Arbor DDoS vs Cloudflare comparison

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Arbor DDoS

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Cloudflare and Arbor DDoS compete in the DDoS mitigation services category, with Cloudflare often preferred for budget-friendly solutions and Arbor DDoS favored for extensive features and security. Cloudflare's cost-effective options give it an advantage for smaller businesses, while Arbor's comprehensive security suits larger enterprises.

Features: Cloudflare offers CDN caching, DDoS mitigation, and DNS management at affordable or no cost, making it accessible for optimized website security and performance. It provides an easy-to-use platform for free CDN and DDoS protection, democratizing high-grade web security services. Arbor DDoS is known for its robust network-level DDoS protection and threat intelligence, excelling in real-time protection, packet capture, and advanced analytics for proactive threat management.

Room for Improvement: Cloudflare users suggest enhanced analytics, more responsive support, better CDN speed, and improved documentation for advanced setups. Arbor DDoS faces criticism for its high cost and complex pricing, with calls for improved automation, mitigation capabilities, and seamless integration with third-party intelligence services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudflare excels in deploying solutions across public and hybrid clouds, yet its customer service receives mixed reviews regarding prompt technical support. Arbor DDoS, primarily deployed in on-premises environments, is praised for knowledgeable customer support but may require better response times and resources to handle dynamic traffic environments.

Pricing and ROI: Cloudflare offers competitive pricing with a free tier and affordable business plans, delivering good ROI for small to medium-sized businesses. Its flexible pricing models cater to various budgets. Arbor DDoS, though expensive, provides value through reliability against large-scale attacks, justifying the investment for enterprises seeking critical infrastructure protection, while smaller businesses may struggle with its costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Arbor DDoS vs. Cloudflare Report (Updated: December 2025).

Arbor DDoS vs. Cloudflare

December 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:

ROI

Sentiment score

6.3

Arbor DDoS ensures uptime and data security, enhancing ROI by preventing costly outages and boosting profitability for internet-reliant companies.

Sentiment score

6.1

Cloudflare improves performance, security, and financial outcomes with affordable plans, enhancing user satisfaction and operational efficiency significantly.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Arbor DDoS report

For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.

Wellington Malagutti

Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.

Herb Angle

Owner at Hga consulting

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudflare report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

7.6

Arbor DDoS support is praised for knowledgeable assistance and quick resolutions, despite some delays in initial response.

Sentiment score

6.9

Cloudflare's customer service is praised for promptness, but technical support feedback varies, especially favoring Enterprise tier users.

The technical support team is very effective in resolving issues.

Network Engineer at A1 Bulgaria

Although the team is good, they are not fast, and they lack the skills to manage dynamic attackers.

Leandro Di Maria

Gerente De Ventas at internet winds ag

Support for Arbor DDoS deserves a rating of 10 because when there is a problem with implementation, the people I work with are the best.

For more quotes and insights, download the Arbor DDoS report

Team Lead Network Engineer at Artco Group d.o.o Sarajevo

Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.

reviewer1245303

Senior Consultant CDN at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.

Herb Angle

Owner at Hga consulting

We use other solutions where support is available through Slack channels and is more interactive, with someone responding within a couple of minutes or seconds.

M.A. Faisal

General Manager at bKash Limited

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudflare report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

7.3

Arbor DDoS effectively scales for enterprises and small setups, offering versatile deployment but requires careful planning for satisfaction.

Sentiment score

7.9

Users praise Cloudflare's scalability, flexibility, and seamless tier transitions for maintaining high performance under increasing traffic and demands.

This would enhance the knowledge about scalability options available for Arbor DDoS, making it more accessible and useful for users.

ClementOlaosebikan

System Engineer at TIGER LOGIC

They need to purchase boxes monthly to expand their bandwidths, and these new boxes can be added to the installed base very easily.

Hamada Elewa

System Engineer - Security Presales at Raya Integration

I find Arbor DDoS to be very scalable.

