Arbor DDoS vs F5 Silverline Managed Services comparison

NETSCOUT and F5 are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. NETSCOUT is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.1, while F5 is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. NETSCOUT holds a 14.6% mindshare in DDOS, compared to F5’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of NETSCOUT users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of F5 users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Arbor DDoS and F5 Silverline Managed Services both compete in the cybersecurity category, focusing on protection against DDoS attacks and enhancing security for web applications. Arbor seems to have an advantage in network visualization and attack response speed, whereas F5 stands out in ease of deployment and comprehensive cloud application protection.

Features: Arbor DDoS offers real-time attack visualization, auto-mitigation to minimize false positives, and flexible deployment options for both on-premises and cloud environments. F5 Silverline Managed Services focuses on web application firewall capabilities, cloud-native functionality compatible with various environments, and strong integration for seamless deployment.

Room for Improvement: Arbor DDoS could enhance its reporting capabilities, improve integration with third-party systems, and reduce false positives in auto-mitigation. Users also wish for a more modern console design and scalable hardware options. F5 Silverline Managed Services could broaden its integration options, improve navigation interfaces, and increase global points of presence, alongside enhancing stability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Arbor DDoS supports flexible deployment options, mainly focusing on-premises and hybrid models, and receives positive feedback for its technical support, though some users note slower response times after NETSCOUT's acquisition. F5 Silverline Managed Services offers extensive deployment across public, private, and hybrid clouds, providing a more seamless experience for cloud-first strategies, with 24/7 mitigation support.

Pricing and ROI: Arbor DDoS is seen as expensive due to its comprehensive features, posing a barrier for smaller businesses despite high performance and ROI. F5 Silverline Managed Services also has premium pricing, especially for additional features like bot protection, offering significant ROI in security stability and uptime maintenance, with cost remaining a critical factor for potential customers.

To learn more, read our detailed Arbor DDoS vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

March 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 March 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.9%, down from 19.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 14.6%, up from 12.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Silverline Managed Services is 1.4%, down from 2.6% 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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DejanBlagojevic

Presales Engineer at Exclusive-networks

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.

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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."

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

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

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

"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."

"The technical support is good."

More Cloudflare pros

"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."

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

"It is fully mitigating the attacks. We've dealt with other ones where we didn't necessarily see that. The detection is very good. It's also very simple to use. Arbor is a single pane of glass, whereas with other solutions you might have a detection pane of glass and then have to go to a separate interface to deal with the mitigation. That single pane of glass makes it much simpler."

"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."

"Arbor DDoS's best feature is that we can put the certificates in, and it will look at layer seven and the encrypted traffic and do the required signaling."

"There are a number of valuable features in this product, like Cloud Signaling and Threat Intelligence feeds."

"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."

"We have taken on the Arbor Cloud subscription, which is really useful because you secure yourself for anything beyond your current mitigation capacity. This is a really good feature of Arbor that is available."

More Arbor DDoS pros

"The stability of the solution is very good."

"F5 Silverline offers load balancing, flexibility, and reliability."

"Most vendors fulfill the requirements for standard DDoS protection, but F5 Silverline Managed Services has a better understanding of defending web applications like HTTP and can mitigate more bot activity than any other vendor."

"Its flexibility is the most valuable because it is a managed service. The good part is that you don't need to set it up. It just needs DNS routing, which is the easiest thing. Our client had Akamai for certain websites because they were using CDN features. They had NetScaler on the internal zone, F5 AWAFs on the data centers, and no WAF at all in the cloud. One of the main activities of the project was to move all these policies into a single WAF so that we could control and use that as a choke point. That exercise itself was very easy because it was a managed service and F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall does that for you. That's the best thing about F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall. It is easy to apply policies on-premises. If you have AWAF on-premises and you want to replicate some policies on F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, other than the policies that it applies by itself, it is easy because you have a team that supports it. F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works perfectly fine. It pretty much does everything that an Advanced WAF on-premises should do."

"The most valuable feature is flexibility."

"The product’s UI is easy to understand."

