A10 Thunder TPS vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) comparison

A10 Networks and F5 are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. A10 Networks is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.4, while F5 is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.6. A10 Networks holds a 1.8% mindshare in DDOS, compared to F5’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of A10 Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of F5 users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

A10 Thunder TPS and F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager compete in network security by providing DDoS protection and firewall capabilities. F5 BIG-IP AFM has a slight edge due to its advanced feature set, offering superior protection, although A10 Thunder TPS provides competitive pricing and robust support.

Features: A10 Thunder TPS offers high-performance DDoS mitigation, effective traffic management, and scalability. F5 BIG-IP AFM provides extensive firewall features, advanced threat protection, and deep packet inspection. F5's detailed threat intelligence further enhances its feature set.

Room for Improvement: A10 Thunder TPS could enhance its threat intelligence and expand firewall capabilities. It may also benefit from more comprehensive documentation. F5 BIG-IP AFM could improve deployment simplicity, reduce configuration complexity, and deliver more competitive pricing options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: A10 Thunder TPS is recognized for its straightforward deployment and responsive customer service, easing integration and troubleshooting. F5 BIG-IP AFM, while slightly more complex due to its rich features, benefits from extensive documentation and flexibly configured options, facilitating thorough deployments once established.

Pricing and ROI: A10 Thunder TPS is a cost-effective choice offering strong ROI with competitive pricing in DDoS protection. F5 BIG-IP AFM, requiring higher initial investment, justifies the cost through its premium feature set and potential long-term value from comprehensive threat management. A10 provides immediate cost benefits, whereas F5 promises greater long-term returns with its advanced capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed A10 Thunder TPS vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

A10 Thunder TPS vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

January 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 838,713 peers since 2012

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

Cloudflare

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.8%, down from 19.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of A10 Thunder TPS is 1.8%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is 1.4%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

Read full review

David Mello

Technology manager at Folha de S. Paolo

A highly stable solution that can be used for load balancing

We contacted the solution's technical support to maintain and exchange the power supply. A few versions ago, we had some CPU and memory problems. We just started the appliance, and it was already on 70% of CPU usage. We first contacted our reseller in Brazil and then escalated the issue to A10 Thunder TPS support. The reseller in Brazil was a little slow, but the A10 Thunder TPS support was fast.

Read full review

Richard Polyak

Sr. Architect at NBC Universal

Straightforward setup with very good granularity and performance

Our company uses the solution as a data center firewall. It is hard to determine all users within our infrastructure. It depends on systems we put behind the solution. Its internal but also a data center firewall. Sometimes, there are hooks from the solution to our external infrastructure or…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."

"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"

"The tool is user-friendly."

More Cloudflare pros

"We can keep track of all the customer's requirements. We can forecast our trails and we can forecast our overall financial things."

"They give us the ability to configure many features for DDoS. There are many items that we can use."

"We selected the solution because of its programmable automated defense using RESTful API. We didn't want to connect to the box. We wanted to be able to do some automation. We wanted to have our own portal because we wanted to connect our customers to our own UI using the A10 API. It has been good and exactly what we need."

"Thunder TPS has automated mitigation and fully managed support in case the device cannot handle the attack. They have engineers available to respond."

"The GUI is very use-friendly. You can configure it through CLI or GUI, they give you an option to choose. It's a good solution in terms of the appliance itself. It's very light compared to other brands that offer DDoS solutions."

"The product's initial setup phase is very simple."

"It is a scalable solution."

"The solution has reduced the amount of manual intervention required during an attack. We have the inline solution and when it comes to the customers that we have on it, it has saved us some troubleshooting time."

More A10 Thunder TPS pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is that the blocking of IP's."

"We use the solution for load balancing and WAF (web application firewall)."

"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager's most valuable feature is load balance. It is readily available and uncomplicated."

"The most valuable features of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) are the web gateway, load balancing, services, and applications available."

"The product’s most valuable features are LTM and WAF."

"The setup and functionality are fairly straightforward."

"The solution is easily deployable and has great functionality."

"CGNAT is one of its strong areas."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) pros

Cons

"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."

"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."

"Latencies are always a problem."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

More Cloudflare cons

"They have a cloud scrubbing feature that redirects the traffic if the on-prem appliance can't accommodate a large amount of traffic but it's not available where we are."

"I would like for them to develop an advanced reporting feature."

"Its documentation could be better."

"We have had some issues with implementation. So, it is the only area that needs improvement."

"I rate Thunder TPS seven out of 10 for scalability."

"The problem here is when you buy another box from A10, they want to put Thunder TPS to run, and it works okay, after which we cannot block it for another solution to be used, which is a problem for me where improvements are needed."