For more quotes and insights, download the Arbor DDoS report

Network Engineer at A1 Bulgaria

It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.

reviewer2541525

Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch

Engineer at SITMEXICO

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

Prajith Chowthee

Independent Consultant at Unaikui

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudflare report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.3

Arbor DDoS is praised for its stability and reliability, with users rating it highly against competitors, despite occasional issues.

Sentiment score

7.5

Cloudflare is generally stable and reliable, with some initial setup challenges but excellent performance and positive user feedback.

It is a very stable product.

For more quotes and insights, download the Arbor DDoS report

Team Lead Network Engineer at Artco Group d.o.o Sarajevo

Arbor DDoS is very stable.

Hamada Elewa

System Engineer - Security Presales at Raya Integration

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

Prajith Chowthee

Independent Consultant at Unaikui

The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch

Engineer at SITMEXICO

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudflare report

Room For Improvement

Arbor DDoS needs improvements in automation, interface, third-party integration, pricing, support, documentation, traffic decryption, and WAF features.

Cloudflare needs enhancements in speed, support, reliability, pricing, and documentation, while expanding integration, security, and analytics capabilities.

I would like to see an option to decrypt the traffic with Arbor DDoS, as some clients are interested in this, particularly for application layer attacks on port 443.

For more quotes and insights, download the Arbor DDoS report

Network Engineer at A1 Bulgaria

Enhancing the handshakes between Arbor DDoS and third-party solutions is essential for obtaining better and real-time data that supports any organization’s support team effectively.

ClementOlaosebikan

System Engineer at TIGER LOGIC

I would like to see a roadmap for one or two years, and it is tough to predict what will happen in that timeframe without a clearer description.

Dmytro Okhrushchak

CTO at UkrNet

Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.

Bilal Mujahid

Managed Services Manager at Adapture Technology Group

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.

M.A. Faisal

General Manager at bKash Limited

Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements.

Darryl Wethington

Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Integrated Technology Solution Group (ITSG)

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudflare report

Setup Cost

Arbor DDoS pricing is high but justified by effectiveness, with options for enterprises, though restrictive for small businesses.

Enterprise users find Cloudflare cost-effective, with valuable upgrades and competitive pricing, despite unclear enterprise price lists.

The prices for Arbor DDoS are expensive.

Team Lead Network Engineer at Artco Group d.o.o Sarajevo

For some customers, the cost is expensive, but for enterprises looking to protect their services, it is affordable.

For more quotes and insights, download the Arbor DDoS report

Network Engineer at A1 Bulgaria

I find it to be cheap.

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch

Engineer at SITMEXICO

I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

Animesh.Kumar

Senior Solutions Architect at Think Power Solutions

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

reviewer2541525

Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudflare report

Valuable Features

Arbor DDoS offers advanced, user-friendly features for efficient, AI-driven threat detection and seamless cloud-on-premise integration for enhanced security.

Cloudflare provides caching, DDoS protection, and CDN services with enhanced security features, making it vital for optimized web performance.

That is an attack over 10 gigabit per second, and if an attack enters the telecommunication network, that will be a disaster for their customer, their services, and so on.

Team Lead Network Engineer at Artco Group d.o.o Sarajevo

We have many updates for the library of different attacks, and they have artificial intelligence that automatically learns the process during different attacks.

Dmytro Okhrushchak

CTO at UkrNet

The platform offers quick mitigation of attacks because Arbor DDoS uses BGP Flowspec, enabling very quick mitigation.

For more quotes and insights, download the Arbor DDoS report

Network Engineer at A1 Bulgaria

The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.

Darryl Wethington

Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Integrated Technology Solution Group (ITSG)

Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.

