Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Arbor DDoS vs F5 Shape Security comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Arbor DDoS
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd)
F5 Shape Security
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Fraud Detection and Prevention (6th), Bot Management (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Fraud Detection and Prevention
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Tushar Sail - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Nikolay Dimitrov - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to configure and blocks bot attacks for web users
The solution is deployed on the F5 cloud. The solution's real-time analytics help you see what has been blocked. It helps to see whether the attack category was an automation attack or a fake browser. F5 Shape Security has a normal dashboard. We are doing F5 Shape Security migrations for 30 customers. F5 Shape Security uses Javascript. For a lot of competitors, the Javascript can be reverse-engineered by attackers to bypass the protection. F5 Shape Security has machine learning authentication of the Java script. If you had hacked it, the encryption would have been changed. It's really hard for attackers to reverse engineer the F5 Shape Security JavaScript. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"The product allows us to check real-time progress, including latency and network activities."
"Companies that live from their presence on the internet will get a very high return on investment from Arbor."
"The solution is flexible, easy to implement and has an efficient technical support team."
"The most valuable features include the traffic categorization and control of the traffic. The filtering of the traffic is very precise. When you want to stop some traffic, you precisely stop that traffic."
"The stability is okay and we have not encountered problems with the solution."
"The stateless device format means that the box is very strong for preventing DDoS attacks."
"The technical support of Arbor DDoS is good."
"The solution looks into volumetric attacks and gets them resolved."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of configuration."
"F5 Shape Security's most valuable feature is performance."
 

Cons

"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"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."
"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."
"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."
"The pricing could be improved."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"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."
"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."
"The solution needs to enhance its features to compete with other tools."
"The solution's shortcomings are related to its documentation, so it's an area that needs to improve."
"We need a SaaS model for the solution."
"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."
"An improvement to Arbor DDoS would be to make evaluation licenses and virtual machines available."
"I would also like more visibility into their bad actor feeds, their fingerprint feeds. We try to be good stewards of the internet, so if there are attacks, or bad actors within our networks, if there were an easier way for us to find them, we could stop them from doing their malicious activity, and at the same time save money."
"If we want to see live traffic, we can see do so. But once an attack that lasts for five minutes is done, the data is no longer there. It would be an improvement if we could see recent traffic in the dashboard. We can check and download live traffic, but a past attack, with all the details, such as why it happened and how to mitigate and prevent such future attacks, would be helpful to see."
"The tool's price is high."
"I want the solution's custom exclusion rules to be more granular."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 price is reasonable."
"We are using the free version."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"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 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."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"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."
"The price is a little high."
"Arbor's products are very expensive. Their competitors are cheap when compared with Arbor."
"Start with a small license. Measure your bandwidth requirements."
"We do not use the Arbor Cloud DDoS solution because it is too costly."
"I'm a technical guy. But I know it's expensive compared to its competitors. After you have the on-premise solution, for your solution to be effective you have to subscribe to an "upper level," so there's another cost. There is also a subscription to cloud services, which is another cost."
"The licensing of a complete Arbor solution, including fire-walling and unified site management, can get expensive."
"There is room for improvement with the pricing. It is an expensive solution. The issue with the pricing is more the way it is built. Right now we're paying per router, and there's a limitation there. I would like to see bundle-pricing where there is an overall solution cost."
"I don't deal with the pricing, but it seems that you need to get basic support in order to upgrade the software and implement some patches."
"The solution is moderately priced."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
32%
Healthcare Company
10%
Retailer
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 makes automation distinct as an attack vector?
An aspect that sets automation apart as an attack vector is its ability to mimic legitimate user behavior and evade t...
How does F5 Shape Security’s system work? What are its components?
One key component is the Shape Defense Engine. It sends telemetry to the Shape AI Cloud, a highly secure data system ...
Can F5 Shape Security protect both our web and mobile applications? Are there any specific features for mobile app protection?
F5 Shape Security can protect web apps as well. It’s a bit complicated, but goes something like this: The platform em...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT
Shape Security
 

Overview

 

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
Wells Fargo, Loblaw, JetBlue, Zoosk
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, NETSCOUT, Radware and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.