Top 10 Akamai Security Alternatives
APIs have evolved into revenue engines, with 35–62% of enterprises report direct income from APIs, and for 21%, APIs drive more than 75% of total revenue. Behind this growth are DevOps, cloud, and microservices, all transforming software from a cost center into a profit engine.
But with that opportunity comes risk. Unsecured or poorly documented APIs don’t just slow down developers, they open the door to security incidents, compliance fines, integration failures, development delays and lost market share. In a world where APIs carry sensitive data like personal information, payment details, medical records and regulators are tightening controls, bolting on edge security isn’t enough.
API Security is non-negotiable because it’s directly tied to revenue and profitability. However, it’s not just about revenue, it’s about customers’ trust. So enterprises don’t just need to build faster, they need to build more responsibly and with increased forethought to be ready for what regulators demand and customers deserve.
This is where Akamai often falls short. Built on a CDN-first architecture, its API protection relies heavily on post-production mirroring, generating alert fatigue, high costs, and minimal shift-left coverage. Enterprises now need solutions that integrate directly into CI/CD, preserve privacy, and provide true end-to-end API security.
For enterprises exploring their options, this blog outlines the Top 10 Akamai Alternatives, each evaluated on coverage, scalability, cost, and alignment with API-first delivery.
When evaluating Akamai’s approach to API security, several recurring challenges emerge that directly impact security, compliance, cost, and developer velocity. These challenges underline the need to seek alternatives for Akamai.
The table below highlights key triggers and explains why they matter, from false positives and privacy risks to high TCO and lack of CI/CD alignment, so that teams can clearly see where gaps may arise in real-world deployments and seek better alternatives.
Akamai offers API Security, yet for better Shift Left capabilities below are the top 10 key alternatives to Akamai that focus on the lower costs, and tighter data privacy controls.
Here’s a quick comparison for the Akamai vs the top 10 alternatives based on different parameters for a comprehensive detailed analysis while finding the best alternative tool for API Security.
Choosing the right API security solution depends heavily on an organization’s priorities, whether that’s runtime threat detection, shift-left testing, compliance, or broad cloud coverage. Each vendor brings unique strengths but also clear limitations depending on the use case.
The table below highlights where these tools fit best and where they may fall short, helping teams quickly align vendor capabilities with their own API security needs.
Levo.ai is purpose-built for modern, API-first enterprises, delivering complete API security across the entire software development lifecycle. From shift-left testing in pre-production to continuous runtime protection, Levo embeds security directly into the way APIs are designed, built, and operated, without slowing down teams or infrastructure.
Powered by eBPF sensor, Levo provides continuous visibility into every API: internal, partner, third-party, and open, ensuring no endpoint is left unprotected. This unmatched visibility makes our detection devoid of noise and false positives, while protection modules offer customized configurations for better control. Both detection and protection are precise and effective: detecting and blocking only real threats, preventing any kind of traffic loss which overwhelm other solutions.
Unlike edge-based competitors that miss the majority of attacks due to blind spots and limited context, Levo sees the full API landscape and detects threats with confidence. The result is APIs that fuel business growth securely.
Levo’s privacy-preserving, cost-efficient architecture ensures sensitive data never leaves your environment, saving enterprises $500K–$1M annually in egress costs. Lightweight sensors and in-line protection deliver real-time exploit validation and advanced attack detection, while seamless CI/CD integrations keep developers productive and compliant.
Auto-discovers shadow, zombie, third-party, internal APIs with auth, sensitivity, and reachability context
Akamai is a market leader in CDN, WAF, and edge infrastructure. Post-2024, Akamai added API modules built on Noname technology. While these modules provide post-production API protection, they retain limitations such as heavy traffic mirroring, high alert noise, and limited CI/CD integration, leaving pre-production coverage minimal and operational costs elevated.
Traceable.ai, now part of Harness (2025), delivers context-aware API and application security with automatic API discovery, runtime threat detection, and partial shift-left testing. The merger, however, may complicate standalone procurement and restrict some pipeline integrations.
