Arbor DDoS vs Prolexic comparison

NETSCOUT and Akamai are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. NETSCOUT is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.1, while Akamai is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.0. NETSCOUT holds a 7.8% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Akamai’s 2.8% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of NETSCOUT users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Akamai users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

In the field of DDoS protection, Prolexic and Arbor DDoS are competing solutions. Arbor DDoS is viewed as superior due to comprehensive features, whereas Prolexic leads in pricing and customer support.

Features: Prolexic offers real-time monitoring, a robust global infrastructure, and advanced threat intelligence. Arbor DDoS provides comprehensive analytics, automated defense mechanisms, and superior integration capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Prolexic could improve its analytics capabilities and deployment flexibility and expand its integration options. Arbor DDoS might enhance its pricing competitiveness, simplify its deployment process, and improve user interface intuitiveness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Prolexic features easy deployment with strong customer support. Arbor DDoS offers a flexible model that adapts to various network architectures and provides tailored deployment solutions for diverse environments.

Pricing and ROI: Prolexic presents competitive setup costs with significant ROI due to efficient threat mitigation. Arbor DDoS has a higher initial investment but provides considerable ROI based on expansive features, making the choice reliant on budget and organizational priorities.

To learn more, read our detailed Arbor DDoS vs. Prolexic Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS vs. Prolexic

April 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 889,955 peers since 2012

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 April 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 14.9%, down from 18.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 7.8%, down from 13.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prolexic is 2.8%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Arbor DDoS	7.8%
Cloudflare	14.9%
Prolexic	2.8%
Other	74.5%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Q&A Highlights

it_user553896

Works at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Jan 13, 2017

Prolexic vs. Arbor Networks: How do they compare?

Both Prolexic and Arbor are OK solutions. Both have a very limited number of PoPs (Only 4-6 global locations, adds significant latency) and both have trouble reacting to attacks quickly and automatically (without human intervention). Also both will have trouble handling Application layer attacks over TLS. Arbor will also requires on-premise equipment which is a lot of hassle and doesn't scale. I would highly recommend checking out Impreva Incapsula, which is a more modern solution that's more equipped to deliver a premium service (at reasonable prices). Disclosure: I work for Imperva.

See all answers

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal

General Manager at bKash Limited

Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility

From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.

Read full review

Sanjin Zuhric

Team Lead Network Engineer at Artco Group d.o.o Sarajevo

Reliable protection ensures robust network defense and simplifies DDoS management

I am not sure if we plan to use additional features because we have many vendors and platforms that we support. We use the main function and that is it. The prices for Arbor DDoS are expensive. The licensing is subscription-based. From our sales department, they discuss that prices are very high. A potential improvement could be establishing a contract with Cisco to sell via their channel. This could be beneficial because we work extensively with Cisco. If you are a Cisco partner, you can sell Arbor DDoS. That would be good for customers that are Cisco-based because many customers in Bosnia are Cisco-based customers. BH Telecom, our main customer, sells Arbor DDoS to other customers for protection. They buy Arbor and sell the product services to others via Internet links. They sell add-on DDoS protection via Arbor DDoS. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Arbor DDoS is not present in many customers. Some customers try to sell it, but they sell other vendors such as F5. Arbor DDoS is mainly seen in telecom operators but not much in other customers.

Read full review

Gavin Pinho

Privacy & Risk Management Vice President, Information Security at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Has faced challenges with bot detection while benefiting from strong threat monitoring and compliance support

Akamai's most valuable features include being industry recognized and PCI compliant, which is really great; their cloud is PCI compliant, and having a vendor that is PCI certified is crucial for organizations focused on PCI compliance. We utilize the real-time monitoring of the solution. Real-time monitoring helps us identify network vulnerabilities by allowing us to see a spike in traffic and understand the traffic levels compared to this time last month or last week. If we notice a sudden increase, we investigate further to determine if it indicates a DDoS attack or a card testing situation. In terms of threat detection capabilities, they are very good because Akamai has a SOC service that we have tapped into for active threat detection and threat hunting, and they monitor everything carefully 24/7. Scrubbing is done by Akamai as a backend service, and we utilize their SOC, which is a service that you pay additional fees for, allowing us to have our queries prioritized. Prolexic features help maintain business continuity during high-volume attacks by having built-in threat detection capabilities in its bot detection and other functionalities, as attacks usually occur through intelligent bots trying to infiltrate the system.

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

"If it was not for CloudFlare, I would have to hire a dedicated resource to manage all this for me."

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

"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 have not had a DDOS attack since, or at least not become unavailable due to DDOS which means my ROI is pretty good."

