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Arbor DDoS vs Fastly comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Arbor DDoS
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fastly
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
CDN (6th), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.4%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 14.4%, up from 12.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 2.2%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Tushar Sail - PeerSpot reviewer
A critical solution for security, as it includes features that can automatically detect and prevent DDoS attacks
Arbor DDoS offers security features that automatically detect and prevent DDoS attacks. When a DDoS attack is detected targeting a specific IP, the Arbor device immediately becomes in line with the traffic and actively works to prevent the attack. This auto feature is one of the best aspects of Arbor DDoS, as it ensures timely and effective protection against such attacks.
Nick Wilsdon - PeerSpot reviewer
An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support
The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool."
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"It's very user-friendly."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."
"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"It has an easy-to-understand GUI...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"I recommend using Arbor DDoS for those wanting to keep their services online."
"We have taken on the Arbor Cloud subscription, which is really useful because you secure yourself for anything beyond your current mitigation capacity. This is a really good feature of Arbor that is available."
"The solution looks into volumetric attacks and gets them resolved."
"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..."
"The quality of the technical support provided by Arbor DDoS is premium."
"The stateless device format means that the box is very strong for preventing DDoS attacks."
"Arbor DDoS's best feature is that we can put the certificates in, and it will look at layer seven and the encrypted traffic and do the required signaling."
"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."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."
"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
 

Cons

"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"Arbor's SSL decryption is confusing and needs external cards to be installed in the devices. This is not the best solution from an architectural point of view for protecting HTTPS and every other protocol that is SSL encrypted."
"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. Nowadays, everything is being offered as a service model. It is not that we have to deploy the physical hardware, many things move up to the cloud, or even can be delivered in the VNS form in the customer's environment as well. So, in that space, if we can add more features to make it more seamless for customers to use and make it available through some marketplace, not only at the hyperscalers, but also for any on-prem deployment, that definitely would be a big plus."
"There should be an automatic way to configure it to monitor traffic and decide which is an attack and which is not. In Arbor, you need to tweak and set all parameters manually, whereas in Check Point DDoS Protector, you can select the lowest parameters, and over the weeks, Check Point DDoS Protector will learn the traffic and you can then tighten some of the parameters to decide which traffic is regular and which is malicious."
"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."
"If we want to see live traffic, we can see do so. But once an attack that lasts for five minutes is done, the data is no longer there. It would be an improvement if we could see recent traffic in the dashboard. We can check and download live traffic, but a past attack, with all the details, such as why it happened and how to mitigate and prevent such future attacks, would be helpful to see."
"I would also like more visibility into their bad actor feeds, their fingerprint feeds. We try to be good stewards of the internet, so if there are attacks, or bad actors within our networks, if there were an easier way for us to find them, we could stop them from doing their malicious activity, and at the same time save money."
"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."
"An improvement would be to provide information on how pricing is done on different customer levels."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"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."
"Support is not that great."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We don't have any issues with the price."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"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 believe that the price of Arbor DDoS falls under the bracket of medium to high price."
"Start with a small license. Measure your bandwidth requirements."
"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."
"You need to find a way to get a good offering from Arbor by negotiating a price. That is the challenge."
"The solution is a bit costly if you're a small organization, but I think it's worth the price that they are charging."
"The pricing of the solution is cheap."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"It is an expensive solution."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 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.
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 do you like most about Arbor DDoS?
The quality of the technical support provided by Arbor DDoS is premium.
What do you like most about Fastly?
Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for h...
What needs improvement with Fastly?
What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT
No data available
 

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
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Arbor DDoS vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,485 professionals have used our research since 2012.