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Akamai has long been a market leader in CDN, WAF, and edge delivery, with API protection added post-2024 through Noname technology. Its API security remains post-production focused, relying on traffic mirroring at the edge. While this suits enterprises seeking edge performance and DDoS protection, it delivers minimal API visibility, little CI/CD integration, and elevated operational costs.
Salt Security, another early entrant in API security, emphasizes production monitoring and compliance reporting. However, it lacks a native API security testing engine and has limited ability to shift left into development or staging environments. As a result, most vulnerabilities still reach production, creating a gap between compliance visibility and true runtime protection.
Both solutions offer value for organizations with specific priorities, but for enterprises looking to treat APIs as core revenue drivers, their limitations are significant compared to modern API-first security platforms.
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Akamai is a market leader in CDN, WAF, and edge security infrastructure. Its API security modules, added post-2024 through technology partnerships, provide traffic-mirroring–based protection at the edge. While effective at absorbing large volumes of traffic and blocking DDoS, Akamai’s API modules remain production-first, introducing deployment overhead, privacy concerns, and limited visibility into pre-production or CI/CD pipelines.
Akto, an emerging API security vendor, focuses on automated discovery and scanning. It offers endpoint detection and a broad test library for common vulnerabilities but relies heavily on surface-level, pre-built scans. While this delivers initial coverage, complex business logic flaws and access control risks often go undetected. Akto’s deployment typically requires handling captured traffic, increasing privacy review cycles and extending time-to-value.
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Akamai has long been a leader in CDN, WAF, and edge delivery, with API security modules added post-2024 through Noname technology. These modules provide post-production API protection but remain heavily dependent on traffic mirroring. While Akamai excels at global scale and DDoS defense, its API coverage is shallow, offering minimal visibility into internal or low-traffic APIs, little CI/CD integration, and significant operational overhead.
Orca Security, widely known as a CSPM and CNAPP provider, extended into API visibility and monitoring. Its approach, however, is runtime-only and primarily compliance-driven, focusing on external endpoints and sensitive data mapping. With no pre-production testing, limited documentation capabilities, and no remediation automation, Orca provides an additional dashboard for security teams rather than accelerating development or reducing vulnerabilities before production.
Both vendors add API visibility on top of their original strengths, but neither delivers the depth of shift-left security or business impact that API-first organizations increasingly require.
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Akamai has long been a leader in CDN, WAF, and edge delivery, with API security modules added post-2024 through Noname technology. These modules provide post-production API protection but remain heavily dependent on traffic mirroring. While Akamai excels at global scale and DDoS defense, its API coverage is shallow, offering minimal visibility into internal or low-traffic APIs, little CI/CD integration, and significant operational overhead.
Inviciti (formerly Netsparker) is a DAST-first vendor with strong heritage in web application scanning, extending into APIs by leveraging OpenAPI imports, network traffic analysis, and policy-driven scans. Its model is largely periodic and scan-centric, which makes it useful for catching spec mismatches and injection flaws but leaves gaps around shadow APIs, business logic abuse, and undocumented endpoints. Inviciti’s deployment requires multiple on-premise components and frequent maintenance, creating operational drag and high TCO compared to lighter-weight SaaS approaches.
Both vendors bolt API capabilities onto their original strengths, Akamai through CDN/WAF and Inviciti through web app scanning, but neither provides continuous, end-to-end API security across the SDLC that modern, API-first enterprises demand.
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Akamai remains a global leader in CDN, WAF, and edge delivery, with API security added post-2024 via its Noname acquisition. Its approach is heavily post-production, depending on traffic mirroring at the edge. While this provides value for enterprises prioritizing edge performance and DDoS absorption, its API security depth is limited, offering minimal CI/CD integration, poor visibility into shadow or internal APIs, and significant operational overhead.
Qualys, best known for its vulnerability management and cloud security modules, extended into API scanning by adapting its web application testing framework. However, API testing is retrofit, not purpose-built, leading to incomplete coverage.
Discovery depends on imported OpenAPI specs, EASM crawls, and VMDR asset feeds, which often miss low-traffic, partner, and undocumented APIs. While it provides compliance-friendly reporting, deployment is complex, spanning multiple Qualys modules and connectors, and remediation cycles often stall at generic vulnerability lists without context for developers.
