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

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

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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 January 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.8%, down from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 14.5%, up from 12.8% 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.

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Tushar Sail

Sr.Manager - IT at Reliance Industries Ltd

A critical solution for security, as it includes features that can automatically detect and prevent DDoS attacks

Arbor DDoS offers security features that automatically detect and prevent DDoS attacks. When a DDoS attack is detected targeting a specific IP, the Arbor device immediately becomes in line with the traffic and actively works to prevent the attack. This auto feature is one of the best aspects of Arbor DDoS, as it ensures timely and effective protection against such attacks.

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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…

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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

"The tool is user-friendly."

"Cloudflare has many features."

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

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

"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."

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"The UI is good."

More Cloudflare pros

"Arbor DDoS is easy to use, provides effective blocking of DDoS attacks, and can be used for DNS, web, and main servers. Additionally, this solution is far easier to operate than others solutions, such as Fortinet DDoS."

"We use almost all the features of Arbor DDoS, but it really depends on the customer’s requirements, so I can’t specify exactly which features we use. However, many customers appreciate the basic DDoS protection, especially those without specific protection needs. For example, financial companies benefit from the cloud DDoS protection. It’s a straightforward solution that effectively meets their needs."

"Arbor has a global ranking in reliability and credibility. They are very unique and can respond to a very wide scope of threats from their global deployment."

"Reporting is quite good. There are several pages of reporting on DDoS attacks, and you can find all the details that you need."

"Arbor DDoS offers security features that automatically detect and prevent DDoS attacks."

"It provides packet capture and we can block or whitelist whichever IPs we need to. Whatever traffic we want to block - and we get IPs from internal teams and from national teams - we block at the Arbor level only, because if it gets to the firewall then firewall bandwidth will be taken."

"It's just one dashboard with mitigation. You decide which mitigation you want and at what threshold to do this or that. Its operation is pretty simple. It's easy."

"The AI capabilities and anomaly detection using machine learning modules like isolation forests and auto-encoders are the most effective in mitigating DDoS attacks."

More Arbor DDoS pros

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

"Its performance and ease of use are valuable."

"The protection is very useful."

"I find the signature base is very helpful to see traffic"

"The solution is very straightforward. The usability is great."

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

"It is stable."

"It excels in preventing downtime and maintaining application performance, which is crucial for our clients' security and operational continuity."

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

Cons

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."

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

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."

"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."

"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."

"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

"On the application layer, they could have a better distributed traffic flow. They could improve that a bit. For network data it is very effective, but the application layer can be improved."

"The upgrade process is mildly complex requiring treatment of the custom embedded OS separately from the application. The correlation of the underling OS to the application version can be easily missed."

"The look and feel of the management console is a little old, excessively simple. If you compare it with other solutions, the look and feel of the console is like you're using technology from five or six years ago. It doesn't show all the technology that is actually behind it. It looks like an older solution, even though it is not."

"When it comes to some false positives, we need to tweak the system from time to time. There is room for improvement when it comes to the actual mitigation because of some false positives."

"An improvement to Arbor DDoS would be to make evaluation licenses and virtual machines available."

"The solution could be more granular to include logs per second and enhanced pipeline monitoring for router licenses."

"The following areas need improvement: opening and tracking support tickets, online support resources, software upgrades/updates and replacement media, and event management guidelines."

"Sometimes it blocks legitimate traffic. If a legitimate user is trying to access the server continuously, the product suspects that this is a DoS traffic file. That is a case where it needs to improve. It needs machine-learning."

More Arbor DDoS cons

"Currently, we have eighty F5s and we need some kind of management software. It would be very helpful."

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

"This would be absolutely the best network security solution if the price were not so high."

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

"Firstly, geolocation currently relies on manual updates. It has to move to automatic updates. There are no automatic updates for this feature. If some IPs, countries, or service providers move to another country, now you will be allow IPs that you previously denied. This is because you depend on the database, which doesn't update automatically. This is really a very important area that they need to improve."

"For configuring the firewall, every single vendor on the planet has pretty much the same logic when it comes to firewalls, and F5 has a completely different approach and completely different behavior."

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

"Deployment times vary according to the customer. It needs to be heavily configured. You need to look and you need to observe the behavior of the traffic before you can start configuring everything. It can take time."

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

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

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

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"The price is reasonable."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The price is a little high."

"The pricing of the solution is cheap."

"Arbor DDoS is quite expensive, but all these solutions are expensive because they deal with confidential information."

"The price of Arbor DDoS depends on many parameters. It depends on the physical capacity of the environment, and it is not a straight-line price. It's fairly competitive in the market on the price."

"The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is expensive when compared to other tools."

"The solution is a bit costly if you're a small organization, but I think it's worth the price that they are charging."

"I believe that the price of Arbor DDoS falls under the bracket of medium to high price."

"Start with a small license. Measure your bandwidth requirements."

More Arbor DDoS pricing and cost advice

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

"As per pricing, I would not say cheap, but little higher than cheap, but not very expensive. So you can say kind of value for money solutions."

"It's very expensive, and you pay extra for the models."

"The product is expensive."

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

"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."

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.

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831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

17%

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...

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...

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.

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

I would say if it’s an ISP that will build a scrubbing center, Netscout/Arbor is a good solution. In all other soluti...

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

Arbor would be the best bid, apart from Arbor, Palo Alto and Fortinet have good solutions. As this is an ISP, I would...

What do you like most about Arbor DDoS?

The quality of the technical support provided by Arbor DDoS is premium.

What do you like most about F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?

CGNAT is one of its strong areas.

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

The price of the solution presents a challenge.

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...

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Radware Cloud DDoS Protection Service vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 19% of the time

Corero vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 9% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 7% of the time

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Nexusguard DDoS Protection vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 4% of the time

More Arbor DDoS Competitors

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

Compared 16% of the time

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

Compared 12% of the time

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

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

Arbor DDoS

Download Arbor DDoS product report

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

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

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT

F5 AFM, F5 Advanced Firewall Manager

Learn More

Cloudflare

NETSCOUT

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

Arbor DDoS provides effective mitigation against DDoS attacks with a user-friendly interface, integrating cloud and on-premise solutions for real-time traffic control and reporting. It supports large traffic volumes without latency, making it ideal for protecting online infrastructure.

Known for its intuitive GUI and rapid response, Arbor DDoS defends against complex DDoS threats using AI-driven anomaly detection and traffic categorization. It offers packet capture, robust reporting, and deployment flexibility, helping users maintain network stability and performance. While improvements in auto-mitigation, interface modernization, and scalability are needed, its hybrid protection approach efficiently secures networks for service providers and enterprises.

What are the key features of Arbor DDoS?

User-friendly GUI: Simplifies DDoS attack monitoring and management.
Real-time traffic visualization: Allows continuous analysis of network traffic.
BGP support: Facilitates secure routing for network infrastructure.
AI-driven anomaly detection: Identifies unusual traffic patterns promptly.
Automated threat response: Executes fast mitigation strategies.
Hybrid protection: Combines cloud and on-premise defenses.

Which benefits and ROI should users consider?

Effective DDoS mitigation: Enhances network uptime and resilience.
Large traffic processing: Handles high volumes without latency.
Flexible deployment: Adapts to different operational environments.
Comprehensive reporting: Provides insights into network security status.
Scalability: Supports growth in network demand and complexity.

Internet Service Providers and managed service providers utilize Arbor DDoS to secure network infrastructure and service availability. It's implemented in government and finance sectors for safeguarding customer websites and managing server traffic thresholds. Organizations deploy Arbor DDoS both on-premise and via cloud for extensive network protection.

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.

Xtel Communications

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

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