AWS Shield vs Fortinet FortiDDoS comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Fortinet are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.8, while Fortinet is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 7.0% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Fortinet’s 3.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Fortinet users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Fortinet FortiDDoS and AWS Shield compete in the cybersecurity landscape, focusing on DDoS protection. AWS Shield appears to have the upper hand due to its advanced features and perceived value for investment.

Features: Fortinet FortiDDoS is known for real-time attack mitigation, comprehensive reporting tools, and detailed threat analysis. AWS Shield provides scalability, seamless AWS Cloud integration, and robust automated mitigation features.

Room for Improvement: Fortinet FortiDDoS could improve with enhanced cloud integration, better scalability options, and more automated processes. AWS Shield could benefit from simplified onboarding for non-AWS users, reduced cost variability, and improved user interface navigation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortinet FortiDDoS is praised for straightforward deployment and consistent support. AWS Shield is easier for AWS users due to integration but may be challenging for others due to a learning curve.

Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiDDoS offers predictable costs appealing to budget-conscious businesses, while AWS Shield's pay-as-you-go model is tied to usage, offering scalability but with potential cost variability.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Shield vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

January 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 February 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.7%, down from 19.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 7.0%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiDDoS is 3.0%, up from 2.8% 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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Yazan Omar

Systems Engineer at aic²

An easy-to-use tool with great GUI

The product's initial setup phase was really easy. There is a lot of time involved in the testing phase and other processes related to the area of deployment, so it may take up to two weeks to deploy the solution. The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. One person is enough to take care of the deployment phase of the product. The person involved in the deployment phase needs to better understand topologies when dealing with Fortinet.

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

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

"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. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."

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

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"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."

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

"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."

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

More Cloudflare pros

"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."

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

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

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

"The product is easy to use."

"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."

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

"This solution can protect Layer 3, Layer 4 and Layer 7 attacks of applications for us."

"It allows me to see all the traffic on my network."

"The product allows the users to adjust the thresholds."

"Among its key features: Detects and mitigates DDoS attacks at L3 to L7; negligible to zero false-positives; Generates and sends reports without the need for an expensive third-party solution."

"The product's initial setup phase was really easy."

"The solution already has security profiles and it can protect from DDoS attacks and other kinds of attacks."

"The protection resources and the support are valuable features of the solution."

"It is a user-friendly product in terms of monitoring and updating policies."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS pros

Cons

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

"The pricing could be improved."

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

"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."

"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."

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."

More Cloudflare cons

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

"The product is expensive."

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

"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 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."

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

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

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

"The challenge lies within the customer environment, particularly in Brazil, where companies have stringent security requirements for implementing solutions."

"I find that there have been issues in the past year with the solution hanging. It freezes often."

"There aren't really any aspects of the solution we are unhappy with. It's been a positive experience overall."

"The only thing they need to do is to automate it. Today, you must create tools that do not require the use of an expert or anyone with special skills."

"All the thresholds that need to be configured should be included in the default so that user will not forget or misconfigure."

"Alerts and reporting features must be improved."

"I would like to see analytics, big data."

"The primary area for improvement is the on-premises capacity limit, currently fixed at 10 GB."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"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 is cheap."

"The tool's pricing is good."

"The product’s pricing needs improvement."

"The solution is reasonably priced."

"It's quite pricey."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Comms Service Provider

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

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...

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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.

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?

The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced. The tool has a few parameters based on which it tries to understa...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiDDoS?

The product's initial setup phase was really easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiDDoS?

The product's pricing is comparable to other products.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Azure DDoS Protection vs AWS Shield

Compared 25% of the time

Cloudflare One vs AWS Shield

Compared 24% 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

Arbor DDoS vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 26% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 13% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 10% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 7% of the time

Azure DDoS Protection vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 5% of the time

More Fortinet FortiDDoS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield

February 2025

Download AWS Shield product report

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

January 2025

Download Fortinet FortiDDoS product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Fortinet DDoS, FortiDDos

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)

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are ever-evolving and use a variety of technologies. To successfully combat these attacks, you need a dynamic, multi-layered security solution. FortiDDoS protects from both known and zero day attacks with very low latency. It’s easy to deploy and manage, and includes comprehensive reporting and analysis tools.

Fortinet

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

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

January 2025

Free Report: AWS Shield vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Shield vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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