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Arbor DDoS vs F5 Shape Security comparison

 

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
56
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 (7th)
 

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 9.3%, down 13.9% compared to last year.
F5 Shape Security, on the other hand, focuses on Fraud Detection and Prevention, holds 1.4% mindshare, down 1.6% since last year.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Arbor DDoS9.3%
Cloudflare16.6%
Imperva Application Security Platform8.2%
Other65.9%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Fraud Detection and Prevention Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
F5 Shape Security1.4%
ThreatMetrix6.5%
BioCatch4.1%
Other88.0%
Fraud Detection and Prevention
 

Featured Reviews

SZ
Team Lead Network Engineer at Artco Group d.o.o Sarajevo
Reliable protection ensures robust network defense and simplifies DDoS management
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.
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 solution is flexible, easy to implement and has an efficient technical support team."
"I highly recommend Arbor DDoS to others."
"Arbor has the ability to learn and self-create the appropriate profile for each customer."
"Its scalability is big. It is for large deployments of big organizations and service providers."
"Arbor has a global ranking in reliability and credibility. They are very unique and can respond to a very wide scope of threats from their global deployment."
"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."
"The auto-mitigation, that signaling feature, where it automatically raises an alarm that a line is under attack, is important. The upstream service provider will then do something to reduce the load on our internet lines. The fact that it's automated means I don't have to sit and always be looking at threats coming through. It does it almost automatically, without any intervention by me."
"The solution looks into volumetric attacks and gets them resolved."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of configuration."
"F5 Shape Security's most valuable feature is performance."
 

Cons

"Based on my experience and feedback from colleagues, Arbor can make better use of the product because you have to spend a lot of time finding information in a huge number of papers."
"They also have limited sizes of the boxes. Different sizes are needed because some customers are very small while others are very big, such as ISPs, so this categorization should be available."
"Arbor Pravail APS devices do not sync features or config the backup enough. This needs to be improved."
"An issue which needs to be addressed concerns information I received of attacks on the radar and Arbor, allegedly, not taking any action."
"Real-case scenarios that have taken too long to resolve or were escalated can be directly converted into articles."
"When it comes to some false positives, we need to tweak the system from time to time. There is room for improvement when it comes to the actual mitigation because of some false positives."
"It is an expensive product, so there is room for improvement in terms of pricing."
"For troubleshooting problems, it's not so intuitive. It's not straightforward. This is the core of their kernel, so they need to improve it a little bit... In F5 I have full control of everything."
"The tool's price is high."
"I want the solution's custom exclusion rules to be more granular."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe that the price of Arbor DDoS falls under the bracket of medium to high price."
"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."
"The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is expensive when compared to other tools."
"The pricing of the solution is cheap."
"Arbor is striking a good balance between pricing and what they deliver."
"Start with a small license. Measure your bandwidth requirements."
"There is room for improvement with the pricing. It is an expensive solution. The issue with the pricing is more the way it is built. Right now we're paying per router, and there's a limitation there. I would like to see bundle-pricing where there is an overall solution cost."
"Arbor's products are very expensive. Their competitors are cheap when compared with Arbor."
"The solution is moderately priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Healthcare Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
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.
What do you like most about F5 Shape Security?
The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of configuration.
What needs improvement with F5 Shape Security?
There could be some improvement in the options to make custom exclusion rules to be more granular. Sometimes, the solution blocks something that you don't want to be blocked. The solution should al...
What advice do you have for others considering F5 Shape Security?
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 brows...
 

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 Cloudflare, Radware, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: February 2026.
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