"For businesses that don't have a dedicated security team, I think it's a better product; it's more intuitive for people like us."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

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

More Cloudflare pros

"Arbor's technical support is very good, we've had no issues with it."

"When there was an attack, the attack was contained only on the IPs under attack, the rest of the network was not impacted, and that is the most important part."

"We can reduce the bandwidth to minimize the attack level. If we see more than 2.5 GBs we drop it directly."

"Arbor has a global ranking in reliability and credibility and is very unique in its ability to respond to a very wide scope of threats from its global deployment."

"The solution is flexible, easy to implement and has an efficient technical support team."

"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 solution provides good protection against volumetric DDoS attacks."

"Predefined filters/techniques to easily stop the attacks and start mitigation."

More Arbor DDoS pros

"Akamai's most valuable features include being industry recognized and PCI compliant, which is really great; their cloud is PCI compliant, and having a vendor that is PCI certified is crucial for organizations focused on PCI compliance."

"The solution does not have hardware or maintenance requirements and is very easy to scale."

"They've scrubbed DDoS traffic that was blasting us offline, thus allowing legitimate traffic through and letting our service return online."

"The support from Akamai is great, and they provide excellent information and mitigation services."

"The solution does not have hardware or maintenance requirements and is very easy to scale."

"Prolexic technical support is second to none."

Cons

"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."

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

"However, what I still fail to understand is that why aren't they offering domains themselves."

"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."

"More insight into analytics and threats would be a good place to start improving Cloudflare."

"Latencies are always a problem."

"It looks like they don't support as many TLDs as other registrars, but since they are very new as a registrar, I expect this may improve soon."

"There are some issues with the CDN services."

More Cloudflare cons

"An improvement would be to provide information on how pricing is done on different customer levels (e.g. is it done per gig or bandwidth?)."

"Implementation could be better."

"The regional support here in African could improve, such as marketing and account managers."

"The following areas need improvement: opening and tracking support tickets, online support resources, software upgrades/updates and replacement media, and event management guidelines."

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

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

"The upgrade process is mildly complex requiring treatment of the custom embedded OS separately from the application."

"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."

More Arbor DDoS cons

"The solution needs additional product options for small and medium enterprises."

"The reports provided don’t give detailed information about DDoS mitigations, bandwidth utilization, etc."

"The web portal for checking status and traffic needs improvements."

"In bot management, there are times when attackers find ways to bypass Akamai, which is a continuously evolving challenge."

"The solution needs additional product options for small and medium enterprises."

"It's expensive, though."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 price of the solution is expensive."

"We are using the free version."

"I give the price a five out of ten."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"Our customers always complain about the price of the product."

"The price is a little high."

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

"Arbor's products are very expensive. Their competitors are cheap when compared with Arbor."

"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."

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

"The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is expensive when compared to other tools."

"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."

More Arbor DDoS pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is a pay-as-you-go model that is charged by the hour."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

889,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Answers from the Community

it_user553896

Works at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Jan 13, 2017

Prolexic vs. Arbor Networks: How do they compare?

2 out of 11 answers

it_user411600

Works

Dec 14, 2016

Hi Dennis, Will you reply to the underneath please. Rgds, Arthur

Read full answer

it_user476130

Works with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 14, 2016

Hi, I would suggest looking at Radware and their solutions as they provide solutions in this space. This includes Cloud WAF, Always-on Cloud DDoS Protection, On-Demand Cloud DDoS Protection and Hybrid Cloud DDoS Protection consisting of both On-Premise mitigation and On-Demand Cloud DDoS. Prolexic – use Radware Attack Mitigation Solutions as part of their DDoS Mitigation solution. This same Attack Mitigation solution is OEM’d by both Checkpoint – Checkpoint DDoS Protector, and Cisco – integrated into the Cisco Firepower 9300 and 41xx Platforms. Note – I am a Radware employee. Thanks Dean,

Read full answer

See all 11 answers

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

13%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

29%

Comms Service Provider

16%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	26

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	14
Large Enterprise	29

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...

See all answers

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?

The tool's pricing is moderate. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expens...

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...

See all answers

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Arbor DDoS?

The prices for Arbor DDoS are expensive. The licensing is subscription-based. From our sales department, they discuss...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Akamai Prolexic Routed?

For the DDoS protection, I don't see any areas for improvement because they are pretty solid there, though in bot man...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Akamai Prolexic Routed?

The main use case for DDoS protection is to mitigate risks, and there are multiple ways Akamai provides DDoS protecti...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Akamai Prolexic Routed?

