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 8.7. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 3.9% mindshare in DDOS, compared to F5’s 1.8% 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

Download the report

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: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

March 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 885,264 peers since 2012

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 March 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 16.2%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 3.9%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Silverline Managed Services is 1.8%, up from 1.4% 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	16.2%
AWS Shield	3.9%
F5 Silverline Managed Services	1.8%
Other	78.1%

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool is user-friendly."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

"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."

"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."

"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

"CloudFlare has positively improved my site's speed, performance and security."

"The solution is a great fit for customers who want unlimited bandwidth."

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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

More AWS Shield pros

"F5 technical support is really good."

"My advice to others is this is a very reliable solution."

"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."

"We have a lot of businesses that we put behind this solution, and it has really helped us in terms of monitoring the logs and incidents."

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

"The initial setup is straightforward."

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

More F5 Silverline Managed Services pros

Cons

"Latencies are always a problem."

"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."

"I would like to not need a separate server for non-www redirection under the CNAME setup option."

"Perhaps I would ask that they improve the Free plan and allow us to use it with any TLD (certain ones are not allowed)."

"I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we have reported over the years."

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

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"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. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a situation is normal or abnormal."

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

"The network has been experiencing frustrating performance issues today, which is not typical for Nigeria."

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

"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."

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

More AWS Shield cons

"The product could be improved on the global load and the integration with other solutions like Cisco and Dell EMC."

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

"The product could be improved on the global load and the integration with the other solution like Cisco and Dell. As a representor of the operation, we prefer to have one platform which can accommodate all type of integration. We are also looking for more improvements in the security policy configuration."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better, they are not very flexible."

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

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

"We are doing a lot of automation, so I find the APIs are not very easy to use. So the current automation is not that good for F5 at the moment."

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

More F5 Silverline Managed Services cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"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."

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

"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."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"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."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"The tool's pricing is good."

"The tool is cheap."

"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."

"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."

"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 product’s pricing is reasonable."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Comms Service Provider

14%

Insurance Company

11%

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Shield?

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

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

Regarding the pricing of F5 Silverline Managed Services, I would say it is quite affordable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Silverline Managed Services?

In terms of areas for improvement, I would say that one scenario is that F5 Silverline Managed Services needs to adap...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 44% 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

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Azure DDoS Protection vs AWS Shield

Compared 15% of the time

Cloudflare One vs AWS Shield

Compared 14% of the time

Radware DDoS vs AWS Shield

Compared 10% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs AWS Shield

Compared 8% of the time

Fastly vs AWS Shield

Compared 2% of the time

More AWS Shield Competitors

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 12% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 8% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 6% 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 5% of the time

More F5 Silverline Managed Services Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

March 2026

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield

March 2026

Download AWS Shield product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Silverline Managed Services

March 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

March 2026

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: March 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our AWS Shield vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services report.

See our list of best Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection vendors.

We monitor all Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.