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 #5 with an average rating of 8.7, while F5 is ranked #14 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 4.4% mindshare in DDOS, compared to F5’s 1.6% 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: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

February 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 February 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 16.6%, down from 18.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 4.4%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Silverline Managed Services is 1.6%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cloudflare	16.6%
AWS Shield	4.4%
F5 Silverline Managed Services	1.6%
Other	77.4%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

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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reviewer2767527

Lead Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Has enabled multi-layered threat mitigation but still lacks deeper visibility for advanced application attacks

AWS Shield has limited coverage as it only protects against common and high-volume network and transport layer attacks, such as SYN floods. It does not provide inherent protection against more sophisticated layer 7 attacks such as HTTP floods. In such cases, integration with WAF is necessary, which results in additional costs for customers. To protect layer 7, layer 4, and layer 3, customers must implement both solutions. The service also has difficulties with static detection thresholds, which may not be sensitive enough to detect smaller application-specific attacks. While AWS Shield is a key security service, AWS should enhance their expert support with 24/7 response for complex attacks, which is currently limited.

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Mohan Janarthanan

Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions

Cloud applications have gained stronger protection and real-time defense against web attacks

What really stands out for me in terms of advantages of F5 Silverline Managed Services is that in a single cloud platform, I can protect my web applications against attacks. I can also use my load balancer in F5 because they are providing and acting as a load balancer too, and they will support the volumetric and DDoS attacks and malicious attacks. Regarding the real-time threat intelligence feature, I do use this aspect in F5 Silverline Managed Services. It blocks malicious IPs or bad IPs for my server, protecting against my applications. For example, if someone is a bad actor trying to access via a malicious IP, I can block it because the threat intelligence has the capability to block the malicious IP. The adaptable and flexible security impacts threat response time positively. It is effective because it blocks my malicious traffic. Whenever I face issues related to that application, it automatically routes my traffic to act as a proxy and routes my traffic to their scrubbing center, especially in case of any volumetric attack.

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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

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

"The tool is user-friendly."

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."

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

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

More Cloudflare pros

"AWS Shield is aligned with the web application firewall (WAF), and they work seamlessly together, primarily working with Elastic Load Balancer, CloudFront, and Route 53 for CDN and DNS services protection."

"The automatic detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks in the product operates in real-time and provides satisfactory results."

"I recommend AWS Shield because it has proven helpful in tracking DDoS attacks within both my past and present environments, and without AWS Shield, a business could face potential losses, as this tool helps in identifying and mitigating fake traffic that disrupts applications, ultimately supporting business continuity."

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

"AWS Shield offers numerous protection features that are crucial at the application layer, safeguarding users from distributed denial of service attacks, man-in-the-middle assaults, and hacker orchestrations."

"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."

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

More AWS Shield pros

"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 is flexibility."

"F5 technical support is really good."

"The best advantage of F5 Silverline Managed Services is that it is easy to use."

"The stability of the solution is very good."

"The most important feature is that they have seven firewall protection, to protect our web servers."

"What really stands out for me in terms of advantages of F5 Silverline Managed Services is that in a single cloud platform, I can protect my web applications against attacks."

"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."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services pros

Cons

"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

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

"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

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

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"AWS Shield Standard requires improvement, particularly regarding its dashboard since it currently provides limited coverage against comprehensive DDoS attacks."

"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."

"The product is expensive."

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

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

"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."

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

More AWS Shield cons

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

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

"Regarding return on investment with F5 Silverline Managed Services, I would say only ten to fifteen percent, not more than that."

"One negative aspect is that the product is expensive."

"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."

"The navigation is difficult to use."

"In terms of the scalability, this part is always so confusing because they are checking for packet count. Also, after an attack, they said that the throughput must be from gigabits but then I check my bandwidth and it is already done in gigabits. So it is a little bit confusing."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

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

"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."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

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

"The tool is cheap."

"The tool's pricing is good."

"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."

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

"The product’s pricing is reasonable."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Comms Service Provider

14%

Insurance Company

13%

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	3
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	9

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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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 pricing structure for AWS Shield is fair, yet it depends on the specific protections chosen. Enabling Shield Adva...

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What needs improvement with AWS Shield?

Services always benefit from improvements, including AWS Shield. With respect to the Web Application Firewall, curren...

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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...

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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...

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What needs improvement with F5 Silverline Managed Services?

Automating processes could enhance F5 Silverline Managed Services. For example, introducing preemptive support prompt...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 47% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

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Azure DDoS Protection vs AWS Shield

Compared 17% of the time

Cloudflare One vs AWS Shield

Compared 16% of the time

Radware DDoS vs AWS Shield

Compared 10% of the time

Prolexic vs AWS Shield

Compared 6% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs AWS Shield

Compared 2% of the time

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F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 15% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 7% of the time

NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 6% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 6% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2026

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Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield

February 2026

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Silverline Managed Services

February 2026

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 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

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

February 2026

Free Report: AWS Shield vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

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