"The most important feature is that they have seven firewall protection, to protect our web servers."

"We have a lot of businesses that we put behind this solution, and it has really helped us in terms of monitoring the logs and incidents."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services pros

Cons

"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."

"Technical support is lacking."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

More Cloudflare cons

"I think Arbor DDoS needs improvement in areas where competitors like S5, Redver, or NETSCOUT offer web application firewall functionality or dedicated web application firewall devices. Arbor lacks these features, which is a significant disadvantage. Yes, I would like to see these features introduced in Arbor as well. Regarding real-time detection capabilities, Arbor DDoS works very well. We and our customers are very satisfied with its performance. However, it would benefit from adding Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities to reach a larger customer base."

"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."

"An issue which needs to be addressed concerns information I received of attacks on the radar and Arbor, allegedly, not taking any action."

"It is an expensive product, so there is room for improvement in terms of pricing."

"Arbor's SSL decryption is confusing and needs external cards to be installed in the devices. This is not the best solution from an architectural point of view for protecting HTTPS and every other protocol that is SSL encrypted."

"A small improvement could be a better reporting system."

"Because we had some routers that were somewhat old, they were not integrated with Arbor. They did not support the NetFlow version that Arbor was running. That was a challenge. We had to upgrade the routers. Some backward-compatibility would be helpful."

More Arbor DDoS cons

"The product could be improved on the global load and the integration with the other solution like Cisco and Dell. As a representor of the operation, we prefer to have one platform which can accommodate all type of integration. We are also looking for more improvements in the security policy configuration."

"I just hope the price can be cheaper."

"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by reducing the price."

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, being a new product in the market or comparatively related to a new product, currently supports less number of PoPs. They should introduce more PoPs. The current number of PoPs that they have is around 10 or 12, which is still relatively less as compared to 2,400 plus PoPs that Akamai offers. The user latency or the number of hops a user needs before reaching the actual web application is less in Akamai because it has its internal fabric to route the traffic. They need to spin up more data to increase its traffic handling capability. They can also include the bot detection capability, though it is a pretty advanced functionality. If they could include DataDome like functionality, that is, bot prediction, then F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall will be top-notch in the market."

"The navigation is difficult to use."

"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by adding features that Palo Alto has."

"The price is high in comparison to other products."

"There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"The price is reasonable."

"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."

"A free version of the solution is available."

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

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"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."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"Regarding pricing, I would rate it as average. Arbor DDoS offers good value for money with our DDoS filter device. For higher protection needs, Arbor’s CloudMeter’s DDoS mitigation or hardware devices might be more expensive, but customers who need them are usually prepared for the cost and the additional resources required."

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

"Pricing is slightly on the higher side."

"The licensing of a complete Arbor solution, including fire-walling and unified site management, can get expensive."

"Arbor is striking a good balance between pricing and what they deliver."

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

More Arbor DDoS pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

21%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

21%

Insurance Company

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

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...

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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

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...

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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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Arbor DDoS?

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

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The initial setup is straightforward.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The solution is expensive, however, the quality and performance are good.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

AWS Shield vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 21% of the time

Corero vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 9% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Palo Alto Networks WildFire vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 2% of the time

More Arbor DDoS Competitors

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 22% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 9% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Front Door vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 8% of the time

More F5 Silverline Managed Services Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

March 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS

March 2025

Download Arbor DDoS product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Silverline Managed Services

March 2025

Download F5 Silverline Managed Services product report

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

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

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.

NETSCOUT

F5's Silverline Managed Services is a SaaS solution delivering DDoS protection, managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) services, and managed Shape Security Fraud and Anti-bot solutions.

Silverline services include 24x7 access to F5's Security Operations Center (SOC). F5's expert security professionals use F5 products with state-of-the-art security tools to ensure the best protection possible. As an add-on to Silverline DDoS or WAF services, Silverline Threat Intelligence integrates dynamic lists of threatening IP addresses to give context for policy decisions.

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

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

March 2025

Free Report: Arbor DDoS vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

Find out what your peers are saying about Arbor DDoS vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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