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A10 Thunder TPS vs AWS Shield 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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
A10 Thunder TPS
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
21st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Shield
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.8%, up from 17.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of A10 Thunder TPS is 2.1%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 5.3%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cloudflare18.8%
AWS Shield5.3%
A10 Thunder TPS2.1%
Other73.8%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
RonaldoDE Melo - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for protecting and supporting users against attacks
One problem for me with A10 Thunder TPS is that the box comes from another country in Brazil. In the tool, there is no one key to block it. For example, in F5 Networks, we have a key. If you try to buy another box from Huawei or from F5 and try to enable them in A10 Thunder TPS, you need a key to do it. The problem here is when you buy another box from A10, they want to put Thunder TPS to run, and it works okay, after which we cannot block it for another solution to be used, which is a problem for me where improvements are needed.
Ifeanyi Stanly Nwokoro - PeerSpot reviewer
Has ensured ongoing protection against cyber threats and provides timely automated response while requiring improvements in cost structure and performance transparency
Business inherently involves risk, and it's important that services continue to improve. AWS Shield is not an exception. Regarding advanced Shield protection pricing, there should be cost protection for most DDoS events. The pricing model should be based on service usage rather than a flat monthly rate. The advanced technique package, while premium and not available to every user due to cost implications of $3,000 per month, offers valuable features including real-time attack visibility and 24/7 access to the DDoS response team. Integration is paramount, particularly with the Web Application Firewall's rule-based blocking paradigm that helps in balancing routes, especially route 53 and the global accelerator. AWS Shield uses pattern recognition to analyze traffic, and certain attributes are immediately intercepted. The assessment process is profound, and the service maintains consistent availability. From a software perspective, there are improvements needed regarding antivirus and network security. Additional engineering improvement requirements would benefit AWS Shield.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool is user-friendly."
"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"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."
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"I had a rather positive experience with A10 Networks Support Service."
"The solution has reduced the amount of manual intervention required during an attack. We have the inline solution and when it comes to the customers that we have on it, it has saved us some troubleshooting time."
"Thunder TPS has automated mitigation and fully managed support in case the device cannot handle the attack. They have engineers available to respond."
"The solution is easy to use and implement in terms of operations."
"The solution's support is one of the coolest things about the product. I"
"We selected the solution because of its programmable automated defense using RESTful API. We didn't want to connect to the box. We wanted to be able to do some automation. We wanted to have our own portal because we wanted to connect our customers to our own UI using the A10 API. It has been good and exactly what we need."
"The most valuable feature of A10 Thunder TPS is load balancing."
"They give us the ability to configure many features for DDoS. There are many items that we can use."
"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."
"The automatic detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks in the product operates in real-time and provides satisfactory results."
"I recommend AWS Shield because it has proven helpful in tracking DDoS attacks within both my past and present environments, and without AWS Shield, a business could face potential losses, as this tool helps in identifying and mitigating fake traffic that disrupts applications, ultimately supporting business continuity."
"AWS Shield offers numerous protection features that are crucial at the application layer, safeguarding users from distributed denial of service attacks, man-in-the-middle assaults, and hacker orchestrations."
"The solution's ease of use is the most valuable feature."
"The solution operates smoothly at its baseline level, and we do not encounter any issues at that level."
"We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't degrade the performance of our solution. Additionally, it's easy to configure, which is crucial for us. It's easy to use and set up and stops attacks on our servers. We haven't encountered any attack problems because the solution stops them in real-time. AWS Shield specifically focuses on defending against denial-of-service attacks, making it a great solution for that type of threat."
"AWS Shield is aligned with the web application firewall (WAF), and they work seamlessly together, primarily working with Elastic Load Balancer, CloudFront, and Route 53 for CDN and DNS services protection."
 

Cons

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"The pricing could be improved."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"Its documentation could be better."
"They have a cloud scrubbing feature that redirects the traffic if the on-prem appliance can't accommodate a large amount of traffic but it's not available where we are."
