Arbor DDoS vs Fastly comparison

NETSCOUT and Fastly are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. NETSCOUT is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.2, while Fastly is ranked #10 with an average rating of 9.0. NETSCOUT holds a 10.2% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Fastly’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of NETSCOUT users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Arbor DDoS and Fastly compete in cybersecurity and content delivery. Fastly appears to have the upper hand with its comprehensive features that effectively balance with investment costs.

Features: Arbor DDoS provides advanced threat intelligence, robust network protection, and effective mitigation strategies focused on security. Fastly offers a fast content delivery network, real-time traffic visibility, and superior edge computing capabilities optimal for speed and efficiency.

Room for Improvement: Arbor DDoS could enhance user interface simplicity, faster deployment, and greater automation for ease-of-use. Fastly could improve security integrations, enhance reporting detail, and expand its zero-trust capabilities to compete better in security-focused markets.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Arbor DDoS requires a more intricate setup due to its security focus, demanding specialized support but offering responsive customer service for maintenance. Fastly offers streamlined deployment and is known for its quick-resolution customer service enhancing hassle-free integration.

Pricing and ROI: Arbor DDoS involves higher initial investment due to comprehensive security features, ensuring substantial ROI by risk reduction. Fastly provides a competitive pricing model, delivering excellent value in speed optimization and network efficiency, emphasizing operational enhancement over security ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Arbor DDoS vs. Fastly Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS vs. Fastly

December 2025

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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 December 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 17.8%, up from 17.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Arbor DDoS is 10.2%, down from 13.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 2.7%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cloudflare	17.8%
Arbor DDoS	10.2%
Fastly	2.7%
Other	69.3%

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

Herb Angle

Owner at Hga consulting

Has helped manage client domains with streamlined access control and threat visibility

I don't know what areas could be improved with Cloudflare WAF; Cloudflare is constantly improving and adding features to their feature set. They're doing a good job, and as far as DNS and support for any domains that I create or my clients create, it's mandatory for me to make sure that they have Cloudflare as their DNS provider. The Cloudflare load balancing capability hasn't really helped in enhancing my website's uptime and resiliency because we don't really get that much traffic; it's mostly remote users, and web hosting is done by a web hosting service. It doesn't pay to try to host your own website.

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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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Patel Parth

Technical support engineer at Adobe

Optimized ecommerce performance and improved access control through image handling and IP filtering

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP addresses instead of POP IPs. Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list. Additionally, a POP address should be there with a wide range of IP addresses provided, public static IP addresses, so customers can integrate egress IPs. Fastly should provide WebP image processing on the backend instead of on the fly. It would be a very useful feature to avoid unnecessary time for browser to browser and local cookies. I believe that Fastly service has a few gaps. We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers. There should be transparency.

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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

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."

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

"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."

More Cloudflare pros

"Predefined filters/techniques to easily stop the attacks and start mitigation."

"Valuable features include simple and centralized management of user access and capabilities, as well as Web 2.0 interactive attack alerting, traffic visualization, and mitigation service control."

"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."

"Using standard BGP, NetFlow and SNMP ensure wide compatibility. There are also peering traffic reports that can help identify upstream peering opportunities. The ATLAS aggregation service allows us to contribute to the global DDoS data and benefit from overall trends."

"Its scalability is big. It is for large deployments of big organizations and service providers."

"The stateless device format means that the box is very strong for preventing DDoS attacks."

"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 artificial intelligence feature is most appreciated. This solution can lower the throughput and clear the traffic, which is something really important for us. It also provides good protection. It is user-friendly, and its integration has also been really fast. We have many critical applications, and it was easy to integrate Arbor DDoS with our website, mobile application, and web banking."

More Arbor DDoS pros

"Fastly combines both the CDN side and the Signal Sciences next-generation WAF, which is closely integrated with the CDN, allowing us to use both products seamlessly."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

More Fastly pros

Cons

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."

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

"The pricing could be improved."

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

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

More Cloudflare cons

"I have observed that the SNMP traps aspect that sends information to third-party solutions needs improvement."

"Arbor DDoS could improve out-of-the-box reporting, it could be better."

"They should improve the reporting section and make it a little bit more detailed. I would like to have much better and more detailed reports."

"Implementation could be better."

"On the application layer, they could have a better distributed traffic flow. They could improve that a bit. For network data it is very effective, but the application layer can be improved."

"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. We had to upgrade the routers. Some backward-compatibility would be helpful."

"The implementation should be made easier."

"For troubleshooting problems, it's not so intuitive. It's not straightforward. This is the core of their kernel, so they need to improve it a little bit... In F5 I have full control of everything."

More Arbor DDoS cons

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"Support is not that great."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."

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

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"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 solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The pricing of the solution is cheap."

"You need to find a way to get a good offering from Arbor by negotiating a price. That is the challenge."

"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."

"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."

"As far as I know, they are the best in this sector, in DDoS protection. They know it, I know, because their service prices are too high. They provide cloud DDoS protection for ISPs, but that is also too expensive."

"Regarding pricing, I would rate it as average. Arbor DDoS offers good value for money with our DDoS filter device. For higher protection needs, Arbor’s CloudMeter’s DDoS mitigation or hardware devices might be more expensive, but customers who need them are usually prepared for the cost and the additional resources required."

"Pricing is slightly on the higher side."

"The price is a little high."

More Arbor DDoS pricing and cost advice

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"It is an expensive solution."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Comms Service Provider

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	25

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	5

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 Fastly?

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for h...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fastly?

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 52% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Google Cloud DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

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Radware DDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 21% of the time

Corero vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 7% of the time

A10 Thunder TPS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Arbor DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

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Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 22% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

December 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS

December 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Fastly

December 2025

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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

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Fastly

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

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

Buyer's Guide

Arbor DDoS vs. Fastly

December 2025

Free Report: Arbor DDoS vs. Fastly

Find out what your peers are saying about Arbor DDoS vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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