AWS Shield vs Arbor DDoS comparison

NETSCOUT and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. NETSCOUT is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.3, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.7. NETSCOUT holds a 8.7% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 3.9% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of NETSCOUT users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Arbor DDoS and AWS Shield are products designed to mitigate DDoS attacks. Arbor DDoS seems to have an edge due to its straightforward pricing and efficient support, while AWS Shield stands out with comprehensive features through its deep integration with AWS services.

Features: Arbor DDoS offers extensive network visibility, advanced threat detection, and detailed reporting. AWS Shield integrates seamlessly with AWS services, providing automated threat monitoring and robust auto-scaling for improved management within AWS environments.

Room for Improvement: Arbor DDoS could enhance its initial setup process to be more cost-effective and simplify integration with non-Arbor products. Meanwhile, AWS Shield may benefit from more tailored customer support, improved reporting details, and enhanced visibility for users outside the AWS ecosystem.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Arbor DDoS provides a structured deployment model with responsive and bespoke customer service. AWS Shield's integration within AWS ensures rapid deployment for existing AWS users, although its customer service may appear less customized compared to Arbor DDoS.

Pricing and ROI: Arbor DDoS typically involves a higher initial setup cost but provides solid ROI through thorough protection and reduced downtime. AWS Shield offers no upfront charges for its Standard tier, presenting a cost-effective option with an ROI linked to its performance and integration within AWS services, despite variations in protection value between each tier.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Shield vs. Arbor DDoS Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. Arbor DDoS

March 2026

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 16.2%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 8.7%, down from 13.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 3.9%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare	16.2%
Arbor DDoS	8.7%
AWS Shield	3.9%
Other	71.2%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal

General Manager at bKash Limited

Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility

From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.

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Sanjin Zuhric

Team Lead Network Engineer at Artco Group d.o.o Sarajevo

Reliable protection ensures robust network defense and simplifies DDoS management

I am not sure if we plan to use additional features because we have many vendors and platforms that we support. We use the main function and that is it. The prices for Arbor DDoS are expensive. The licensing is subscription-based. From our sales department, they discuss that prices are very high. A potential improvement could be establishing a contract with Cisco to sell via their channel. This could be beneficial because we work extensively with Cisco. If you are a Cisco partner, you can sell Arbor DDoS. That would be good for customers that are Cisco-based because many customers in Bosnia are Cisco-based customers. BH Telecom, our main customer, sells Arbor DDoS to other customers for protection. They buy Arbor and sell the product services to others via Internet links. They sell add-on DDoS protection via Arbor DDoS. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Arbor DDoS is not present in many customers. Some customers try to sell it, but they sell other vendors such as F5. Arbor DDoS is mainly seen in telecom operators but not much in other customers.

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reviewer2767527

Lead Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Has enabled multi-layered threat mitigation but still lacks deeper visibility for advanced application attacks

AWS Shield has limited coverage as it only protects against common and high-volume network and transport layer attacks, such as SYN floods. It does not provide inherent protection against more sophisticated layer 7 attacks such as HTTP floods. In such cases, integration with WAF is necessary, which results in additional costs for customers. To protect layer 7, layer 4, and layer 3, customers must implement both solutions. The service also has difficulties with static detection thresholds, which may not be sensitive enough to detect smaller application-specific attacks. While AWS Shield is a key security service, AWS should enhance their expert support with 24/7 response for complex attacks, which is currently limited.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"Cloudflare consolidates various capabilities into one product, streamlining processes."

"Cloudflare makes it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple users and multiple clients, and basically go in and access their account, make the changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"Cloudflare has many features."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it."

More Cloudflare pros

"The solution is easy to use."

"Go for it."

"We have gained from this product, and our customers are also satisfied with this solution."

"There were huge attacks in October, around 62 attacks at 30 gigabits per second, at one of our banks. We used Arbor DDoS to mitigate these attacks, and it performed great."

"Mitigating network level volumetric attacks, complete network visibility and complete control on applying countermeasures."

"It prevents all unwanted or malicious traffic, using the Threat Intelligence feeds."

"It provides packet capture and we can block or whitelist whichever IPs we need to. Whatever traffic we want to block - and we get IPs from internal teams and from national teams - we block at the Arbor level only, because if it gets to the firewall then firewall bandwidth will be taken."

"It's just one dashboard with mitigation. You decide which mitigation you want and at what threshold to do this or that. Its operation is pretty simple. It's easy."

More Arbor DDoS pros

"It is integrated with AWS. So, it gives you a good first step."

"I am impressed with the product's multiple features like security."

"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."

"It is quite scalable, and we have not faced any issues with its scalability."

"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."

"The solution's ease of use is the most valuable feature."

"The product is easy to use."

"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."

More AWS Shield pros

Cons

"DNS Management."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"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."

"Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region."

"It looks like they don't support as many TLDs as other registrars, but since they are very new as a registrar, I expect this may improve soon."

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

More Cloudflare cons

"The regional support here in African could improve, such as marketing and account managers."

"A small improvement could be a better reporting system."

"Because we had some routers that were somewhat old, they were not integrated with Arbor. They did not support the NetFlow version that Arbor was running. That was a challenge."

"Arbor DDoS has some difficult pricing rules. For many different small features, we have to pay additional fees for every small feature."

"There is definitely room for improvement in third-party intelligence and integrations."

"Implementation could be better."

"An improvement to Arbor DDoS would be to make evaluation licenses and virtual machines available."

"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."

More Arbor DDoS cons

"AWS Shield has limited coverage as it only protects against common and high-volume network and transport layer attacks, such as SYN floods."

"We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need."

"AWS Shield Standard requires improvement, particularly regarding its dashboard since it currently provides limited coverage against comprehensive DDoS attacks."

