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A10 Networks Thunder SSLi vs Radware Bot Manager 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

A10 Networks Thunder SSLi
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
SSL/TLS Decryption (3rd)
Radware Bot Manager
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Bot Management (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

A10 Networks Thunder SSLi and Radware Bot Manager aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. A10 Networks Thunder SSLi is designed for SSL/TLS Decryption and holds a mindshare of 25.7%, up 22.0% compared to last year.
Radware Bot Manager, on the other hand, focuses on Bot Management, holds 3.1% mindshare, down 3.7% since last year.
SSL/TLS Decryption
Bot Management
 

Featured Reviews

CC
The SSL decryption successfully decrypts at a rate that has minimal to no impact on our end users
With the Thunder SSLi, we're better protected. We can stop use of VPN and proxies. We are better protected against dirty traffic coming back to our schools. Having a secure decrypt zone with the equipment lowers the chances that our security infrastructure could possibly miss an attack. It gives us insight into the actual traffic that a student is following. What's the value of identifying possible risks or possible intent based on unencrypted traffic where you have insight to what the student's intent may be? E.g., anonymous bully reporting. It's invaluable to be able to leverage that insight and data to maybe bring help or avert a possible bad circumstance. It's something that's very important to us that this type of system gives us insight into that. For terms of ease of use, it's fairly simple. My analysts tell me that they don't mind getting in there. It was something new that we had to throw on their plate. Every time you add a new element and a new level of complexity, your analysts will look at you like you're crazy, Our plan was originally to use our native firewalls to do the decryption. Unfortunately, that was a feature set which was added on afterward. It just ended up bogging down our system. That is the reason why we had to add the extra hardware. Once the team understood that, the UI was intuitive and a huge help. We use the solution’s Harmony analytics and visibility controller. We have been able to proactively engage and deescalate situations with it. We love Harmony’s traffic management capabilities because it is centralized management. It has a rich analytics capability. This allows us insight into the aggregate performance of all the boxes. so we can possibly leverage any resources available to enhance the environment. We love the single pane of glass traffic management. Single pane of glass is huge, centralized logging. It is the buzzword that everyone is talking about right now, except what nobody seems to take into consideration, is that an analyst only has two eyes. The administration piece of it is huge. It allows us to not just look and get the information, but also cipher it, which is actionable. Looking at logs all day is great, but you can stare in the matrix so long before you want to get in the game. This single pane of glass allows us to look at information that's actionable.
ARMANDO CARRETO CASTRO - PeerSpot reviewer
It has an advantage over other solutions because it recognizes automated processes much more quickly
I like how Bot Manager intelligently detects automated tools. It allows some requests through, identifies them quickly, and contains them effectively. It has an advantage over other solutions because it understands much quicker that it is an automated process and begins to mitigate it a little more quickly. Almost all of our clients use the crypto mitigation algorithm. It is much more efficient because it’s very flat and plain when not encrypted. When we implemented it, the algorithm helped reduce the number of attacks on our clients' applications. With this type of solution, the attacker typically gives up after attempting because it doesn't affect the application. It has reduced the number of attempts by 30 to 40 percent.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With the Thunder SSLi, we're better protected. We can stop use of VPN and proxies. We are better protected against dirty traffic coming back to our schools. Having a secure decrypt zone with the equipment lowers the chances that our security infrastructure could possibly miss an attack."
"We have several proxies in our environment, so we localized internet traffic between these proxies. Instead of getting a really huge proxy box, according to our size, we can use three boxes and share the traffic with A10's load-balancer feature."
"Its most valuable feature is its ability to do its job accurately, effectively, and very quickly. The amount of traffic that we have going through our system is astounding... The delay with the SSL decryption turned on is almost unnoticeable."
"The most valuable feature is the bot management itself and the way it has stopped bots from scraping our site, with its AI mechanism. Its ability to detect and mitigate bots is really good."
"I like how Bot Manager automatically detects when a suspicious user attempts to download content from your website."
"Radware Bot Manager has positively impacted our organization because we had masses of scans that took place against certain addresses, allowing us to identify those either good or bad."
"Bot Manager's behavioral modeling and intelligence help us distinguish between harmless and malicious bots."
"It's very good at categorizing the different types of bots, whether they're malicious or good. Bot is a very generic term. It could be good, it could be bad. Quite a lot of legitimate businesses are using bot-type services to just scrape the internet for information."
"The solution provides a rating of the sophistication of the bot attack."
"The support from Radware is excellent."
"Bot Manager is an excellent tool for analyzing traffic to detect suspicious patterns. It uses artificial intelligence to identify malicious behavior."
 

