AWS Shield vs F5 Silverline Managed Services comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and F5 are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.4, while F5 is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 7.0% mindshare in DDOS, compared to F5’s 1.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of F5 users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

F5 Silverline Managed Services and AWS Shield compete in the cloud security solutions category. AWS Shield seems to have the upper hand due to its seamless integration and efficient feature set within the AWS ecosystem, appealing to users already leveraging AWS services.

Features: F5 Silverline offers dedicated DDoS mitigation, high customization, and detailed analytics, catering to enterprises needing tailored security. AWS Shield provides automatic DDoS protection, deep integration with AWS, and ease of deployment, reducing manual intervention.

Room for Improvement: F5 Silverline could enhance its user interface, reduce complexity in setup processes, and expand third-party integration capabilities. AWS Shield might improve by offering more detailed analytics, extending support for non-AWS environments, and providing advanced customization options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 Silverline involves detailed setup and ongoing management, ideal for specific configurations. AWS Shield offers straightforward setup and routine operations, benefiting companies within the AWS cloud ecosystem.

Pricing and ROI: F5 Silverline's higher initial setup cost can be justified by a long-term ROI through its customized benefits. AWS Shield provides cost-effective security with tiered pricing, appealing to businesses leveraging AWS services, leading to potentially quicker ROI due to reduced operational costs.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Shield vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.4%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 7.0%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Silverline Managed Services is 1.3%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Manikandan-R

Senior Project Manager at Synopsys Inc

Solution provides essential protection with good support and a simple setup

I have noticed a pattern developing in approximately five minutes. If it were possible to provide these patterns with historical data spanning six months, three months, or two months directly from the console, it would be extremely beneficial. It would allow for easy inquiries and facilitate the retrieval of relevant parts without having to manually check logs or examine movements. Instead, if all historical data were available, I could consult six months' worth of identified patterns efficiently through AWS without relying on external sources. This solution is particularly suitable for startups or medium-sized startups. I would rate the overall solution eight out of ten.

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DejanBlagojevic

Presales Engineer at Exclusive-networks

Mitigates more bot activity when defending web applications than any other vendor but comes at a price

F5 Silverline Managed Services is expensive. You do get world-class quality of mitigation, but I think it is still pricey. You can find similar services, potentially of slightly lower quality, from other vendors like Cloudflare or Akamai for about half the price. When you compare what you get for the money you spend at Cloudflare or Akamai, you do get less protection but you are not dishing out too much for it. On the other hand, at F5 Silverline Managed Services, you do get better protection but, but you are paying double for it. We have had mixed feedback from our clients about this. Most of them would rather pay less for a bit of a lower-quality defense than overshoot their budget. The most common piece of feedback we receive is that the difference in protection levels is not reflected in the price.

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

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."

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

"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 allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."

"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."

More Cloudflare pros

"The solution's ease of use is the most valuable feature."

"I am impressed with the product's multiple features like security."

"We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't degrade the performance of our solution. Additionally, it's easy to configure, which is crucial for us. It's easy to use and set up and stops attacks on our servers. We haven't encountered any attack problems because the solution stops them in real-time. AWS Shield specifically focuses on defending against denial-of-service attacks, making it a great solution for that type of threat."

"The product is easy to use."

"It is integrated with AWS. So, it gives you a good first step."

"It is quite scalable, and we have not faced any issues with its scalability."

"The solution operates smoothly at its baseline level, and we do not encounter any issues at that level."

"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."

"It's a good front end for public infrastructure"

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is it becomes similar to a distributed architecture."

"F5 technical support is really good."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is the benchmark performance."

"The product’s UI is easy to understand."

"F5 Silverline offers load balancing, flexibility, and reliability."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"The most valuable features are the configuration and configuring the process."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services pros

Cons

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."

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

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

"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."

"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."

"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."

More Cloudflare cons

"The product should give users more flexibility to customize their security policies according to their requirements."

"The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced."

"The product needs to improve its logs and reports to make it read better."

"The management of it is a bit hard. If you don't engineer it on the front side, it is hard to go back in and change it. It could be improved in terms of architecture requirements and then ongoing support requirements as a secondary component to it. People tend to set up things like this, and they just expect it to work without the care and feeding that needs to go back into it either from an application team or a network environment team."

"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a situation is normal or abnormal."

"The product is expensive."

"We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need."

"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced."

"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by reducing the price."

"The navigation is difficult to use."

"There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution."

"The price is high in comparison to other products."

"You need to have Linux knowledge in order to use the shell."

"We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough."

"Improvements could include the creation of highly optimized profiles, optimization deployments, and compression profiles for better performance."

"Sometimes tech support can be slow. They take more time assigning engineers to complex issues, however, they resolve the issues by joining me to fix them."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"The price is reasonable."

"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."

"We are using the free version."

"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."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It depends on your subscription level and the volume that you're spending with AWS. So, it is very relative to the consumption alignment in your subscription level. It is a well-constructed, scalable pricing option, but it is relative to how much you're spending on AWS. Because the more you spend, typically, the more you get off on services like this. I find it to be comparable to other solutions."

"The tool's pricing is good."

"The cost depends on traffic each month, so on average, it costs us between US$200 and US$300 per month."

"We pay $3000 per month for the solution."

"The tool is cheap."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."

"The product’s pricing is reasonable."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better, they are not very flexible. The price of the solution is based on the requirements of the enterprise."

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works based on your bandwidth. They look at the clean bandwidth and do the pricing. 20% of a total pipe would be a clean bandwidth. The list price or a non-negotiated price for F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall would be around $2,200 per application per year for everything that you need. When you get into an enterprise kind of a setup, they negotiate this to the last bit. I would easily take 20% on that, which would be the cost, but it should cover all your Advance WAF features, bot protection, tech campaign, etc. It is built as a package and gives you most of the capability. You don't get the mobile SDK, which is an additional license. Mobile SDK is required only if you're buying or if you have a mobile application, and you are going to instrument F5 or Imperva into your mobile appliance. This anyways would be an additional module. It doesn't come within the WAF, but it is a WAF feature."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

19%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

15%

Comms Service Provider

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Insurance Company

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

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Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.

See all answers

What do you like most about AWS Shield?

We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't de...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Shield?

The tool is cheap.

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Shield?

Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a si...

See all answers

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you hav...

See all answers

What do you like most about F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The initial setup is straightforward.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The solution is expensive, however, the quality and performance are good.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Google Cloud DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Azure DDoS Protection vs AWS Shield

Compared 24% of the time

Cloudflare One vs AWS Shield

Compared 21% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs AWS Shield

Compared 4% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs AWS Shield

Compared 4% of the time

Prolexic vs AWS Shield

Compared 3% of the time

More AWS Shield Competitors

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 23% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 11% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 8% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 8% of the time

More F5 Silverline Managed Services Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield

April 2025

Download AWS Shield product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Silverline Managed Services

April 2025

Download F5 Silverline Managed Services product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

F5's Silverline Managed Services is a SaaS solution delivering DDoS protection, managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) services, and managed Shape Security Fraud and Anti-bot solutions.

Silverline services include 24x7 access to F5's Security Operations Center (SOC). F5's expert security professionals use F5 products with state-of-the-art security tools to ensure the best protection possible. As an add-on to Silverline DDoS or WAF services, Silverline Threat Intelligence integrates dynamic lists of threatening IP addresses to give context for policy decisions.

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code

City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

April 2025

Free Report: AWS Shield vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Shield vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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