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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

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

Arbor DDoS and F5 Shape Security aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Arbor DDoS is designed for Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection and holds a mindshare of 5.7%, down 11.7% compared to last year.
F5 Shape Security, on the other hand, focuses on Fraud Detection and Prevention, holds 1.6% mindshare, down 2.1% since last year.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Arbor DDoS5.7%
Cloudflare11.9%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.7%
Other74.7%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Fraud Detection and Prevention Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Shape Security1.6%
ThreatMetrix4.3%
Riskified3.0%
Other91.1%
Fraud Detection and Prevention
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1331304 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Of Research And Development at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Automated threat intelligence and flow-based mitigation have improved our DDoS defense
A very useful feature in Arbor DDoS is its ability to send flow spec announcements to routers. For example, if it is clear that a Layer 3 or Layer 4 attack is occurring and the attack pattern is identified through source and destination IP addresses and ports, you can generate flow spec filters. These filters are transferred through BGP to border routers, which automatically build filters, mitigating the attack even at the network's boundary and preventing it from reaching the TMS. This allows the TMS to focus on other tasks. This is a highly effective feature that can mitigate huge volumetric attacks; for example, we experienced a 32-gigabit attack, and all those 32 gigabits were dropped by our border routers, not by Arbor DDoS itself. The flow spec announcement was generated by Arbor DDoS, and as far as I know, the same technology is used by Radware, but it comes under a different feature and a different license. At the time, we were told that flow spec mitigation was an additional very expensive license to purchase from Radware, while Radware included everything in one package.
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

"The quality of the technical support provided by Arbor DDoS is premium."
"The most valuable features include the traffic categorization and control of the traffic. The filtering of the traffic is very precise. When you want to stop some traffic, you precisely stop that traffic."
"Arbor Pravail APS devices provide easy management, high visibility, and quick response capabilities."
"Valuable features include simple and centralized management of user access and capabilities, as well as Web 2.0 interactive attack alerting, traffic visualization, and mitigation service control."
"There were huge attacks in October, around 62 attacks at 30 gigabits per second, at one of our banks. We used Arbor DDoS to mitigate these attacks, and it performed great."
"In terms of Arbor DDoS's reporting and analytics, Arbor DDoS is superior to Radware, especially when comparing it to the Radware model which I used previously."
"We use it not only for DDoS detection and protection, but we also use it for traffic analysis and capacity planning as well. We've also been able to extend the use of it to other security measures within our company, the front-line defense, not only for DDoS, but for any kind of scanning malware that may be picked up. It's also used for outbound attacks, which has helped us mitigate those and lower our bandwidth costs..."
"Arbor DDoS is easy to use, provides effective blocking of DDoS attacks, and can be used for DNS, web, and main servers. Additionally, this solution is far easier to operate than others solutions, such as Fortinet DDoS."
"F5 Shape Security's most valuable feature is performance."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of configuration."
 

Cons

"There is always room for improvement for any product or service. If we can bring in more agility when deploying services, that is definitely a scope which we can work towards."
"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?)."
"For troubleshooting problems, it's not so intuitive. It's not straightforward."
"An improvement to Arbor DDoS would be to make evaluation licenses and virtual machines available."
"The look and feel of the management console is a little old, excessively simple. If you compare it with other solutions, the look and feel of the console is like you're using technology from five or six years ago. It doesn't show all the technology that is actually behind it. It looks like an older solution, even though it is not."
"They should improve the reporting section and make it a little bit more detailed. I would like to have much better and more detailed reports."
"Sometimes it is not able to filter traffic adequately because of the hybrid approach."
"This is a disadvantage of Arbor DDoS, as it operates merely as a flow collector, generating alerts only after a violation occurs."
"I want the solution's custom exclusion rules to be more granular."
"The tool's price is high."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't know about the pricing details as our company's service provider offers us the solution as an inbuilt feature within the internet bandwidth they provide us."
"The price of this solution is a little high in the African market, it should be lower."
"The solution is a bit costly if you're a small organization, but I think it's worth the price that they are charging."
"Our customers always complain about the price of the product."
"Because the solutions from competitors are very different, it's not easy to compare. However, the licensing from Arbor is clear and understandable and the pricing is reasonable when looking at the market, in general."
"Regarding pricing, I would rate it as average. Arbor DDoS offers good value for money with our DDoS filter device. For higher protection needs, Arbor’s CloudMeter’s DDoS mitigation or hardware devices might be more expensive, but customers who need them are usually prepared for the cost and the additional resources required."
"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."
"The pricing of the solution is cheap."
"The solution is moderately priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Healthcare Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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?
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.
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Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.