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AWS Shield vs F5 Silverline Managed Services 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
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
AWS Shield
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 Silverline Managed Services
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.6%, up from 19.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 6.6%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Silverline Managed Services is 1.3%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
Manikandan-R - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
DejanBlagojevic - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The UI is good."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"I am impressed with the product's multiple features like security."
"The product is easy to use."
"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 solution's ease of use is the most valuable feature."
"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."
"It is integrated with AWS. So, it gives you a good first step."
"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."
"Most vendors fulfill the requirements for standard DDoS protection, but F5 Silverline Managed Services has a better understanding of defending web applications like HTTP and can mitigate more bot activity than any other vendor."
"The stability of the solution is very good."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It's a good front end for public infrastructure"
"The most valuable features are the configuration and configuring the process."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"Its flexibility is the most valuable because it is a managed service. The good part is that you don't need to set it up. It just needs DNS routing, which is the easiest thing. Our client had Akamai for certain websites because they were using CDN features. They had NetScaler on the internal zone, F5 AWAFs on the data centers, and no WAF at all in the cloud. One of the main activities of the project was to move all these policies into a single WAF so that we could control and use that as a choke point. That exercise itself was very easy because it was a managed service and F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall does that for you. That's the best thing about F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall. It is easy to apply policies on-premises. If you have AWAF on-premises and you want to replicate some policies on F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, other than the policies that it applies by itself, it is easy because you have a team that supports it. F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works perfectly fine. It pretty much does everything that an Advanced WAF on-premises should do."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is its cloud-native functionality and the high level of protection it provides."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"Technical support is lacking."
"Support response time could be improved."
"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 reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"The product needs to improve its logs and reports to make it read better."
"The product is expensive."
"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 time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced."
"The product should give users more flexibility to customize their security policies according to their requirements."
"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced."
"We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution."
"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by reducing the price."
"There is a lot of room for improvement with their tech support. I am not sure F5 Silverline Managed Services can be classified as having tech support."
"The price is high in comparison to other products."
"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, being a new product in the market or comparatively related to a new product, currently supports less number of PoPs. They should introduce more PoPs. The current number of PoPs that they have is around 10 or 12, which is still relatively less as compared to 2,400 plus PoPs that Akamai offers. The user latency or the number of hops a user needs before reaching the actual web application is less in Akamai because it has its internal fabric to route the traffic. They need to spin up more data to increase its traffic handling capability. They can also include the bot detection capability, though it is a pretty advanced functionality. If they could include DataDome like functionality, that is, bot prediction, then F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall will be top-notch in the market."
"You need to have Linux knowledge in order to use the shell."
"Improvements could include the creation of highly optimized profiles, optimization deployments, and compression profiles for better performance."
"We need to have support for cloud protection, which is not offered by this solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"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 price is reasonable."
"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."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"We pay $3000 per month for the solution."
"The tool is cheap."
"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 cost depends on traffic each month, so on average, it costs us between US$200 and US$300 per month."
"The tool's pricing is good."
"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."
"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."
"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."
"The product’s pricing is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Insurance Company
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
 

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...
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 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.
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...
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...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?
The solution is quite reasonably priced, with costs being lower in comparison to competitors. On a scale where ten is...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection
 

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.
netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code
City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Shield vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.