A10 Thunder TPS vs Fastly comparison

A10 Networks and Fastly are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. A10 Networks is ranked #15 with an average rating of 7.5, while Fastly is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.0. A10 Networks holds a 1.6% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Fastly’s 3.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of A10 Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

A10 Thunder TPS and Fastly are leading solutions in network security and content delivery. A10 Thunder TPS is advantageous with its attractive pricing and strong support, while Fastly gains the upper hand through superior feature offerings justifying its higher cost.

Features: A10 Thunder TPS provides comprehensive DDoS protection, offering efficient attack mitigation and reliable firewall capabilities. It excels in automated defense with RESTful API, supporting multi-vector attack protection. Fastly is recognized for its advanced caching and load balancing features, expediting content delivery worldwide. Its version control for configurations allows rapid deployment and rollback. Its powerful VCL scripting enables extensive customization for precise control over content delivery.

Room for Improvement: A10 Thunder TPS could enhance its feature set with better integration for SIP and proxy functionalities, increase form factor efficiency, and expand global support coverage. Fastly may benefit from clarifying its zero-trust capabilities, improving user experience in its API, and expanding its performance in hybrid environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: A10 Thunder TPS offers a simple deployment process with a focus on security and dependable customer service, ensuring an easy start for security-centric operations. Fastly, though more complex, provides extensive customization options that cater to organizations valuing tailored performance optimizations, necessitating a more involved setup process yet supported by robust technical assistance.

Pricing and ROI: A10 Thunder TPS stands out with competitive pricing and a great ROI for organizations focusing on security investments. Its cost-effectiveness is particularly beneficial for setups prioritizing security. Fastly involves a potentially higher initial investment but offers significant ROI by aligning performance enhancements with business goals centered around speed and reliability, appealing especially to performance-focused markets.

To learn more, read our detailed A10 Thunder TPS vs. Fastly Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

A10 Thunder TPS vs. Fastly

April 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 May 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 14.0%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of A10 Thunder TPS is 1.6%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 3.5%, up from 2.3% 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	14.0%
Fastly	3.5%
A10 Thunder TPS	1.6%
Other	80.9%

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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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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Pranay Jain

Senior software developer at Simplifyvms

Edge caching has transformed response times and delivers faster candidate data globally

Fastly can be improved in certain areas such as VCL, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve for normal users. A more user-friendly, UI-based configuration could simplify the experience, alongside better templates for common use cases and dashboard improvements, as the current dashboard feels complex for beginners, and pricing can be hard to predict for smaller companies. I chose 8 out of 10 because it has excellent performance and low latency delivery, making it suitable for larger applications, with strong Edge Caching and instant purging capabilities. However, VCL complexity and pricing predictability, especially for smaller companies, along with a user-friendly dashboard are areas impacting my score.

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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 overall performance of this solution is what makes it one of the best solutions on the market."

"The technical support on offer is excellent; they are very helpful and responsive, and we are quite happy with the level of service they provide to their customers."

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

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."

"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."

"We're partners with Cloudflare; this solution is the best product and it does not charge you for any kind of attack on your traffic, only for good traffic, and it can mitigate up to 30 TBPS of DDoS attacks."

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

"I have used it to bring enterprise-grade features to my small business clients at low or no cost."

More Cloudflare pros

"We selected the solution because of its programmable automated defense using RESTful API; we wanted to have our own portal and connect our customers to our own UI using the A10 API, and it has been good and exactly what we need."

"The response time to an attack is instant. We've used some outsourced solutions in the past, out in the cloud, that weren't so quick. But it's all within our control now. We control how fast it mitigates."

"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."

"Due to the availability and power of these devices, we've been able to ramp off our upstream cloud-scrubbing provider and handle all attacks on our own."

"It is a scalable solution."

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

"The solution is easy to use and implement in terms of operations."

"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."

More A10 Thunder TPS pros

"In summary, this solution is easy to manage, quick to deploy, and all of my customers are happy."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"Fastly combines both the CDN side and the Signal Sciences next-generation WAF, which is closely integrated with the CDN, allowing us to use both products seamlessly."

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

More Fastly pros

Cons

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"More insight into analytics and threats would be a good place to start improving Cloudflare."

"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed."

"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 Always Online feature has room for improvement. It seems to work sometimes and not others even with the pro version."

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"Latencies are always a problem."

"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."

More Cloudflare cons

"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."

"They have a cloud scrubbing feature that redirects the traffic if the on-prem appliance can't accommodate a large amount of traffic but it's not available where we are."

"The upgrade process for the boxes is not efficient; we have to go through the A10 aGalaxy where we have issues, like timeouts."

"The problem here is when you buy another box from A10, they want to put Thunder TPS to run, and it works okay, after which we cannot block it for another solution to be used, which is a problem for me where improvements are needed."

