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Arbor DDoS vs Prolexic 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
Prolexic
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
18th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Prolexic is 3.8%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user553896 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 13, 2017
 

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.
ÖS
Eliminated DDOS attacks, provides excellent mitigation service
I rate it eight out of 10. It would get a nine if the web portal was better and 10 if the price was lower. We have been using it for three years. We canceled the contract recently and are looking into using another vendor to reduce the price by two-thirds.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"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."
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"Analytics and its attack mitigation capabilities are valuable features of the solution."
"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."
"Arbor has the ability to learn and self-create the appropriate profile for each customer."
"The solution provides good protection against volumetric DDoS attacks."
"Our customers are very happy when we provide them with the interface... They can check how many attacks they have faced and how many attacks have been blocked."
"It's very flexible and we can easily deploy it to our network. It's very user-friendly. We can do everything via the web interface and troubleshoot easily from the CLI. It's not complicated."
"We can reduce the bandwidth to minimize the attack level. If we see more than 2.5 GBs we drop it directly."
"It is fully mitigating the attacks. We've dealt with other ones where we didn't necessarily see that. The detection is very good. It's also very simple to use. Arbor is a single pane of glass, whereas with other solutions you might have a detection pane of glass and then have to go to a separate interface to deal with the mitigation. That single pane of glass makes it much simpler."
"The solution does not have hardware or maintenance requirements and is very easy to scale."
 

Cons

"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."
"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."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"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."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."
"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."
"The solution's IT support needs improvement."
"The solution could be more granular to include logs per second and enhanced pipeline monitoring for router licenses."
"There is some room for AI to take place."
"An improvement to Arbor DDoS would be to make evaluation licenses and virtual machines available."
"Arbor Pravail APS devices do not sync features or config the backup enough. This needs to be improved."
"A small improvement could be a better reporting system."
"Arbor DDoS could improve out-of-the-box reporting, it could be better."
"The solution needs additional product options for small and medium enterprises."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The price is reasonable."
"We are using the free version."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The price is a little high."
"The price of Arbor DDoS depends on many parameters. It depends on the physical capacity of the environment, and it is not a straight-line price. It's fairly competitive in the market on the price."
"We do not use the Arbor Cloud DDoS solution because it is too costly."
"It is an expensive product. I use this product for its different features."
"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."
"Our customers always complain about the price of the product."
"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."
"I'm a technical guy. But I know it's expensive compared to its competitors. After you have the on-premise solution, for your solution to be effective you have to subscribe to an "upper level," so there's another cost. There is also a subscription to cloud services, which is another cost."
"The pricing is a pay-as-you-go model that is charged by the hour."
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Answers from the Community

it_user553896 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 13, 2017
Jan 13, 2017
Both Prolexic and Arbor are OK solutions. Both have a very limited number of PoPs (Only 4-6 global locations, adds significant latency) and both have trouble reacting to attacks quickly and automatically (without human intervention). Also both will have trouble handling Application layer attacks over TLS. Arbor will also requires on-premise equipment which is a lot of hassle and doesn't scale....
2 out of 11 answers
Dec 14, 2016
Hi Dennis, Will you reply to the underneath please. Rgds, Arthur
it_user476130 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 14, 2016
Hi, I would suggest looking at Radware and their solutions as they provide solutions in this space. This includes Cloud WAF, Always-on Cloud DDoS Protection, On-Demand Cloud DDoS Protection and Hybrid Cloud DDoS Protection consisting of both On-Premise mitigation and On-Demand Cloud DDoS. Prolexic – use Radware Attack Mitigation Solutions as part of their DDoS Mitigation solution. This same Attack Mitigation solution is OEM’d by both Checkpoint – Checkpoint DDoS Protector, and Cisco – integrated into the Cisco Firepower 9300 and 41xx Platforms. Note – I am a Radware employee. Thanks Dean,
 

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%
Educational Organization
29%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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 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.
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT
Akamai Prolexic Routed
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Xtel Communications
Fidor Bank
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