Akamai CDN vs. Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Akamai CDN
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Akamai Technologies, headquartered in Boston, offers Akamai Connected Cloud, a content delivery network (CDN) with a variety of services used to guarantee application, API, and media delivery.N/A
Barracuda Web Application Firewall
Score 5.2 out of 10
N/A
Barracuda Web Application Firewall, from Barracuda Networks in Campbell, California, protects web applications from bots, DDoS attacks, and other advanced threats to enterprise apps.N/A
Pricing
Akamai CDNBarracuda Web Application Firewall
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Akamai CDNBarracuda Web Application Firewall
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Akamai CDNBarracuda Web Application Firewall
Best Alternatives
Akamai CDNBarracuda Web Application Firewall
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Score 7.0 out of 10
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Akamai CDNBarracuda Web Application Firewall
Likelihood to Recommend
7.3
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Akamai CDNBarracuda Web Application Firewall
Likelihood to Recommend
Akamai is a superior premium services offering if that's what you need from a CDN. For more typical use cases, we're often more often than not implementing MaxCDN, or integrated CDNs from cloud providers (e.g. CloudFront, Azure CDN, etc). If you find that Akamai's offerings are really what you need, and you are okay paying the premium, the services themselves are great. There's a reason they're used by major enterprises of all sizes, and used for hosting video content from the NFL, etc.
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Easy to use and reliable, with very little maintenance required and zero downtime to date. For the education sector, ease of use is hugely important as IT Managers/Technicians are often "Jack of all trades" with a good, broad general knowledge but perhaps lacking specific expertise in certain aspects. Being provided with easy-to-follow tutorials and instructions has been very useful in setting up and configuring the firewall, especially as my background is more in desktop support.
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Pros
  • Caching is one of the greatest benefits that Akamai allows for, saving time, money and experiencing the user experience.
  • Knowing they provide DDOS and other attack protection gives you peace of mind.
  • How finely you can tune all of the different settings available to you, from blocking IPs, cache settings, headers, redirects and even handling error statuses .
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  • Attack patterns are regularly updates through contents via Barracuda Web Application Firewall update servers
  • Bot Protection has a good line feature to verify between the genuine clients like browsers and bots
  • Dos Protection also good level of protection to mitigate Layer 7 attacks
  • Allow Deny Rules provides a lot of granular controls to allow and deny the traffic
  • URL profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
  • Parameter profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
  • Risk score feature for the clients to mitigate attacks is also very good feature
  • Client fingerprint module can be used against malicious user to enhance security
  • Separate XML and JSOn profile for all the URL profiles of the application is plus
  • API security is very much effective and shadow API can also be identified
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Cons
  • Akamai platforms does not come with an intuitive UI to configure and it requires training for set up.
  • Akami is mostly costly and will be proven very expensive for small organization that are not scaled.
  • Akami activation takes a longer time for a lot of testing with multiple scenarios especially with edge servers scenarios.
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  • STM crashes sometimes happen due to unusual traffic pattern
  • Obfuscation on the client side user credentials which appears in the developer tools of browser
  • URL Profiles redundancy during the learning of traffic needs to be fixed
  • Dos Protection should be more granular like escalation period to throw JS challenge, Captcha and rate limit when escalation period hits until the WAF stops the attack
  • Client Fingerprinting should work as expected when verifying the clients as in rare some scenarios, it creates issues
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Usability
No answers on this topic
-User friendly interface for quick learning -Quick deployment for deploying applications -Easy to manage for naive -System components and upgradation of the WAF is very easy go with -Back restoration is very to make it up and ready anytime -Seperate JSON and XmL profiles for each URLs of the application is plus -Amazing and world class support engineer in comparison other vendors and always available to support -Quick resolution on bugs with their patch applying process
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Support Rating
Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.
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The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is easy to use. Support from Barracuda is great also. Load Balancing of the Web Application Firewall is also nice. This allows you to do maintenance or have large loads for the end-user. Threat monitoring of our network and traffic coming into our services within our cloud solution.
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Alternatives Considered
Akamai offers sophisticated security and defense layers in addition to its content delivery network. Its focus on security is well known and beats offerings from AWS and Azure to punches. It redefined the cloud security market by extending its core offering.
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We have been using their Backup products especially Backup Appliances and legacy products like Intronis. We are also using their Cloud Backup Solutions for O365. This is the reason we opted for this product.
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Return on Investment
  • Positive - Akamai vastly reduced the number of content delivery servers needed here, saving money, hardware and management overheads.
  • Negative - I don't think it's a "cheap" option, but also, you get what you pay for and for such a powerful product you don't expect it to be free.
  • Positive - some of the support we have had has been really good.
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  • Easy for our IT team to use.
  • We just ran it as a pilot for a few months but it was the cheapest solution at the time.
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ScreenShots

Barracuda Web Application Firewall Screenshots

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