Arbor DDoS vs Fortinet FortiDDoS comparison

NETSCOUT and Fortinet are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. NETSCOUT is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.0, while Fortinet is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.0. NETSCOUT holds a 14.8% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Fortinet’s 3.0% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of NETSCOUT users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Fortinet users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Arbor DDoS and Fortinet FortiDDoS compete in the realm of DDoS protection. Arbor DDoS holds the advantage due to its superior reporting, traffic visualization, and flexible deployment options.

Features: Arbor DDoS provides advanced reporting, real-time packet capture, and a hybrid protection approach, making it suitable for ISPs and large enterprises. Its precise traffic filtering significantly enhances security. Fortinet FortiDDoS offers specific protection resources and support, beneficial for targeted network defense, despite not offering the high-level insights that Arbor provides.

Room for Improvement: Arbor DDoS could improve its auto-mitigation to reduce the impact on legitimate traffic and enhance scalability with better integration with non-Arbor technologies. Fortinet FortiDDoS requires upgrades to manage higher bandwidths efficiently and could benefit from improved application traffic management beyond network layer protection.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Arbor provides multiple deployment options, including hybrid cloud and on-premises, whereas Fortinet offers only on-premises deployment. Both receive positive remarks for customer service and technical support, although Arbor's support team is highly rated for its expertise and resolution efficiency.

Pricing and ROI: Arbor DDoS is priced higher but is seen to provide positive ROI, especially for larger enterprises, justified by comprehensive features. Fortinet FortiDDoS is cost-effective yet still expensive for SMBs, with limitations in scalability. Both solutions help maintain uptime and reduce potential financial losses from DDoS attacks, though Arbor's ROI stands out in larger deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed Arbor DDoS vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

January 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 February 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.8%, down from 19.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 14.8%, up from 12.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiDDoS is 3.0%, up from 2.8% 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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Yazan Omar

Systems Engineer at aic²

An easy-to-use tool with great GUI

The product's initial setup phase was really easy. There is a lot of time involved in the testing phase and other processes related to the area of deployment, so it may take up to two weeks to deploy the solution. The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. One person is enough to take care of the deployment phase of the product. The person involved in the deployment phase needs to better understand topologies when dealing with Fortinet.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

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

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."

"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."

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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..."

"The solution is easy to use."

"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."

"The stateless device format means that the box is very strong for preventing DDoS attacks."

More Arbor DDoS pros

"It allows me to see all the traffic on my network."

"The most valuable feature is the cloud DDoS scrubbing capability."

"The product's initial setup phase was really easy."

"This solution can protect Layer 3, Layer 4 and Layer 7 attacks of applications for us."

"The solution already has security profiles and it can protect from DDoS attacks and other kinds of attacks."

"The equipment works very well, and I have not encountered any issues with it."

"I find the interface easy to use."

"The product allows the users to adjust the thresholds."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS pros

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."

"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."

"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."

"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."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

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

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."

More Cloudflare cons

"The implementation should be made easier."

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

"Arbor Pravail APS devices do not sync features or config the backup enough. This needs to be improved."

"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."

"There is always room for improvement for any product or service. If we can bring in more agility when deploying services, that is definitely a scope which we can work towards. Nowadays, everything is being offered as a service model. It is not that we have to deploy the physical hardware, many things move up to the cloud, or even can be delivered in the VNS form in the customer's environment as well. So, in that space, if we can add more features to make it more seamless for customers to use and make it available through some marketplace, not only at the hyperscalers, but also for any on-prem deployment, that definitely would be a big plus."

"There is definitely room for improvement in third-party intelligence and integrations."

"For troubleshooting problems, it's not so intuitive. It's not straightforward. This is the core of their kernel, so they need to improve it a little bit... In F5 I have full control of everything."

More Arbor DDoS cons

"I find that there have been issues in the past year with the solution hanging. It freezes often."

"All the thresholds that need to be configured should be included in the default so that user will not forget or misconfigure."

"The primary area for improvement is the on-premises capacity limit, currently fixed at 10 GB."

"There aren't really any aspects of the solution we are unhappy with. It's been a positive experience overall."

"The product’s pricing needs improvement."

"The challenge lies within the customer environment, particularly in Brazil, where companies have stringent security requirements for implementing solutions."

"The main improvement would be to change the firewall model, however, currently, everything is fixed and working well."

"The only thing they need to do is to automate it. Today, you must create tools that do not require the use of an expert or anyone with special skills."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"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."

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

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

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

"A free version of the solution is available."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It is an expensive product. I use this product for its different features."

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

"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 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."

"As far as I know, they are the best in this sector, in DDoS protection. They know it, I know, because their service prices are too high. They provide cloud DDoS protection for ISPs, but that is also too expensive."

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

"The price of this solution is a little high in the African market, it should be lower."

More Arbor DDoS pricing and cost advice

"It's quite pricey."

"The solution is reasonably priced."

"The product’s pricing needs improvement."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

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...

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What do you like most about Arbor DDoS?

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

See all answers

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiDDoS?

The product's initial setup phase was really easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiDDoS?

The product's pricing is comparable to other products.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiDDoS?

The challenge lies within the customer environment, particularly in Brazil, where companies have stringent security r...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

AWS Shield vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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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 7% of the time

A10 Thunder TPS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

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Radware DDoS Protection Service vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 12% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 10% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 6% of the time

AWS Shield vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 5% of the time

Azure DDoS Protection vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 5% of the time

More Fortinet FortiDDoS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS

February 2025

Download Arbor DDoS product report

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

January 2025

Download Fortinet FortiDDoS product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

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

Fortinet DDoS, FortiDDos

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

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are ever-evolving and use a variety of technologies. To successfully combat these attacks, you need a dynamic, multi-layered security solution. FortiDDoS protects from both known and zero day attacks with very low latency. It’s easy to deploy and manage, and includes comprehensive reporting and analysis tools.

Fortinet

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

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

January 2025

Free Report: Arbor DDoS vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

Find out what your peers are saying about Arbor DDoS vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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