Akamai Bot & Abuse Protection vs Datadog App & API Protection: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Short answer

Mid-market and enterprise teams managing high-traffic digital properties will get the most from Akamai Bot & Abuse Protection because it stops account takeover and credential abuse at the edge before they hit your origin infrastructure. The platform's behavioral analysis and AI scraper detection catch sophisticated bot attacks in real time, and deployment at Akamai's edge network means you're filtering malicious traffic before it consumes your bandwidth or database resources. Skip this if your primary concern is post-incident forensics; Akamai prioritizes detection and prevention over deep historical analysis of compromise patterns. Mid-market and enterprise teams already invested in Datadog's observability platform should adopt App & API Protection to stop runtime attacks without ripping out existing monitoring. The tool's strength is correlating attack signals with your application performance data in real time, which means fewer false positives than standalone WAF vendors, and it covers DE.CM and DE.AE under NIST CSF 2.0 at a depth most point solutions don't. Skip this if you need a standalone API gateway or if your apps run outside Datadog's ecosystem; the value erodes fast without tight observability integration.