A10 Thunder TPS vs Fastly comparison

A10 Networks and Fastly 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 Fastly is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.5. A10 Networks holds a 1.8% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Fastly’s 2.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of A10 Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

A10 Thunder TPS and Fastly are leading solutions in network security and content delivery. A10 Thunder TPS is advantageous with its attractive pricing and strong support, while Fastly gains the upper hand through superior feature offerings justifying its higher cost.

Features: A10 Thunder TPS provides comprehensive DDoS protection, offering efficient attack mitigation and reliable firewall capabilities. It excels in automated defense with RESTful API, supporting multi-vector attack protection. Fastly is recognized for its advanced caching and load balancing features, expediting content delivery worldwide. Its version control for configurations allows rapid deployment and rollback. Its powerful VCL scripting enables extensive customization for precise control over content delivery.

Room for Improvement: A10 Thunder TPS could enhance its feature set with better integration for SIP and proxy functionalities, increase form factor efficiency, and expand global support coverage. Fastly may benefit from clarifying its zero-trust capabilities, improving user experience in its API, and expanding its performance in hybrid environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: A10 Thunder TPS offers a simple deployment process with a focus on security and dependable customer service, ensuring an easy start for security-centric operations. Fastly, though more complex, provides extensive customization options that cater to organizations valuing tailored performance optimizations, necessitating a more involved setup process yet supported by robust technical assistance.

Pricing and ROI: A10 Thunder TPS stands out with competitive pricing and a great ROI for organizations focusing on security investments. Its cost-effectiveness is particularly beneficial for setups prioritizing security. Fastly involves a potentially higher initial investment but offers significant ROI by aligning performance enhancements with business goals centered around speed and reliability, appealing especially to performance-focused markets.

To learn more, read our detailed A10 Thunder TPS vs. Fastly Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

A10 Thunder TPS vs. Fastly

January 2025

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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 Fastly is 2.0%, down from 2.1% 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.

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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.

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Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"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."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

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

"Cloudflare has many features."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

More Cloudflare pros

"The solution is easy to use and implement in terms of operations."

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

"It is a scalable solution."

"The response time to an attack is instant. We've used some outsourced solutions in the past, out in the cloud, that weren't so quick. But it's all within our control now. We control how fast it mitigates."

"Based on previous equipment that we had, it's amazing that this device can do what it can do in a 1U form factor. The devices that we have right now have never gone over capacity and we've actually mitigated some pretty large attacks."

"The solution's support is one of the coolest things about the product. I"

"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."

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

More A10 Thunder TPS pros

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

Cons

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."

"DNS Management."

"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."

"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."

More Cloudflare cons

"Its documentation could be better."

"It is very difficult to implement. It should be made a bit easier to implement. There is also a lack of resources on the internet. They need to develop more resources."

"We currently do not use the solution's machine-learning-powered Zero-day Automated Protection because of an issue with it... We also use the aGalaxy platform, which is a management platform for the TPS devices. The issue is that some TPS features were added at the TPS level but weren't carried over to aGalaxy, and we manage all of our devices through aGalaxy. So we can't actually use some of the new features that are available on the TPS because that functionality doesn't exist in aGalaxy. That is one of my biggest complaints."

"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."

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

"The solution is a little expensive."

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

"If there's one aspect of A10 that needs improvement it would be the training. All of their training is done online, at least in what we've been exposed to. I would like to have a classroom environment for training... It would give [people] a chance to provision it."

More A10 Thunder TPS cons

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"Support is not that great."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

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 cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"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 tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

"A free version of the solution is available."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

"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 is very reasonable."

"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."

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

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

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"It is an expensive solution."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

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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

Computer Software Company

18%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

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 Fastly?

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for h...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fastly?

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a ...

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

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Arbor DDoS vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 69% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 14% of the time

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Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 17% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Edgio vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

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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

Fastly

February 2025

Download Fastly product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

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

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Fastly

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.

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

Buyer's Guide

A10 Thunder TPS vs. Fastly

January 2025

Free Report: A10 Thunder TPS vs. Fastly

Find out what your peers are saying about A10 Thunder TPS vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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