Fastly DDoS Protection vs Gatekeeper: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Short answer

Teams operating high-traffic APIs and web applications will get the most from Fastly DDoS Protection because its pay-for-legitimate-traffic model removes the financial penalty for false positives that tanks ROI on other DDoS services. The 497+ Tbps absorption capacity and adaptive engine handle synchronized multi-vector attacks without manual rule tuning, which matters if your ops team is already underwater. Skip this if you need post-attack forensics and recovery orchestration; Fastly prioritizes real-time mitigation over the investigation side of the incident lifecycle. Network operators and service providers facing multi-vector DDoS attacks will find Gatekeeper's distributed algorithm approach valuable because it actually scales with your bandwidth requirements instead of hitting throughput walls like centralized scrubbing centers do. The open source model with 1,591 GitHub stars means you're not locked into vendor infrastructure, and deployment across your own edge nodes gives you detection latency measured in milliseconds rather than the round-trip delays of cloud mitigation services. Skip this if your primary concern is stopping Layer 7 application attacks; Gatekeeper prioritizes network-layer volumetric defense, leaving sophisticated HTTP floods to separate WAF tooling.