is Kentik, makes the decision and automatically forwards the traffic to another position that we have in our network, or outgoing that we use.
Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements.
What Cloudflare is doing internally is that it is stepping ahead in areas like detection and protection.
Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option.
More work is required to integrate AI for troubleshooting, simplifying root cause analysis, and providing suggested solutions for network issues.
It needed to be a bit easier for new users and have slightly more customized reports.
Currently, the way I'm configuring it uses reactive alerts, which means alerts are triggered when an issue occurs. I would prefer more proactive alerts in the future.
I find it to be cheap.
The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive.
However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high.
The pricing is good and aligns with the market target.
Kentik’s pricing is competitive in the marketplace.
Later, the prices are very high to maintain all the functionality blocks.
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
Most of our DNS records that are presented to the internet are proxied whenever possible, providing another layer of defense from our perspective.
Cloudflare has positively impacted our organization by giving us flexibility to manage the DNS part, being quite fast, and allowing us to manage everything from a single dashboard.
The area in which Akamai excels compared to other competitors with a WAF is in threat intelligence, as threats continually evolve, requiring ongoing updates to backend algorithms to effectively capture smart bots.
The best features that Kentik offers are the ability to identify traffic end-to-end and to know which transit is used, if it goes through any other transit, to see the entire flow, from the subscriber to the content provider and vice versa.
This allows for better understanding of whether there is a critical ongoing case related to incoming traffic, such as a DDoS event, which is crucial for a service provider dealing with numerous customers.
Kentik has positively impacted our organization because when something happens, we use Kentik to analyze the problem and it brings us a faster solution to the problem, and the troubleshooting is clearer.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 12.4% |
| Kentik | 1.3% |
| Akamai App and API Protector | 5.0% |
| Other | 81.3% |



| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 46 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 11 |
| Large Enterprise | 26 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 4 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 18 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 7 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 10 |
Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.
Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.
What are Cloudflare's key features?
What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?
Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.
Akamai App and API Protector provides website security by preventing DDoS attacks, acting as an application firewall, managing content delivery, and monitoring APIs. It adapts to threat profiles and is used for fast media delivery and identifying malicious activities.
Akamai App and API Protector offers strong protection, adaptable security features, and efficient traffic management. Its WAF blocks IP addresses and country-specific threats while preventing SQL injections. Companies utilize it for scalable CDN services and comprehensive traffic analysis. Known for its cost-effectiveness and user-friendly dashboard, this protector stands out for its customizable rules and technical support. Users also highlight the ease of integration and detailed attack insights available through its advanced dashboard.
What are the key features of Akamai App and API Protector?In media, Akamai App and API Protector ensures smooth streaming by handling high bandwidth demands. E-commerce companies use it to guard against fraud and data breaches. Financial sectors rely on its ability to protect sensitive transactions. Implementations in healthcare focus on safeguarding patient data while maintaining compliance with regulations.
Kentik provides real-time visibility into network infrastructure, focusing on monitoring, data visualization, and flow analysis to manage traffic patterns efficiently.
With robust analytics capabilities, Kentik offers insights into BGP peering status, aids in DDoS detection, and allows for detailed telemetry through its intuitive interface. The platform's SaaS nature simplifies operations by eliminating server maintenance concerns. Multi-vendor support and synthetic testing enhance network security and performance by simulating customer scenarios, while its API offers automation for querying and reporting tasks.
What are the key features of Kentik?Industries implement Kentik for network monitoring, traffic management, and flow data analysis across both on-prem and cloud setups. It proves valuable for detecting DDoS events, managing peering relationships, and optimizing costs, besides managing CDN configurations and performing synthetic tests in diverse environments.
We monitor all Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.