"The network has been experiencing frustrating performance issues today, which is not typical for Nigeria."

"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a situation is normal or abnormal."

"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."

"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced."

"There is an area for improvement regarding health checks. AWS Shield does not come with its own health check functionality."

More AWS Shield cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"We are using the free version."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The price of this solution is a little high in the African market, it should be lower."

"It is an expensive product. I use this product for its different features."

"Arbor's products are very expensive. Their competitors are cheap when compared with Arbor."

"The solution is a bit costly if you're a small organization, but I think it's worth the price that they are charging."

"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."

"Arbor DDoS is quite expensive, but all these solutions are expensive because they deal with confidential information."

"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."

More Arbor DDoS pricing and cost advice

"The tool's pricing is good."

"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."

"We pay $3000 per month for the solution."

"The tool is cheap."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

13%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	26

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	25
Midsize Enterprise	14
Large Enterprise	29

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

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...

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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...

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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.

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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...

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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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Arbor DDoS?

The prices for Arbor DDoS are expensive. The licensing is subscription-based. From our sales department, they discuss...

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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...

See all answers

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...

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What needs improvement with AWS Shield?

Services always benefit from improvements, including AWS Shield. With respect to the Web Application Firewall, curren...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 44% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

IBM NS1 Connect vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

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Radware DDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 17% of the time

Corero vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 7% of the time

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

A10 Thunder TPS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

More Arbor DDoS Competitors

Azure DDoS Protection vs AWS Shield

Compared 15% of the time

Cloudflare One vs AWS Shield

Compared 14% of the time

Radware DDoS vs AWS Shield

Compared 10% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs AWS Shield

Compared 8% of the time

Link11 vs AWS Shield

Compared 4% of the time

More AWS Shield Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

March 2026

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS

March 2026

Download Arbor DDoS product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield

March 2026

Download AWS Shield product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT

No data available

Overview

Cloudflare enhances web performance and security with features like CDN caching and DDoS mitigation while providing easy DNS management and intuitive setup through its user-friendly dashboard.

Cloudflare is recognized for its comprehensive web security and performance solutions. Speed improvements are achieved through caching mechanisms and DDoS protection, combining ease of DNS management with flexible page rules. The robust analytics and threat insight tools provide valuable data, assisted by a user-friendly dashboard allowing quick setup and configuration. An API offers dynamic DNS settings ensuring low latency and high performance across the globe.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN Caching: Enhances website speed through content delivery network caching.
Web Application Firewall: Protects websites from online threats.
DDoS Mitigation: Shields against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
DNS Management: Offers easy-to-use and flexible domain management.
SSL Certificates: Ensures secure connections between users and servers.
Analytics: Provides insights with robust analytics tools.

What benefits and ROI should users evaluate?

Enhanced Security: Strengthening web security with DDoS and firewall protection.
Speed Improvement: Faster content delivery with CDN caching.
Operational Simplicity: Simplifies website optimization through a user-friendly interface.
Scalable Solutions: Scales with global reach, lowering latency for improved performance.
Cost Efficiency: Offers layers of valuable functionality with pricing options.

Cloudflare finds utility across industries for DNS management and defense mechanisms. Its content delivery network assures fast content distribution and fortified security. Businesses integrate features like web application firewalls, load balancing, end-to-end SSL, and zero trust to protect websites from cyber threats while ensuring resilience and reliable performance.

Cloudflare

Arbor DDoS offers a comprehensive defense system against DDoS attacks, integrating a user-friendly GUI and advanced threat mitigation technologies for enhanced network protection.

Arbor DDoS is recognized for its ability to manage high-volume DDoS attacks efficiently, providing extensive protection through real-time traffic analysis and automated threat detection. It utilizes advanced techniques such as blackhole and BGP Flowspec for effective threat management. Arbor's cloud signaling allows users to handle and mitigate volumetric attacks while maintaining service availability. Though it provides robust security features, users note potential improvements in auto-mitigation, scalability, and AI integration. Challenges like an outdated graphical interface, hardware stability, and false positives need addressing to further enhance its usability and integration with third-party systems.

What are the key features of Arbor DDoS?

User-Friendly GUI: Provides an intuitive interface for ease of use.
Effective Mitigation: Combats high-volume DDoS attacks effectively.
Predefined Filters: Simplifies threat management with pre-configured settings.
Real-Time Traffic Analysis: Offers insights into traffic patterns and potential threats.
Automated Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats without manual intervention.
Able to Handle High-Volume Attacks: Ensures extensive protection even under large-scale attacks.
Packet Capture and Integration: Facilitates comprehensive security analysis.
Cloud Signaling: Enhances attack traffic management through hybrid deployments.

What benefits should users expect from Arbor DDoS?

Enhanced Protection: Safeguards networks from diverse DDoS threats.
Improved Service Availability: Maintains business operations without disruptions.
Timely Reporting: Delivers detailed attack reports for proactive prevention.
AI Capabilities: Leverages AI for smarter threat mitigation strategies.
Comprehensive Security: Combines on-premise and cloud deployments for optimal defense.

Internet service providers and telecom companies commonly adopt Arbor DDoS to protect their networks and infrastructure from DDoS attacks. It is also implemented in financial and government sectors to ensure web application security and maintain high availability. Arbor DDoS supports a hybrid approach, utilizing both on-premise and cloud solutions to manage traffic efficiently and sustain service quality during attacks.

NETSCOUT

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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

netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code

Buyer's Guide

AWS Shield vs. Arbor DDoS

March 2026

Free Report: AWS Shield vs. Arbor DDoS

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Shield vs. Arbor DDoS and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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See our AWS Shield vs. Arbor DDoS report.

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