"The upgrade process for the boxes is not efficient. We have to go through the A10 aGalaxy where we have issues, like timeouts. They told me it was fixed in the latest version, but I tried to do it on the Portal and it is not working all the time."
"We have had some issues with implementation. So, it is the only area that needs improvement."
"I rate Thunder TPS seven out of 10 for scalability."
"If there's one aspect of A10 that needs improvement it would be the training. All of their training is done online, at least in what we've been exposed to. I would like to have a classroom environment for training... It would give [people] a chance to provision it."
"The solution needs improvement in terms of fail-open."
"The last issue we had to contact them about was just a question of a false-positive. The A10 system wasn't supposed to decide what is a false-positive. So if we send it good traffic, it's supposed to just pass that good traffic through. But we opened this last ticket because the A10 did block some of the good traffic. Their support had to tweak it a little bit, but it wasn't anything that took a long time."
"The management of it is a bit hard. If you don't engineer it on the front side, it is hard to go back in and change it. It could be improved in terms of architecture requirements and then ongoing support requirements as a secondary component to it. People tend to set up things like this, and they just expect it to work without the care and feeding that needs to go back into it either from an application team or a network environment team."
"The product is expensive."
"AWS Shield Standard requires improvement, particularly regarding its dashboard since it currently provides limited coverage against comprehensive DDoS attacks."
"The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced."
"We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need."
"The product should give users more flexibility to customize their security policies according to their requirements."
"There is an area for improvement regarding health checks. AWS Shield does not come with its own health check functionality."
"The product needs to improve its logs and reports to make it read better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is cheap."
"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."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"We may need to pay fifty percent more if we purchase other solutions. For the payments made to A10 Thunder TPS, we have received three-year support."
"We had a customer who was down for six hours and the loss of revenue for him was three times the price he was paying for us per year. The customer just said, "I don't care about paying you because on only one attack I saved money. It's three times better than losing money.""
"Pricing is very reasonable."
"We did a price survey, and compared to other solutions, A10 Thunder TPS wasn't cheap."
"The financials are always a challenge with this type of technology. That's not really a product-functionality thing but it's the area where we push A10 the most."
"The tool is expensive. If one is low price and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price as a ten."
"Pricing was much higher with Arbor (APS) for the same type of solution."
"The tool is cheap."
"The cost depends on traffic each month, so on average, it costs us between US$200 and US$300 per month."
"It depends on your subscription level and the volume that you're spending with AWS. So, it is very relative to the consumption alignment in your subscription level. It is a well-constructed, scalable pricing option, but it is relative to how much you're spending on AWS. Because the more you spend, typically, the more you get off on services like this. I find it to be comparable to other solutions."
"The tool's pricing is good."
"We pay $3000 per month for the solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
40%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Performing Arts
6%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for A10 Thunder TPS?
I have not seen specific prices, like $10,000 or $20,000. A frustrating aspect is the lack of demo versions. The vend...
What needs improvement with A10 Thunder TPS?
I had issues with the user interface because, when putting settings up, the system asked me for strange things like v...
What is your primary use case for A10 Thunder TPS?
Currently, I have a test setup. A10 Thunder TPS ( /products/a10-thunder-tps-reviews ) works in a chain with a Check P...
What do you like most about AWS Shield?
We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't de...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Shield?
The pricing structure for AWS Shield is fair, yet it depends on the specific protections chosen. Enabling Shield Adva...
What needs improvement with AWS Shield?
Services always benefit from improvements, including AWS Shield. With respect to the Web Application Firewall, curren...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
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.
DDoS defense solution trusted for more than 200 service providers, online gaming, and enterprises including; Bungie, Comcast, KDDI Corporation, Leaseweb, Microsoft Azure, NTT Docomo, Softbank, Turkcell Superonline, Verizon and more.
netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code
Find out what your peers are saying about A10 Thunder TPS vs. AWS Shield and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,778 professionals have used our research since 2012.