We have a couple of products, including DDoS protection, WAF, and Bot Manager. There are two ways Akamai does DDoS pr...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 40% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

IBM NS1 Connect vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Radware DDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 15% of the time

Corero vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 7% of the time

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

NSFOCUS ADS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 3% of the time

More Arbor DDoS Competitors

Akamai App and API Protector vs Prolexic

Compared 16% of the time

Cloudflare One vs Prolexic

Compared 9% of the time

Radware DDoS vs Prolexic

Compared 9% of the time

StackPath DDoS Protection vs Prolexic

Compared 9% of the time

Lumen DDoS Mitigation vs Prolexic

Compared 8% of the time

More Prolexic Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2026

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS

April 2026

Download Arbor DDoS product report

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

April 2026

Download Prolexic product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

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

Akamai Prolexic Routed

Overview

Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

Cloudflare

Arbor DDoS offers a comprehensive defense system against DDoS attacks, integrating a user-friendly GUI and advanced threat mitigation technologies for enhanced network protection.

Arbor DDoS is recognized for its ability to manage high-volume DDoS attacks efficiently, providing extensive protection through real-time traffic analysis and automated threat detection. It utilizes advanced techniques such as blackhole and BGP Flowspec for effective threat management. Arbor's cloud signaling allows users to handle and mitigate volumetric attacks while maintaining service availability. Though it provides robust security features, users note potential improvements in auto-mitigation, scalability, and AI integration. Challenges like an outdated graphical interface, hardware stability, and false positives need addressing to further enhance its usability and integration with third-party systems.

What are the key features of Arbor DDoS?

User-Friendly GUI: Provides an intuitive interface for ease of use.
Effective Mitigation: Combats high-volume DDoS attacks effectively.
Predefined Filters: Simplifies threat management with pre-configured settings.
Real-Time Traffic Analysis: Offers insights into traffic patterns and potential threats.
Automated Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats without manual intervention.
Able to Handle High-Volume Attacks: Ensures extensive protection even under large-scale attacks.
Packet Capture and Integration: Facilitates comprehensive security analysis.
Cloud Signaling: Enhances attack traffic management through hybrid deployments.

What benefits should users expect from Arbor DDoS?

Enhanced Protection: Safeguards networks from diverse DDoS threats.
Improved Service Availability: Maintains business operations without disruptions.
Timely Reporting: Delivers detailed attack reports for proactive prevention.
AI Capabilities: Leverages AI for smarter threat mitigation strategies.
Comprehensive Security: Combines on-premise and cloud deployments for optimal defense.

Internet service providers and telecom companies commonly adopt Arbor DDoS to protect their networks and infrastructure from DDoS attacks. It is also implemented in financial and government sectors to ensure web application security and maintain high availability. Arbor DDoS supports a hybrid approach, utilizing both on-premise and cloud solutions to manage traffic efficiently and sustain service quality during attacks.

NETSCOUT

Akamai Prolexic is a cloud-based DDoS protection solution that defends your data center and hybrid infrastructure to ensure availability and uptime. It provides comprehensive port and protocol protection against the broadest range of DDoS attacks, including high-bandwidth sustained attacks and complex multi-vector attacks. Prolexic is available as an always-on or on-demand service, contains a Network Cloud Firewall, and offers flexible integration models based on your desired security posture across hybrid origins. Prolexic is backed by a proven platform with more than 20 Tbps of dedicated DDoS defense capacity and our 24/7/365 global SOCC for a fully managed solution.

Prolexic stops DDoS attacks closer to the source to maximize performance for users and to maintain network resiliency through cloud distribution. Instead of originating advertisements for your prefixes from your cloud/data centers, you’ll make either a border gateway protocol route advertisement change or DNS redirection (A record or CNAME record) to originate from one of many Akamai scrubbing centers globally. Your intended traffic is then routed to the user via Anycast through the closest scrubbing center. Prolexic will inspect the traffic to determine if it is good or bad, and apply proactive and/or custom mitigation controls designed to stop attacks instantly if needed. This ensures fast and accurate DDoS protection. Clean traffic is then returned to the customer origin via GRE tunnels, Layer 2 VLAN connections, and/or VIP-to-origin back-end mapping with little perceived latency. Prolexic also features a Network Cloud Firewall that allows IT teams to auto generate or manually manage access control lists.

Akamai

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

Fidor Bank

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS vs. Prolexic

April 2026

Free Report: Arbor DDoS vs. Prolexic

Find out what your peers are saying about Arbor DDoS vs. Prolexic and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

889,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Arbor DDoS vs. Prolexic report.

See our list of best Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection vendors.

We monitor all Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.