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Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs ShieldX comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 14, 2024

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 Guardicore Segmentation
Ranking in Microsegmentation Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (1st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (11th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (8th)
ShieldX
Ranking in Microsegmentation Software
11th
Average Rating
9.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Microsegmentation Software category, the mindshare of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is 22.7%, down from 27.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ShieldX is 1.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Microsegmentation Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation22.7%
ShieldX1.2%
Other76.1%
Microsegmentation Software
 

Featured Reviews

SachinShelar - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Account Services Delivery at Softcell Technologies Limited
Micro-segmentation has strengthened zero trust security and reduces lateral movement risks
Some of the best features of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation are its granular micro-segmentation and deep visibility, allowing control to process, service level, and full east-west traffic mapping, while it also stands out for AI-assisted policy creation, real-time threat detection, and software-based enforcement. The feature I rely on most in Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is application dependency mapping and visibility, which gives real-time insight into east-west traffic flows, helping us design accurate policies quickly and troubleshoot issues without impacting production environments. Additionally, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers a policy simulation test mode, which is very useful to validate rules before enforcement and avoid outages.
MP
IT Director at park holidays uk
Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance
The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput. The traffic through our website depends on holiday bookings. It's very quiet in November through January, and then our traffic picks up quite rapidly and, at our peak, we will take in excess of a million pounds of business a day through our website. The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides. Uptime on the system has been 648 days and we do very little to it because it self-updates and alerts. It does everything that we need it to do, so the administration side of it is zero. One of the beauties about ShieldX is that it's such a good "fire-and-forget" product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."
"Guardicore makes its own rule set automatically, so we can work fast when creating a rule set."
"The technical support has been excellent, and is probably one of the best customer services provided by any company, as they are helpful, reactive to problems, and constantly work to enable us to do what we want to do."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the maps and ring fencing that help monitor events."
"In security, there are not many products that can do what Guardicore Centra can do in terms of visibility, seeing what is going on in the server, and using the type of mapping that it gives you with the application."
"We have seen a strong ROI both in cost savings and operational efficiency, having reduced 70 percent in incident handling effort and a 30 to 40 percent reduction in security resources, which delivers measurable value through reduced risk, lower operational cost, and faster breach containment."
"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."
"The most important feature or use case, because of micro-segmentation, is the visibility you get when you deploy this product."
"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."
"Very often, when new challengers come in, what they do is they end up coming in at a lower cost with more functionality."
"...It takes the exact same policies that you would apply to your on-premise environment and enables you to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX."
"Once you install it you can virtually forget about it; it's very low-maintenance and high-protection."
"The Adaptive Intention Engine is fantastic. It allows us to develop security policies using the language of our internal customers. It's machine-learning applied to security workflows. That allows us to much more easily construct the policies that will protect those workflows."
"The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides."
"ShieldX has been designed from the very beginning to work well in cloud environments. It understands autoscaling, automation, and auto-configuration. These are the things which are important in today's operating environment."
 

Cons

"The product needs a few features like enhanced user policies and payload-level inspection to improve the offering."
"Incident tagging could be improved. Other vendors offer semi-automatic tagging, which Guardicore doesn't yet have."
"The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one... to then manage the policies and changes to those policies, going forward, through some type of automation process is not turning out to be really easy."
"The dashboard needs improvement. It should be more flexible so that I can easily see what I want or need to see."
"The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one."
"The dashboard needs improvement. It should be more flexible so that I can easily see what I want or need to see."
"The cost of licensing is the biggest issue for clients with GuardiCore."
"Needs more customization of honeypots and a vaster catalog of systems able to be mimicked."
"The one criticism I might have is there should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."
"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."
"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory."
"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so."
"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing."
"There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."
"The customer would complain about the cost."
"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."
"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."
"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."
"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."
"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."
"The pricing is too high."
"Security policies are now applied as applications are going up. Because it's automated, we don't have the three to four week delay. The insertion of applications in the cloud for us dropped from an average of three to four weeks to a couple of days."
"ShieldX ensures that we can have the separation needed for our environment to avoid drastically increasing the cost on the licensing side. From this perspective, it's been very positive and helpful."
"We are very happy with the pricing and licensing. It's about getting a site-wide license. One of the challenges that we've had with our previous vendor had been the cost of licensing."
"For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX. It might not be the big name out there, but it does everything that you are looking for in microsegmentation at a very low price."
"ShieldX also enables us to migrate to cloud environments faster. That is an important part of it for sure because it takes the exact same policies that we would apply to our on-premise environment and enables us to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
"We are actually expecting our costs to drop in the coming year, but it is just a matter of the licensing expiring. That is going to happen in the next six months or so. Then, we will start to see a decrease in overall spend."
"For a three-year deal we paid £55,000 plus tax... But, and this is a big "but," this was over two years ago. ShieldX had only just hit the market. We were the first company in Europe to buy ShieldX."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise11
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that overall everything worked out really well. The pricing was flexible, and it has worked out well with our budget.
What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?
I think the pricing is very high. It is a big cost. The price of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is very expensive, but it is important to the enterprise. I think it is more or less.
What is your primary use case for Guardicore Infection Monkey?
I use Akamai Guardicore Segmentation to block lateral movement of malicious software like ransomware. This is very important to protect my business and my corporation. I create labels for any asset...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore
APEIRO, ShieldX APEIRO
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE
Iowa State University
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. ShieldX and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.