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 9.1, while Akamai is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.0. NETSCOUT holds a 6.1% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Akamai’s 2.5% 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: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS vs. Prolexic

June 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 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
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare	12.4%
Arbor DDoS	6.1%
Prolexic	2.5%
Other	79.0%

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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reviewer1331304

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.

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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

"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."

"Using the CDN of Cloudflare improved the speed significantly, reducing the page loading times to appropriate levels."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

"Cloudflare improves performance on my websites and is a great partner for cloud infrastructure for anyone who wants to use the security service and other features."

"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."

"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."

More Cloudflare pros

"With real-time packet capture features, you can easily and quickly response."

"Very user-friendly GUI Simplest way of mitigation Predefined filters/techniques to easily stop the attacks and start mitigation."

"I highly recommend Arbor DDoS to others."

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

"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."

"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."

"We are able to respond quickly and prevent DDoS attacks."

"Our customers are very happy when we provide them with the interface... They can check how many attacks they have faced and how many attacks have been blocked."

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."

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

"Prolexic technical support is second to none."

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

Cons

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"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."

"The Always Online feature has room for improvement. It seems to work sometimes and not others even with the pro version."

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"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."

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"I believe that the Arbor Cloud should be available, even if the customer does not have any Arbor appliance on-premise."

"Their RESTful API is still a work-in-progress."

"Because we had some routers that were somewhat old, they were not integrated with Arbor. They did not support the NetFlow version that Arbor was running. That was a challenge. We had to upgrade the routers. Some backward-compatibility would be helpful."

"The solution needs to enhance its features to compete with other tools."

"Implementation could be better."

"Arbor's SSL decryption is confusing and needs external cards to be installed in the devices. This is not the best solution from an architectural point of view for protecting HTTPS and every other protocol that is SSL encrypted."

"I have observed that the SNMP traps aspect that sends information to third-party solutions needs improvement."

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

More Arbor DDoS cons

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

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

"It's expensive, though."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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 product's pricing is cheap."

"The price is reasonable."

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

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

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"Regarding pricing, I would rate it as average. Arbor DDoS offers good value for money with our DDoS filter device. For higher protection needs, Arbor’s CloudMeter’s DDoS mitigation or hardware devices might be more expensive, but customers who need them are usually prepared for the cost and the additional resources required."

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

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

"Pricing is slightly on the higher side."

"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."

"The price is a little high."

"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."

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

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%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Comms Service Provider

13%

Outsourcing Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

24%

Comms Service Provider

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	11
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 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.

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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 31% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Fastly vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Link11 vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

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Radware DDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 11% of the time

Corero vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 7% of the time

A10 Thunder TPS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 4% of the time

More Arbor DDoS Competitors

Akamai App and API Protector vs Prolexic

Compared 14% of the time

F5 Silverline Managed Services vs Prolexic

Compared 12% of the time

Cloudflare One vs Prolexic

Compared 9% of the time

StackPath DDoS Protection vs Prolexic

Compared 9% of the time

Lumen DDoS Mitigation vs Prolexic

Compared 6% of the time

More Prolexic Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

August 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS

August 2026

Download Arbor DDoS product report

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

August 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

Prolexic provides industry-leading DDoS protection, ensuring businesses maintain secure and uninterrupted connectivity. It offers robust defense mechanisms designed to mitigate cyber threats effectively, allowing enterprises to focus on their core operations with confidence.

Prolexic delivers a comprehensive suite of defenses against distributed denial-of-service attacks. Leveraging a global network, it quickly mitigates threats before they affect your networks. The rapid integration and real-time threat analytics facilitate swift, intelligent responses to protect infrastructure from both sophisticated and high-volume attacks. With an emphasis on scalability and reliability, Prolexic addresses the security demands of modern enterprises, minimizing downtime and potential revenue loss.

What are the key features of Prolexic?

Global Threat Intelligence: Provides up-to-date insights into emerging threats.
Customizable Protection: Offers tailored configurations to meet specific needs.
24/7 Monitoring: Ensures constant vigilance and rapid response to incidents.
Traffic Scrubbing: Filters malicious traffic while allowing legitimate traffic through.
Real-Time Reporting: Delivers actionable insights on threat activity and trends.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Reduced Downtime: Minimizes disruptions to maintain productivity and service delivery.
Enhanced Security: Strengthens defenses against cyber threats to protect critical assets.
Cost Efficiency: Lowers potential financial impact of attacks by preventing service outages.
Scalability: Adapts to the evolving needs of growing businesses, ensuring continuous protection.
Ease of Integration: Seamlessly fits into existing networks to streamline implementation.

In industries like finance and e-commerce, Prolexic is crucial due to high threat levels. Financial services leverage its protection to secure sensitive data and ensure transaction integrity, while e-commerce platforms benefit from uninterrupted service during traffic peaks, preserving user experience and transaction volumes.

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

June 2026

Free Report: Arbor DDoS vs. Prolexic

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

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