Cons

"I would like them to have a better UI (better universal design)."
"It would be great if it supported SSL operations according to Active Directory users. For example, if we want to bypass one of the servers or a client's internet access for SSL interception, we have to do it according to the IP address. It would be better if we could do it according to the Active Directory username. A10 says they kind of support that but we haven't tested it."
"There is one thing I would like to see changed. In their features for setting things up, there is a templating system that would normally assist clients. However, we had a better time setting up the device either through the command line or through the interface and not using the templates that were pre-installed. So there is room for improvement to the templates for initial installation."
"Maybe people who are new to it, or haven't used anything similar before, might say that the configuration is a bit difficult unless you're a technical person who understands the flow or the URL environment."
"It would be beneficial to have a link from the WAF to the Bot Manager portal available so we do not have to log in again."
"While the interface is simple, they could add the ability to upload lists of IPs in an Excel spreadsheet. If there are two or three IPs, it's easy to add them. You have a graphical option to log in and register your IP, but if you want to upload 50 IPs, it becomes more complicated because there are 50 steps. Also, Radware could simplify the implementation of SDK, which is a bit complicated. Radware should work on making the SDK part more efficient."
"We're missing links to their modules for installation and configuration. They have most of them available already, but there were situations for mobile applications that, when they released a new version, were not stable. We had to ask them to send a link by email, and that could be made accessible in the portal."
"Radware's pricing is generally expensive. This could be a deterrent for smaller organizations."
"I would like more ability to configure custom rules. Currently, I need to open a ticket with support to request a specific rule that isn't available in the console. In some cases, I don't have visibility into the logs or they are too complicated to analyze."
"Radware Bot Manager is a little costly but not too expensive. It's in the middle."
"Bot Manager is doing its job, but I think the behavioral modeling could be improved by adding fingerprinting and automation. Remediation should be automated so that it doesn't require any intervention by the user."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you purchase the equipment, you purchase the licensing and warranty. It's all fairly standard. We haven't been caught with anything surprising."
"We always pay for support. Any organization of our size who doesn't is asking for problems."
"Our licensing costs, yearly, are just under $15,000. Your initial cost of acquisition is obviously going to be more than $15,000..."
"We negotiated a decent price with Radware that fits into our budget. It's a five-year license, so we get a good price and don't need to renew for several years."
"It is fairly priced."
"We pay a fair price for each application we wish to protect."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
14%
Media Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Radware Bot Manager?
Radware's pricing is generally expensive. This could be a deterrent for smaller organizations.
What needs improvement with Radware Bot Manager?
When looking at Radware Bot Manager, I noticed instances of false positives where legitimate activities were mistakenly detected as attacks. However, our team has weekly calls with Radware to addre...
What is your primary use case for Radware Bot Manager?
We use Radware Bot Manager for protecting against bot attacks, specifically to distinguish between bot attacks and legitimate traffic.
 

Also Known As

Thunder SSLi
ShieldSquare, ShieldSquare Bot Mitigation and Bot Management
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Klein Independent School District
Pearson, Zulily, Purch, Groupe PSA, Yellow Pages, Axel Springer, Dorman, Penske, SeLoger.com, trovaprezzi.it
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Fidelis Security, A10 Networks and others in SSL/TLS Decryption. Updated: May 2025.
855,080 professionals have used our research since 2012.