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

"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."

"The solution is a little expensive."

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

More A10 Thunder TPS cons

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"It's not easy to start with Fastly if you don't have VCL knowledge, so it appears very complex at the beginning."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Fastly can be improved in certain areas such as VCL, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve for normal users."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

More Fastly cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

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

"The price is reasonable."

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

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"Pricing is very reasonable."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"It is an expensive solution."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

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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

37%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	26

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	5

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare?

The tool's pricing is moderate. I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expens...

See all answers

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 vend...

See all answers

What needs improvement with A10 Thunder TPS?

I had issues with the user interface because, when putting settings up, the system asked me for strange things like v...

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 P...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fastly?

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Fastly?

I am using Fastly in the Adobe Commerce Cloud project. In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 40% 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

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Arbor DDoS vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 25% of the time

Radware DDoS vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 16% of the time

AWS Shield vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 11% of the time

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

Compared 9% of the time

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs A10 Thunder TPS

Compared 7% of the time

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Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 17% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fastly

Compared 9% of the time

Uplynk vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly

Compared 4% of the time

AWS WAF vs Fastly

Compared 4% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2026

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

A10 Thunder TPS

May 2026

Download A10 Thunder TPS product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

May 2026

Download Fastly product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

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

A10 Thunder TPS provides advanced DDoS mitigation with seamless traffic management, ensuring legitimate network activity while blocking threats efficiently. It operates with minimal oversight, featuring quick response capabilities and operational simplicity.

A10 Thunder TPS is engineered for rapid detection and defense against DDoS threats, employing programmable automated solutions through RESTful API integrations and aGalaxy management. This system efficiently handles extensive attacks with multi-vector protection, supporting functions such as load balancing. Its intuitive interface allows quick adaptation, helping organizations minimize operational expenses and quickly counter threats. Challenges arise in aligning TPS features with aGalaxy, necessitating improvements in reporting and user training methods. Integration issues due to import restrictions further complicate deployment endeavors.

What are the key features of A10 Thunder TPS?

Advanced Filtering: Detects and removes malicious traffic while maintaining legitimate data flow.
Fast DDoS Mitigation: Quickly resolves attacks with automated programmable defenses.
Multi-Vector Protection: Shields against diverse attack methods efficiently.
Load Balancing Support: Ensures optimal distribution of network traffic.
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies complex defense tasks to enhance response time.

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Operational Efficiency: Lowers management effort with automated solutions.
Cost-Effectiveness: Reduces operational costs through streamlined resource use.
User Satisfaction: Interfaces that cater to quick and intuitive interaction support.
Adaptability: Works in various attack scenarios offering dependable network defense.

A10 Thunder TPS serves as a robust defense for cloud infrastructure and hosting companies against powerful DDoS threats. By rerouting harmful traffic and ensuring legitimate traffic reaches its destination, this protection system is employed on-premises alongside other tools for substantial availability. Its capabilities in load balancing and network troubleshooting further reinforce its role in maintaining security and reliability against high-capacity attacks across industries.

A10 Networks

Fastly is a leading provider of content delivery network services that enhances website performance through efficient caching and real-time architecture capabilities.

Fastly integrates CDN technology with advanced web application firewall for comprehensive security. Its global infrastructure supports performance enhancement, rapid deployment, and rollback capabilities. Utilizing the VCL language allows custom caching solutions. Compute@Edge provides extensive architectural flexibility, aiding in HTML manipulation and script execution. Users benefit from its stability and reliability features for seamless network protection, log management, image optimization, and A/B testing. Challenges include limited support in mainland China, inadequate WebSocket protocol implementation, and complex pricing structures.

What are the key features of Fastly?

CDN Integration: Delivers content quickly across global Points of Presence.
Signal Sciences’ WAF: Manages security threats effectively.
VCL Language: Offers customizable caching solutions.
Compute@Edge: Enables flexible architecture for HTML manipulation.
Image Optimization: Enhances performance with dynamic image delivery.

What benefits should users consider in reviews?

Performance Enhancement: Boosts website speed and response time.
Rapid Deployment: Allows for swift implementation and rollback.
Real-Time Visibility: Provides insights into cached content management.
Security and Stability: Ensures reliability against DDoS attacks and other threats.
Flexibility: Offers diverse network protection and infrastructure capabilities.

Fastly is widely implemented in industries needing robust content delivery and security capabilities. Companies use it as a reverse proxy for media delivery, ensuring availability and optimized performance. Its rapid deployment and rollback features are particularly beneficial in technology sectors requiring agile responses to demand shifts.

Fastly

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

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.

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

Buyer's Guide

A10 Thunder TPS vs. Fastly

April 2026

Free Report: A10 Thunder TPS vs. Fastly

Find out what your peers are saying about A10 Thunder TPS vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.

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