"The solution is a little expensive."

"The upgrade process for the boxes is not efficient. We have to go through the A10 aGalaxy where we have issues, like timeouts. They told me it was fixed in the latest version, but I tried to do it on the Portal and it is not working all the time."

More A10 Thunder TPS cons

"Apart from the price, I feel no other areas need improvement."

"The solution’s initial setup is not easy."

"The product is expensive."

"We needed to protect the database but the solution didn't offer a certain feature to do so."

"The pricing of the solution could be a little bit better."

"It doesn't compare to next generation firewalls"

"The web gateway feature could improve in F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)."

"F5 BIG-IP AFM can improve the reporting interface in relation to advanced troubleshooting depending on CLI. They should have enhanced troubleshooting with the use of GUI."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

"The price is reasonable."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The financials are always a challenge with this type of technology. That's not really a product-functionality thing but it's the area where we push A10 the most."

"We may need to pay fifty percent more if we purchase other solutions. For the payments made to A10 Thunder TPS, we have received three-year support."

"We had a customer who was down for six hours and the loss of revenue for him was three times the price he was paying for us per year. The customer just said, "I don't care about paying you because on only one attack I saved money. It's three times better than losing money.""

"Pricing was much higher with Arbor (APS) for the same type of solution."

"We did a price survey, and compared to other solutions, A10 Thunder TPS wasn't cheap."

"The tool is expensive. If one is low price and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price as a ten."

"Pricing is very reasonable."

"The solution is slightly on the higher priced side."

"The price of F5 BIG-IP AFM is a little more expensive than other firewalls on the market."

"F5 BIG-IP AFM is an affordable solution. There were not any additional fees other than the standard licensing."

"We need to pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution."

"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is an expensive solution. They are one of the best in the market, but the price could be cheaper."

"We have purchased a five-year licensing package for the product."

"It is somewhat on the expensive side although it is worth the additional cost."

"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager is not an expensive solution."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

35%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

18%

Insurance Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.

See all answers

What do you like most about A10 Thunder TPS?

The most valuable feature of A10 Thunder TPS is load balancing.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for A10 Thunder TPS?

The tool is expensive. If one is low price and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price as a ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with A10 Thunder TPS?

The solution needs improvement in terms of fail-open. We need separate fail-open kits connected to A10 Thunder TPS an...

See all answers

What do you like most about F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?

CGNAT is one of its strong areas.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?

The price of the solution presents a challenge.

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?

I have encountered challenges with the price of the solution. Apart from the price, I feel no other areas need improv...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Arbor DDoS vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 69% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 14% of the time

More A10 Thunder TPS Competitors

Arbor DDoS vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 61% of the time

AWS Shield vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 15% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 15% of the time

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

A10 Thunder TPS

February 2025

Download A10 Thunder TPS product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

February 2025

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) report

Download F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

F5 AFM, F5 Advanced Firewall Manager

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

The Thunder TPS is a family of high-performance DDoS defense solutions that detect and mitigate multi-vector DDoS attacks. Unlike traditional DDoS defenses that leave a wake of collateral damage against users, Thunder TPS applies a source-based defense-in-depth mitigation pipeline. This multimodal defense that includes actionable DDoS weapons intelligence, operator definable adaptive policies, and machine learning-powered Zero-Day Automated Protection (ZAP) blocks attackers while protecting real users.

The Thunder TPS is uniquely suited for communication service providers, online gaming, and enterprise network operators who protect large networks and need compact solutions with faster response from a fully automated, zero-touch defense during an attack.

A10 Networks

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is a high-performance, full-proxy network security solution designed to protect networks and data centers against incoming threats that enter the network. Built on F5’s industry-leading BIG-IP hardware and software platforms, BIG-IP AFM provides a scalable platform that delivers the flexible performance and control needed to mitigate aggressive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and protocol attacks before they overwhelm and degrade applications and infrastructure availability.

For service providers, BIG-IP AFM IPS does even more, protecting the network edge and performing traffic inspection and protocol adherence for prevalent service provider protocols such as SS7, Diameter, HTTP/2, GTP, SCTP and SIP traffic coming into the network over UDP, TCP, and SCTP.

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

DDoS defense solution trusted for more than 200 service providers, online gaming, and enterprises including; Bungie, Comcast, KDDI Corporation, Leaseweb, Microsoft Azure, NTT Docomo, Softbank, Turkcell Superonline, Verizon and more.

City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office

Buyer's Guide

A10 Thunder TPS vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

January 2025

Free Report: A10 Thunder TPS vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Find out what your peers are saying about A10 Thunder TPS vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our A10 Thunder TPS vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) report.

See our list of best Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection vendors.

We monitor all Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.