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Arbor DDoS vs F5 Shape Security comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (2nd), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th)
Arbor DDoS
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (3rd)
F5 Shape Security
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Fraud Detection and Prevention (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Arbor DDoS6.6%
Cloudflare13.2%
Imperva Application Security Platform8.1%
Other72.1%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Fraud Detection and Prevention Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Shape Security1.6%
ThreatMetrix4.9%
Riskified3.4%
Other90.1%
Fraud Detection and Prevention
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
DO
CTO at UkrNet
Customer interface and support have impressed while artificial intelligence features drive confidence
Arbor DDoS has some difficult pricing rules. For many different small features, we have to pay additional fees for every small feature. If we compare it, it is slightly high and not very affordable. If I compare it to automobiles, when you buy Volkswagen and then consider Skoda, for the cheapest way, you would buy Skoda. But if you want similar features to Volkswagen, you have to pay a little bit more than for Volkswagen. As I mentioned, a good way would be to buy some package of features at small prices. That is one of my recommendations for the company. 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.
Nikolay Dimitrov - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Engineer at Paysafe / IBM
Easy to configure and blocks bot attacks for web users
The solution is deployed on the F5 cloud. The solution's real-time analytics help you see what has been blocked. It helps to see whether the attack category was an automation attack or a fake browser. F5 Shape Security has a normal dashboard. We are doing F5 Shape Security migrations for 30 customers. F5 Shape Security uses Javascript. For a lot of competitors, the Javascript can be reverse-engineered by attackers to bypass the protection. F5 Shape Security has machine learning authentication of the Java script. If you had hacked it, the encryption would have been changed. It's really hard for attackers to reverse engineer the F5 Shape Security JavaScript. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have used it to bring enterprise-grade features to my small business clients at low or no cost."
"Cloudflare has made management of my website much easier by combining various functions in one platform without compromising quality."
"There is no service as mature as Cloudflare that is also as easy to use, reliable, and hosted from excellent infrastructure."
"Using the CDN of Cloudflare improved the speed significantly, reducing the page loading times to appropriate levels."
"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"When there was an attack, the attack was contained only on the IPs under attack, the rest of the network was not impacted, and that is the most important part."
"The solution provides good protection against volumetric DDoS attacks."
"I like all the features together as a whole."
"We also use it by serving our customers' cloud signaling services with on-premise APS devices."
"It's just one dashboard with mitigation. You decide which mitigation you want and at what threshold to do this or that. Its operation is pretty simple. It's easy."
"It provides packet capture and we can block or whitelist whichever IPs we need to. Whatever traffic we want to block - and we get IPs from internal teams and from national teams - we block at the Arbor level only, because if it gets to the firewall then firewall bandwidth will be taken."
"Its scalability is big. It is for large deployments of big organizations and service providers."
"It's an excellent product DDoS protection against attacks."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of configuration."
"F5 Shape Security's most valuable feature is performance."
 

Cons

"The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service."
"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."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"At the end, it is worth than giving your house keys to the NSA."
"I have found CloudFlare's support to be unresponsive at times, and not very helpful with providing technical details for issues that we have reported over the years."
"I rate technical support quite badly."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"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."
"The solution could be more granular to include logs per second and enhanced pipeline monitoring for router licenses."
"Sometimes it is not able to filter traffic adequately because of the hybrid approach."
"The following areas need improvement: opening and tracking support tickets, online support resources, software upgrades/updates and replacement media, and event management guidelines."
"The prices for Arbor DDoS are expensive. The licensing is subscription-based."
"The solution's IT support needs improvement."
"An improvement would be to provide information on how pricing is done on different customer levels (e.g. is it done per gig or bandwidth?)."
"This is a disadvantage of Arbor DDoS, as it operates merely as a flow collector, generating alerts only after a violation occurs."
"Arbor's products are very expensive. Their competitors are cheap when compared with Arbor."
"The tool's price is high."
"I want the solution's custom exclusion rules to be more granular."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The price is reasonable."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The solution is a bit costly if you're a small organization, but I think it's worth the price that they are charging."
"I believe that the price of Arbor DDoS falls under the bracket of medium to high price."
"The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is expensive when compared to other tools."
"The price of this solution is a little high in the African market, it should be lower."
"I don't deal with the pricing, but it seems that you need to get basic support in order to upgrade the software and implement some patches."
"Pricing is slightly on the higher side."
"As far as I know, they are the best in this sector, in DDoS protection. They know it, I know, because their service prices are too high. They provide cloud DDoS protection for ISPs, but that is also too expensive."
"It is an expensive product. I use this product for its different features."
"The solution is moderately priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Retailer
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise29
No data available
 

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...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.
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 soluti...
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...
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...
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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT
Shape Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Xtel Communications
Wells Fargo, Loblaw, JetBlue, Zoosk
Find out what your peers are saying about Radware, Cloudflare, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: May 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.