A10 Thunder TPS vs AWS Shield comparison

A10 Networks and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. A10 Networks is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.5, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.7. A10 Networks holds a 1.8% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 4.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of A10 Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users who would recommend it.

A10 Thunder TPS

Read 15 A10 Thunder TPS reviews

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925 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

AWS Shield

Read 11 AWS Shield reviews

2,059 Views
2,059 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

A10 Thunder TPS

AWS Shield

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

A10 Thunder TPS and AWS Shield compete in network security. A10 Thunder TPS stands out for comprehensive protection and strong pricing and support ratings, whereas AWS Shield is noted for a robust feature set, offering attractive value in its integration with AWS services.

Features: A10 Thunder TPS is valued for advanced traffic monitoring, DDoS protection, and flexible integration capabilities. AWS Shield offers seamless integration with AWS, scalable protection, and automated traffic analysis. AWS Shield's integration capability is a highlight, whereas A10 Thunder TPS is renowned for its flexibility.

Room for Improvement: A10 Thunder TPS could improve by broadening its integration with more cloud services, refining its user interface, and enhancing automated configuration options. AWS Shield could reduce configuration efforts for non-AWS deployments, enhance real-time attack visibility, and streamline multi-cloud integrations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: A10 Thunder TPS is praised for efficient deployment and responsive support, making setup straightforward. AWS Shield, integrated with AWS, offers streamlined deployment for AWS users but may require more configuration for non-AWS services. A10 is recognized for supportive customer service, while AWS Shield benefits from AWS's broader support infrastructure.

Pricing and ROI: A10 Thunder TPS offers competitive setup costs and strong ROI with adaptable pricing models. AWS Shield has higher costs associated with premium service, justified by extensive AWS integration, appealing to those heavily invested in AWS. A10's cost-effectiveness offers a notable advantage in ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed A10 Thunder TPS vs. AWS Shield Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

A10 Thunder TPS vs. AWS Shield

February 2026

Download the complete report

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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

A10 Thunder TPS

Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

16th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

AWS Shield

Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

5th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of A10 Thunder TPS is 1.8%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 4.4%, down from 6.7% 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 (%)
AWS Shield	4.4%
A10 Thunder TPS	1.8%
Other	93.8%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

reviewer1126782

Information Technology Security Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Management console adds value and technical support delivers timely solutions

I had issues with the user interface because, when putting settings up, the system asked me for strange things like virtual local networks that I didn't create. For example, I set an NTP server, and after some clicks, a message appeared stating 'setup is incorrect'. It asked for a VLAN even though no VLANs were created. We had to find workarounds for issues like A10 blocking necessary traffic, sometimes leading to decreased security, because it was the simplest way to deal with them. This was a real issue. A more flexible policy for demo licenses would also be helpful.

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PranavTelang

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

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's support is one of the coolest things about the product. I"

"The most valuable feature of A10 Thunder TPS is load balancing."

"The GUI is very use-friendly. You can configure it through CLI or GUI, they give you an option to choose. It's a good solution in terms of the appliance itself. It's very light compared to other brands that offer DDoS solutions."

"The primary benefit that we see from their systems is that their filtering technology has the ability to detect and drop the malicious traffic from the legitimate traffic with a high success rate. That, in combination with the very small effort needed to manage their systems, are the two most important benefits to us."

"The solution has reduced the amount of manual intervention required during an attack. We have the inline solution and when it comes to the customers that we have on it, it has saved us some troubleshooting time."

"The product's initial setup phase is very simple."

"It is a scalable solution."

"Based on previous equipment that we had, it's amazing that this device can do what it can do in a 1U form factor. The devices that we have right now have never gone over capacity and we've actually mitigated some pretty large attacks."

More A10 Thunder TPS pros

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

"The product is easy to use."

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

"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."

"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."

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

More AWS Shield pros

Cons

"It is very difficult to implement. It should be made a bit easier to implement. There is also a lack of resources on the internet. They need to develop more resources."

"I rate Thunder TPS seven out of 10 for scalability."

"I had issues with the user interface because, when putting settings up, the system asked me for strange things like virtual local networks that I didn't create."

"We currently do not use the solution's machine-learning-powered Zero-day Automated Protection because of an issue with it... We also use the aGalaxy platform, which is a management platform for the TPS devices. The issue is that some TPS features were added at the TPS level but weren't carried over to aGalaxy, and we manage all of our devices through aGalaxy. So we can't actually use some of the new features that are available on the TPS because that functionality doesn't exist in aGalaxy. That is one of my biggest complaints."

