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Arbor DDoS vs F5 Silverline Managed Services comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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
Sponsored
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Arbor DDoS
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 Silverline Managed Services
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
19th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (26th)
 

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 Silverline Managed Services is 1.6%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

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.
DejanBlagojevic - PeerSpot reviewer
Mitigates more bot activity when defending web applications than any other vendor but comes at a price
F5 Silverline Managed Services is expensive. You do get world-class quality of mitigation, but I think it is still pricey. You can find similar services, potentially of slightly lower quality, from other vendors like Cloudflare or Akamai for about half the price. When you compare what you get for the money you spend at Cloudflare or Akamai, you do get less protection but you are not dishing out too much for it. On the other hand, at F5 Silverline Managed Services, you do get better protection but, but you are paying double for it. We have had mixed feedback from our clients about this. Most of them would rather pay less for a bit of a lower-quality defense than overshoot their budget. The most common piece of feedback we receive is that the difference in protection levels is not reflected in the price.

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"
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"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."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"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."
"Arbor DDoS offers security features that automatically detect and prevent DDoS attacks."
"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."
"Reporting is quite good. There are several pages of reporting on DDoS attacks, and you can find all the details that you need."
"The quality of the technical support provided by Arbor DDoS is premium."
"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."
"Its scalability is big. It is for large deployments of big organizations and service providers."
"The technical support of Arbor DDoS is good."
"Analytics and its attack mitigation capabilities are valuable features of the solution."
"The most valuable feature is flexibility."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is the benchmark performance."
"The product’s UI is easy to understand."
"The most valuable features are the configuration and configuring the process."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is it becomes similar to a distributed architecture."
"F5 technical support is really good."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is its cloud-native functionality and the high level of protection it provides."
 

Cons

"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."
"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."
"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."
"DNS Management."
"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"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."
"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 timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"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."
"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 solution could be more granular to include logs per second and enhanced pipeline monitoring for router licenses."
"There should be an automatic way to configure it to monitor traffic and decide which is an attack and which is not. In Arbor, you need to tweak and set all parameters manually, whereas in Check Point DDoS Protector, you can select the lowest parameters, and over the weeks, Check Point DDoS Protector will learn the traffic and you can then tighten some of the parameters to decide which traffic is regular and which is malicious."
"Real-case scenarios that have taken too long to resolve or were escalated can be directly converted into articles."
"I think the diversity of protection is extremely limited. It must be expanded in future upgrades and versions."
"An improvement would be to provide information on how pricing is done on different customer levels."
"The regional support here in African could improve, such as marketing and account managers."
"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by reducing the price."
"In terms of the scalability, this part is always so confusing because they are checking for packet count. Also, after an attack, they said that the throughput must be from gigabits but then I check my bandwidth and it is already done in gigabits. So it is a little bit confusing."
"You need to have Linux knowledge in order to use the shell."
"The price is high in comparison to other products."
"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better."
"There is a lot of room for improvement with their tech support. I am not sure F5 Silverline Managed Services can be classified as having tech support."
"There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution."
"The navigation is difficult to use."
 

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 solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"The price is reasonable."
"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."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"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."
"Start with a small license. Measure your bandwidth requirements."
"You need to find a way to get a good offering from Arbor by negotiating a price. That is the challenge."
"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."
"The solution is a bit costly if you're a small organization, but I think it's worth the price that they are charging."
"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 is a little high."
"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 price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better, they are not very flexible. The price of the solution is based on the requirements of the enterprise."
"The product’s pricing is reasonable."
"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works based on your bandwidth. They look at the clean bandwidth and do the pricing. 20% of a total pipe would be a clean bandwidth. The list price or a non-negotiated price for F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall would be around $2,200 per application per year for everything that you need. When you get into an enterprise kind of a setup, they negotiate this to the last bit. I would easily take 20% on that, which would be the cost, but it should cover all your Advance WAF features, bot protection, tech campaign, etc. It is built as a package and gives you most of the capability. You don't get the mobile SDK, which is an additional license. Mobile SDK is required only if you're buying or if you have a mobile application, and you are going to instrument F5 or Imperva into your mobile appliance. This anyways would be an additional module. It doesn't come within the WAF, but it is a WAF feature."
"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Insurance Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

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.
Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?
For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you hav...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT
F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection
 

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
City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office
Find out what your peers are saying about Arbor DDoS vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.