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Arbor DDoS vs Prolexic 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
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (9th), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Arbor DDoS
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Prolexic
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 12.4%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 6.1%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prolexic is 2.5%, 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
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare12.4%
Arbor DDoS6.1%
Prolexic2.5%
Other79.0%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user553896 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Jan 13, 2017
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
reviewer1331304 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Of Research And Development at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Automated threat intelligence and flow-based mitigation have improved our DDoS defense
A very useful feature in Arbor DDoS is its ability to send flow spec announcements to routers. For example, if it is clear that a Layer 3 or Layer 4 attack is occurring and the attack pattern is identified through source and destination IP addresses and ports, you can generate flow spec filters. These filters are transferred through BGP to border routers, which automatically build filters, mitigating the attack even at the network's boundary and preventing it from reaching the TMS. This allows the TMS to focus on other tasks. This is a highly effective feature that can mitigate huge volumetric attacks; for example, we experienced a 32-gigabit attack, and all those 32 gigabits were dropped by our border routers, not by Arbor DDoS itself. The flow spec announcement was generated by Arbor DDoS, and as far as I know, the same technology is used by Radware, but it comes under a different feature and a different license. At the time, we were told that flow spec mitigation was an additional very expensive license to purchase from Radware, while Radware included everything in one package.
Gavin Pinho - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare's DNS services deliver the best performance in terms of speed and reliability."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The setup and configuration is also easy to perform and their support is excellent."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"If it was not for CloudFlare, I would have to hire a dedicated resource to manage all this for me."
"It's very user-friendly."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"Because this Arbor DDoS product is the best, I do not need to spend time supporting it."
"The stateless device format means that the box is very strong for preventing 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."
"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."
"Using standard BGP, NetFlow and SNMP ensure wide compatibility. There are also peering traffic reports that can help identify upstream peering opportunities. The ATLAS aggregation service allows us to contribute to the global DDoS data and benefit from overall trends."
"There were huge attacks in October, around 62 attacks at 30 gigabits per second, at one of our banks. We used Arbor DDoS to mitigate these attacks, and it performed great."
"Arbor DDoS's best feature is that we can put the certificates in, and it will look at layer seven and the encrypted traffic and do the required signaling."
"I like all the features together as a whole."
"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 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

"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."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service."
"The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall."
"With CDN loads, sometimes we get an error that the host server is unavailable when the connection between CloudFlare and the server timed out."
"Flexible SSL is nothing more than an illusion of security that you're presenting to your visitors."
"Technical support is not well developed. While there are good engineers, Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model."
"The solution needs to enhance its features to compete with other tools."
"Real-case scenarios that have taken too long to resolve or were escalated can be directly converted into articles."
"For troubleshooting problems, it's not so intuitive. It's not straightforward."
"Implementation could be better."
"The prices for Arbor DDoS are expensive. The licensing is subscription-based."
"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."
"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."
"Arbor DDoS could improve out-of-the-box reporting, it could be better."
"The solution needs additional product options for small and medium enterprises."
"The web portal for checking status and traffic needs improvements."
"The reports provided don’t give detailed information about DDoS mitigations, bandwidth utilization, etc."
"It's expensive, though."
"In bot management, there are times when attackers find ways to bypass Akamai, which is a continuously evolving challenge."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"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."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The price is a little high."
"The licensing of a complete Arbor solution, including fire-walling and unified site management, can get expensive."
"The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is expensive when compared to other tools."
"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."
"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."
"Start with a small license. Measure your bandwidth requirements."
"You need to find a way to get a good offering from Arbor by negotiating a price. That is the challenge."
"The pricing of the solution is cheap."
"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 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Jan 13, 2017
Jan 13, 2017
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....
2 out of 11 answers
Dec 14, 2016
Hi Dennis, Will you reply to the underneath please. Rgds, Arthur
it_user476130 - PeerSpot reviewer
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,
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Comms Service Provider
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise29
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...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT
Akamai Prolexic Routed
 

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