"I would like for them to develop an advanced reporting feature."

"The upgrade process for the boxes is not efficient. We have to go through the A10 aGalaxy where we have issues, like timeouts. They told me it was fixed in the latest version, but I tried to do it on the Portal and it is not working all the time."

"The solution needs improvement in terms of fail-open."

"The last issue we had to contact them about was just a question of a false-positive. The A10 system wasn't supposed to decide what is a false-positive. So if we send it good traffic, it's supposed to just pass that good traffic through. But we opened this last ticket because the A10 did block some of the good traffic. Their support had to tweak it a little bit, but it wasn't anything that took a long time."

More A10 Thunder TPS cons

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

More AWS Shield cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The financials are always a challenge with this type of technology. That's not really a product-functionality thing but it's the area where we push A10 the most."

"Pricing was much higher with Arbor (APS) for the same type of solution."

"We may need to pay fifty percent more if we purchase other solutions. For the payments made to A10 Thunder TPS, we have received three-year support."

"The tool is expensive. If one is low price and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price as a ten."

"Pricing is very reasonable."

"We had a customer who was down for six hours and the loss of revenue for him was three times the price he was paying for us per year. The customer just said, "I don't care about paying you because on only one attack I saved money. It's three times better than losing money.""

"We did a price survey, and compared to other solutions, A10 Thunder TPS wasn't cheap."

"The tool is cheap."

"It depends on your subscription level and the volume that you're spending with AWS. So, it is very relative to the consumption alignment in your subscription level. It is a well-constructed, scalable pricing option, but it is relative to how much you're spending on AWS. Because the more you spend, typically, the more you get off on services like this. I find it to be comparable to other solutions."

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

"The tool's pricing is good."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Comms Service Provider

39%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for A10 Thunder TPS?

I have not seen specific prices, like $10,000 or $20,000. A frustrating aspect is the lack of demo versions. The vendor insists on commercial licenses despite requests for demo licenses. The global...

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What needs improvement with A10 Thunder TPS?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for A10 Thunder TPS?

Currently, I have a test setup. A10 Thunder TPS ( /products/a10-thunder-tps-reviews ) works in a chain with a Check Point firewall and a Juniper MX router. Recently, we had a presentation from a ve...

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 degrade the performance of our solution. Additionally, it's easy to configure, whi...

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 Advanced on multiple services such as CloudFront, network load balancer, or Route 53...

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Shield?

Services always benefit from improvements, including AWS Shield. With respect to the Web Application Firewall, current rule-based setups may not be adequately defined or classified. Enhancement of ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Arbor DDoS vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 32% of the time

Radware DDoS vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 13% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 10% of the time

Cloudflare vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 9% of the time

Corero vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 6% of the time

More A10 Thunder TPS Competitors

Cloudflare vs AWS Shield

Compared 22% of the time

Azure DDoS Protection vs AWS Shield

Compared 18% of the time

Cloudflare One vs AWS Shield

Compared 16% of the time

Radware DDoS vs AWS Shield

Compared 10% of the time

F5 Silverline Managed Services vs AWS Shield

Compared 3% of the time

More AWS Shield Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

A10 Thunder TPS

February 2026

Download A10 Thunder TPS product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield

February 2026

Download AWS Shield product report

Overview

The Thunder TPS is a family of high-performance DDoS defense solutions that detect and mitigate multi-vector DDoS attacks. Unlike traditional DDoS defenses that leave a wake of collateral damage against users, Thunder TPS applies a source-based defense-in-depth mitigation pipeline. This multimodal defense that includes actionable DDoS weapons intelligence, operator definable adaptive policies, and machine learning-powered Zero-Day Automated Protection (ZAP) blocks attackers while protecting real users.

The Thunder TPS is uniquely suited for communication service providers, online gaming, and enterprise network operators who protect large networks and need compact solutions with faster response from a fully automated, zero-touch defense during an attack.

A10 Networks

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)

Sample Customers

DDoS defense solution trusted for more than 200 service providers, online gaming, and enterprises including; Bungie, Comcast, KDDI Corporation, Leaseweb, Microsoft Azure, NTT Docomo, Softbank, Turkcell Superonline, Verizon and more.

netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code

Buyer's Guide

A10 Thunder TPS vs. AWS Shield

February 2026

Free Report: A10 Thunder TPS vs. AWS Shield

Find out what your peers are saying about A10 Thunder TPS vs. AWS Shield and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.

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