Azure DDoS Protection vs Fortinet FortiDDoS comparison

Microsoft and Fortinet are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Microsoft is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.3, while Fortinet is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.0. Microsoft holds a 4.1% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Fortinet’s 3.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Fortinet users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Fortinet FortiDDoS and Azure DDoS Protection compete in the distributed denial-of-service attack mitigation category. Azure DDoS Protection holds an edge due to its seamless cloud-native integration and scalability, appealing particularly to enterprises engaged with Azure cloud services.

Features: Fortinet FortiDDoS offers real-time attack detection and mitigation, automatic security updates, and detailed traffic insights suited for on-premises environments. Azure DDoS Protection emphasizes seamless Azure integration, leveraging threat intelligence networks for enhanced protection and ease of scalability.

Room for Improvement: Fortinet FortiDDoS could benefit from streamlined deployment processes and improved support for cloud environments. Enhancing automatic threat intelligence sharing can increase its competitiveness. Azure DDoS Protection could work on optimizing costs and offering better support for hybrid infrastructures. It might improve its traffic analysis tools for detailed on-premises insights and reduce the complexity of configuration for non-Azure users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortinet FortiDDoS requires on-premises installation, more complex for organizations lacking existing infrastructure, but offers dedicated support channels. Azure DDoS Protection benefits from its streamlined cloud deployment, reducing complexity and providing extensive online resources and integrated support within the Azure platform.

Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiDDoS offers competitive initial pricing, providing cost-effectiveness and quicker ROI for security-centric environments. Azure DDoS Protection has higher upfront costs but offers greater ROI for cloud-centric enterprises due to its integration capabilities, scaling with cloud usage and requiring minimal maintenance.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure DDoS Protection vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure DDoS Protection 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 March 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.9%, down from 19.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure DDoS Protection is 4.1%, up from 3.8% 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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Venkat Raju Mallipudi

Group Chief of Enterprise Architecture & S/W Engineering/ CTO at Aventra Group

Acts as an additional layer of protection, provides endpoint security but not very easy to configure

It's not very easy to configure, in my view. We have to do some work behind the scenes. It's not very simple. We have to do it very carefully, and we need to monitor this enablement as well. But apart from that, I didn't see any kind of challenges. So, in my opinion, configuration is the main trouble for them. It is something that can be done to be better. Not just configuration. You need an expert who knows the ins and outs of these security solutions. In my experience, people struggle with configuration. While configuring, we get this error, we get that error, and then we try to fix those issues. I have seen those. It's not straightforward.

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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.

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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

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"Cloudflare has many features."

"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."

"The UI is good."

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

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

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

More Cloudflare pros

"Azure DDoS Protection offers superior protection against denial-of-service attacks."

"Azure is easy to set up and widely used by our clients."

"AI capabilities are very good. I would rate them an eight out of ten."

"Azure is easy to set up and widely used by our clients."

"The integration of various tools with Azure Firewall, like DDoS Protection, Web Application Firewall, and Azure Front Door, is quite effective."

"DDoS Protection is simple to deploy and integrates seamlessly with the Azure environment. Ease of deployment is a crucial feature for us."

"The most valuable feature of Azure DDoS Protection is that it performs well."

"This solution is the best option for us because we use a lot of Microsoft products. So, it is easy for us to deploy or integrate any features or products."

More Azure DDoS Protection pros

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

"The equipment works very well, and I have not encountered any issues with it. It is a good solution for my company."

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

"The solution is very user-friendly and very easy to use."

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

"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."

"We have researched them all, and it's a good solution all around."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS pros

Cons

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"Support response time could be improved."

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

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

"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."

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

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

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."

More Cloudflare cons

"I suggest adding more services and additional services, which would be beneficial."

"The visibility could be better. We would like to have better metrics, so we could see all the information in a central place."

"The implementation of Azure DDoS Protection results in a decrease in our bandwidth capacity and should be optimized to reduce resource consumption."

"It's not very easy to configure, in my view."

"Sometimes, it is hard for our staff to keep track of changes (in the GUI) between different projects, because there are constant changes. As a result, it is hard to manage, recall, and see all the features because they have been moved from one place to another."

"Azure DDoS Protection could improve on the reporting."

"I have noticed some false positives with the Web Application Firewall yet not with DDoS Protection."

"The main improvement would be to change the firewall model, however, currently, everything is fixed and working well."

"The web interface could be much better."

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

"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."

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

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

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

More Fortinet FortiDDoS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

"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."

"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."

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

"We are using the free version."

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

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

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It is an expensive solution."

"You can test it for a certain period of time free of charge. You can have a free account. You can test it to compare its pros and cons with other products that you are testing."

"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

18%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

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.

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What do you like most about Azure DDoS Protection?

Azure DDoS Protection offers superior protection against denial-of-service attacks.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure DDoS Protection?

Compared to competitors, it is good. The pricing is mostly okay.

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What needs improvement with Azure DDoS Protection?

I suggest adding more services and additional services, which would be beneficial.

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 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 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

AWS Shield vs Azure DDoS Protection

Compared 27% of the time

Azure Firewall vs Azure DDoS Protection

Compared 11% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Azure DDoS Protection

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Azure DDoS Protection

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Entra ID vs Azure DDoS Protection

Compared 2% of the time

More Azure DDoS Protection 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 6% of the time

Corero vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 4% of the time

More Fortinet FortiDDoS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

March 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Azure DDoS Protection

March 2025

Download Azure DDoS Protection product report

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

February 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

Azure DDoS Protection, combined with application design best practices, provides defense against DDoS attacks.

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Microsoft

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.

Information Not Available

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

Buyer's Guide

Azure DDoS Protection vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

January 2025

Free Report: Azure DDoS Protection vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

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