

Radware Alteon and F5 Distributed Cloud Services are competing products in the network management and application delivery market. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has the upper hand with its comprehensive features that justify a higher investment.
Features: Radware Alteon offers robust load balancing, application acceleration, and SSL offloading ensuring reliability and security. F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides extensive cloud-native capabilities, including application security, identity management, and a scalable platform. The primary difference is F5's focus on comprehensive cloud services compared to Alteon's focus on load balancing performance.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers a straightforward deployment model and responsive customer service aimed at quick resolutions. Radware Alteon, while easy to deploy, is noted for creating a more personalized experience through its customer support. The distinction is F5's streamlined cloud-centric model versus Alteon's personalized support.
Pricing and ROI: Radware Alteon is competitive with lower setup costs and predictable ROI offering value with its pricing model. F5 Distributed Cloud Services, despite a higher initial cost, is seen as delivering superior ROI due to a feature-rich offering. The main difference lies in immediate cost versus long-term returns from features.
I would estimate the cost was reduced by approximately 30 percent in the first year.
There is definitely a return on investment in F5 Distributed Cloud Services.
I do find F5 Distributed Cloud Services to be cost-effective, as it brings benefits and a strong return on investment.
There is a lot of support from F5 Distributed Cloud Services and the knowledge on the page is very good and reliable.
I would provide 9.5 for support.
Email services are good, but they need to have a good human-based interaction with the call centers.
We never face support issues, and their team resolves any critical issues quickly once they are involved.
There is a dedicated expert answering even the toughest questions.
If I ever need assistance from them, they respond immediately.
I need the traffic management environments in distributed management, which have a very good goal to manage very difficult traffic in the world.
We have not hit any major scalability limitations so far.
It handles peak loads and thousands of concurrent connections without exceeding 10% utilization.
I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.
Within a couple of hours, if the deployment is very straightforward and if the requirements or the IP addresses are already in place, the deployment can be completed.
I won't face any issues with stability as a concern because it provides the load balancers and all redundancy, so it's very unlikely that we have any downtime.
We've never faced downtime, even during peak transaction hours.
There are no difficulties with the deployment of Radware Alteon; it is quite straightforward.
Making it easier to follow the traffic path and quickly see where something is going wrong would be a great enhancement.
The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF.
For availability, they have added additional clusters across all the regional edges in the Kubernetes clusters to enhance availability.
They keep integrating new features that sometimes break our production, but we use clustered systems, so we can test those software releases.
Other OEMs offer free courses and hands-on labs on new technologies and features, which we find useful.
In the future, I would like to see some other security features added, such as DDoS, which is Distributed Denial of Service.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable.
I believe the prices are much higher than I expected, but for the time being, the customer is still paying.
For our solution, it was right in the middle of price performance.
The cost of the Radware solution is reasonable and stable.
The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well.
Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting.
The product allows us to manage multiple networks and VLANs into a single box and add numerous web services and farms efficiently.
The best feature of Radware Alteon is basically the configuration; how we configure it is very straightforward, and it is very simple to configure.
I find the best features to be the flexibility and ease of use.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Radware Alteon | 1.9% |
| F5 Distributed Cloud Services | 1.8% |
| Other | 96.3% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 6 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 16 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 17 |
| Large Enterprise | 22 |
F5 Distributed Cloud Services excel in enhancing security, optimizing web application delivery, and ensuring robust network performance. Users value its integrated Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, global server load balancing, and intuitive management interface. It boosts organizational efficiency, reduces operational costs, and scales seamlessly, making it essential for businesses operating in distributed environments.
Alteon is Radware’s application delivery and security platform for delivering and protecting applications across physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments. Available as hardware, virtual appliances cloud deployment, Alteon provides local, global server and link load balancing, advanced traffic management, SSL/TLS offload and acceleration, automation, and application optimization, including HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support.
Through Alteon Protect, organizations can combine Alteon application delivery and on-device security with Radware Cloud Application Protection services, including web application and API protection, bot management, and web DDoS protection. This provides a unified application delivery and security approach across data center and cloud environments.
Alteon supports flexible capacity and deployment through Global Elastic Licensing (GEL), which enables licensed capacity to be allocated and reallocated across supported Alteon deployments as application and infrastructure requirements change.
The platform also supports modern automation and AI-assisted operations. Alteon MCP Server enables application, DevOps, and platform teams to use natural-language intent through an MCP-compatible AI client to create supported Alteon configurations using a guided workflow that gathers required parameters, validates configuration state, and maintains human review and approval before changes are applied. Alteon also supports lifecycle automation and integration through REST APIs, Ansible, Terraform, and Kubernetes/cloud-native environments.
Together, these capabilities enable organizations to deliver, scale, automate, and protect applications consistently across data centers, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid environments.
Alteon supports flexible perpetual and subscription-based licensing models. Physical appliance pricing is based on the selected Alteon hardware platform and enabled performance/capacity, while virtual and cloud deployments can be licensed according to the required capacity as a subscription. Global Elastic Licensing (GEL) provides additional flexibility by allowing licensed capacity to be allocated and redistributed across supported Alteon physical, virtual, and cloud deployments rather than tying all capacity permanently to an individual instance.
Customers can also purchase application delivery together with cloud-delivered application protection through Alteon Protect, providing a combined subscription model for Alteon application delivery and Radware Cloud Application Protection capabilities.
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