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Arbor DDoS vs Fastly 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
Fastly
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
CDN (6th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.7%, down from 19.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 14.7%, up from 12.8% 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 - 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.
Nick Wilsdon - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"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 technical support of Arbor DDoS is good."
"The product allows us to check real-time progress, including latency and network activities."
"We use it not only for DDoS detection and protection, but we also use it for traffic analysis and capacity planning as well. We've also been able to extend the use of it to other security measures within our company, the front-line defense, not only for DDoS, but for any kind of scanning malware that may be picked up. It's also used for outbound attacks, which has helped us mitigate those and lower our bandwidth costs..."
"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."
"We are able to respond quickly and prevent DDoS attacks."
"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."
"The stability is okay and we have not encountered problems with the solution."
"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."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
 

Cons

"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Support response time could be improved."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"Technical support is lacking."
"The support got worse after NETSCOUT acquired Arbor."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution could be more granular to include logs per second and enhanced pipeline monitoring for router licenses."
"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."
"An improvement would be to provide information on how pricing is done on different customer levels."
"Support is not that great."
"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."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"We are using the free version."
"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."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"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."
"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."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"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 pricing of the solution is cheap."
"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."
"Pricing is slightly on the higher side."
"The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is expensive when compared to other tools."
"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."
"Arbor DDoS is quite expensive, but all these solutions are expensive because they deal with confidential information."
"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."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT
No data available
 

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
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Arbor DDoS vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.