Both Akamai and Qualys add API visibility and scanning on top of their legacy strengths, Akamai through CDN/WAF and Qualys through VM/DAST, but neither delivers the continuous, developer-friendly, shift-left security that API-first enterprises require today.
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Akamai, best known for its CDN, WAF, and edge delivery, has extended into API security post-2024 through its Noname acquisition. Its model emphasizes edge-based traffic mirroring and DDoS resilience, but remains heavily post-production focused. While strong in global performance and edge security, Akamai lacks deep API visibility, CI/CD integration, and carries higher operational costs.
Rapid7, on the other hand, approaches API security from its DAST heritage. Its solution delivers point-in-time scans aimed at compliance reporting rather than continuous protection. While suitable for audit-driven organizations, it falls short of safeguarding APIs across the SDLC. APIs often remain exposed between scans, driving false confidence, longer remediation cycles, and higher breach risk.
Both tools bring legacy strengths, Akamai in edge protection, Rapid7 in compliance scanning, but neither fully delivers on the needs of modern API-first enterprises where APIs are revenue-critical assets.
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Akamai has long dominated the CDN, WAF, and edge delivery market, with API security added only recently via its Noname acquisition. Its approach relies on traffic mirroring at the edge, making it strong for organizations prioritizing global performance and DDoS resilience, but leaving gaps in API visibility, CI/CD integration, and operational efficiency.
Escape Security takes a different path, applying static AST parsing and schema generation to pre-production code. While this helps generate documentation and some test cases early in the lifecycle, the approach remains reactive and incomplete. It lacks runtime protection, misses many APIs not declared in code, and often slows developer velocity with heavy manual tuning.
Both tools offer value in specific contexts: Akamai at the edge, Escape in static analysis, but for enterprises that see APIs as business-critical revenue drivers, their gaps create risk. Neither delivers full end-to-end, runtime-aware API protection that modern businesses demand.
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Akamai has long been a market leader in CDN, WAF, and edge delivery, with API protection added post-2024 through Noname technology. Its API security remains post-production focused, relying on traffic mirroring at the edge. While this suits enterprises seeking edge performance and DDoS protection, it delivers minimal API visibility, little CI/CD integration, and elevated operational costs.
StackHawk, by contrast, positions itself as a developer-friendly API security testing tool. It runs periodic scans of code-parsed endpoints within CI/CD pipelines but does not confirm real-world runtime API behavior. While lightweight and relatively simple to set up, this static approach struggles with complex authentication, dynamic logic paths, and runtime discovery, leading to gaps in real-world coverage.
Both approaches serve niche needs: Akamai for enterprises prioritizing edge performance and compliance, and StackHawk for teams experimenting with basic API scanning in CI. However, neither delivers end-to-end API security across the SDLC, leaving gaps for enterprises that treat APIs as core revenue drivers.
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APIs are the backbone of modern software, but also one of the most exploited attack surfaces. While Akamai’s acquisition of Noname Security added some API capabilities, its reliance on traffic mirroring, high false positives, and limited CI/CD integration makes it a partial solution at best, leaving compliance, privacy, and developer velocity at risk.
Other platforms like Salt Security, Traceable.ai, and StackHawk address specific pain points i.e. runtime detection, shift-left testing, or developer-first integrations, but few deliver end-to-end coverage with privacy and cost-efficiency built in.
This is where Levo.ai stands apart. Purpose-built for APIs, Levo provides complete SDLC coverage, combining shift-left testing, runtime threat detection, sensitive data protection, and automated remediation in a single platform. It reduces operational overhead, preserves privacy, accelerates developer workflows, and saves enterprises substantial costs compared to edge-based solutions.
The “best” API security solution ultimately depends on your organization’s priorities: developer speed, runtime visibility, or privacy-first compliance. What is clear is that edge-first solutions like Akamai cannot meet the demands of API-first enterprises.
By adopting a purpose-built platform like Levo, security teams can close gaps, reduce overhead, and protect APIs across development and production, ensuring security accelerates digital innovation rather than slowing it down.
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