Animesh.Kumar

Senior Solutions Architect at Think Power Solutions

The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.

reviewer2541525

Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudflare report

Categories and Ranking

Arbor DDoS

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

3rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Cloudflare

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

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 9.8%, down from 13.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudflare is 16.7%, down from 18.0% 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 (%)
Cloudflare	16.7%
Arbor DDoS	9.8%
Other	73.5%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

Reliable protection ensures robust network defense and simplifies DDoS management

Team Lead Network Engineer at Artco Group d.o.o Sarajevo

I am not sure if we plan to use additional features because we have many vendors and platforms that we support. We use the main function and that is it. The prices for Arbor DDoS are expensive. The licensing is subscription-based. From our sales department, they discuss that prices are very high. A potential improvement could be establishing a contract with Cisco to sell via their channel. This could be beneficial because we work extensively with Cisco. If you are a Cisco partner, you can sell Arbor DDoS. That would be good for customers that are Cisco-based because many customers in Bosnia are Cisco-based customers. BH Telecom, our main customer, sells Arbor DDoS to other customers for protection. They buy Arbor and sell the product services to others via Internet links. They sell add-on DDoS protection via Arbor DDoS. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Arbor DDoS is not present in many customers. Some customers try to sell it, but they sell other vendors such as F5. Arbor DDoS is mainly seen in telecom operators but not much in other customers.

Read full review

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	25
Midsize Enterprise	14
Large Enterprise	29

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	26

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

I would say if it’s an ISP that will build a scrubbing center, Netscout/Arbor is a good solution. In all other solutions, Imperva is a great choice.

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 prefer Arbor.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Arbor DDoS?

The prices for Arbor DDoS are expensive. The licensing is subscription-based. From our sales department, they discuss that prices are very high.

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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...

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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...

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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Imperva Application Security Platform vs Arbor DDoS

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Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Fastly vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

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Product Reports

Download Arbor DDoS product report

Arbor DDoS

January 2026

Download Cloudflare product report

January 2026

Also Known As

Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT

Cloudflare DNS

Overview

Arbor DDoS offers a comprehensive defense system against DDoS attacks, integrating a user-friendly GUI and advanced threat mitigation technologies for enhanced network protection.

Arbor DDoS is recognized for its ability to manage high-volume DDoS attacks efficiently, providing extensive protection through real-time traffic analysis and automated threat detection. It utilizes advanced techniques such as blackhole and BGP Flowspec for effective threat management. Arbor's cloud signaling allows users to handle and mitigate volumetric attacks while maintaining service availability. Though it provides robust security features, users note potential improvements in auto-mitigation, scalability, and AI integration. Challenges like an outdated graphical interface, hardware stability, and false positives need addressing to further enhance its usability and integration with third-party systems.

What are the key features of Arbor DDoS?

User-Friendly GUI: Provides an intuitive interface for ease of use.
Effective Mitigation: Combats high-volume DDoS attacks effectively.
Predefined Filters: Simplifies threat management with pre-configured settings.
Real-Time Traffic Analysis: Offers insights into traffic patterns and potential threats.
Automated Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats without manual intervention.
Able to Handle High-Volume Attacks: Ensures extensive protection even under large-scale attacks.
Packet Capture and Integration: Facilitates comprehensive security analysis.
Cloud Signaling: Enhances attack traffic management through hybrid deployments.

What benefits should users expect from Arbor DDoS?

Enhanced Protection: Safeguards networks from diverse DDoS threats.
Improved Service Availability: Maintains business operations without disruptions.
Timely Reporting: Delivers detailed attack reports for proactive prevention.
AI Capabilities: Leverages AI for smarter threat mitigation strategies.
Comprehensive Security: Combines on-premise and cloud deployments for optimal defense.

Internet service providers and telecom companies commonly adopt Arbor DDoS to protect their networks and infrastructure from DDoS attacks. It is also implemented in financial and government sectors to ensure web application security and maintain high availability. Arbor DDoS supports a hybrid approach, utilizing both on-premise and cloud solutions to manage traffic efficiently and sustain service quality during attacks.

NETSCOUT

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.

Sample Customers

Xtel Communications

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