Arbor DDoS vs Prolexic comparison

NETSCOUT and Akamai are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. NETSCOUT is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.3, while Akamai is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.0. NETSCOUT holds a 8.7% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Akamai’s 2.9% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of NETSCOUT users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Akamai users who would recommend it.

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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: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS vs. Prolexic

March 2026

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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 April 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 16.2%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 8.7%, down from 13.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prolexic is 2.9%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare	16.2%
Arbor DDoS	8.7%
Prolexic	2.9%
Other	72.2%

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"The technical support is good."

"We're partners with Cloudflare; this solution is the best product and it does not charge you for any kind of attack on your traffic, only for good traffic, and it can mitigate up to 30 TBPS of DDoS attacks."

"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."

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

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

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

"It's very user-friendly."

More Cloudflare pros

"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..."

"Arbor has the ability to learn and self-create the appropriate profile for each customer."

"In the seven years we have been using the tool, we have continued with availability of services as before, but today, without the Arbor solution, I believe we would have suffered quite a number of service availability issues."

"Reporting is quite good. There are several pages of reporting on DDoS attacks, and you can find all the details that you need."

"The product allows us to check real-time progress, including latency and network activities."

"The stability is okay and we have not encountered problems with the solution."

"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."

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

More Arbor DDoS pros

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

"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."

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

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

"Prolexic technical support is second to none."

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

Cons

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

"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

More Cloudflare cons

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

"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."

"I think the diversity of protection is extremely limited. It must be expanded in future upgrades and versions."

"The solution could be more granular to include logs per second and enhanced pipeline monitoring for router licenses."

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

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

"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?)."

More Arbor DDoS cons

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

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

"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."

"It's expensive, though."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

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

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

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

"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."

"We are using the free version."

"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."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"The pricing of the solution is cheap."

"I don't know about the pricing details as our company's service provider offers us the solution as an inbuilt feature within the internet bandwidth they provide us."

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

"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."

"Start with a small license. Measure your bandwidth requirements."

"Pricing is slightly on the higher side."

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

More Arbor DDoS pricing and cost advice

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

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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

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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

28%

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	8
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...

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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...

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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.

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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 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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 43% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Radware DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Radware DDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 16% of the time

Corero vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

NSFOCUS ADS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 2% of the time

More Arbor DDoS Competitors

Akamai App and API Protector vs Prolexic

Compared 17% of the time

Radware DDoS vs Prolexic

Compared 9% of the time

Lumen DDoS Mitigation vs Prolexic

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudflare One vs Prolexic

Compared 8% of the time

StackPath DDoS Protection vs Prolexic

Compared 8% of the time

More Prolexic Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

March 2026

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS

March 2026

Download Arbor DDoS product report

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

March 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

March 2026

Free Report: Arbor DDoS vs. Prolexic

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

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