Kentik and F5 BIG-IP AFM are competitors in the network monitoring and protection solutions sector. Kentik has the upper hand in network traffic insights and visualization, while F5 BIG-IP AFM excels in comprehensive network security and application protection.
Features: Kentik provides robust SaaS-based network monitoring tools with NetFlow visualization, analysis, DDoS alerting, and customizable dashboards for real-time visibility. F5 BIG-IP AFM offers comprehensive network protection with modules like LTM and APM, ensuring effective load balancing and firewalling along with application protection from threats.
Room for Improvement: Kentik could enhance granular user permissions and simplify its API for better data access, along with improving actionable insights within the tool. F5 BIG-IP AFM could streamline its geolocation updates and firewall configurations, boost automation and AI capabilities, and reduce pricing for better value.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Kentik's SaaS model simplifies deployment and ensures effective multi-channel support with proactive communication and swift responses. F5 BIG-IP AFM is mostly on-premises, offering strong support but facing critiques regarding setup complexity compared to Kentik’s user-friendly and feedback-driven model.
Pricing and ROI: Kentik offers competitive pricing with ROI through operational efficiency and network visibility despite being perceived as expensive. Large-scale use emphasizes cost reduction, especially in transit costs, while F5 BIG-IP AFM is pricier but justified by its extensive features and reliability, particularly in security capabilities.
In production environments, especially for service providers on IP networks and data centers, Kentik helps in reducing the time to identify and resolve issues.
The responses are generally fast and effective.
The customer service is excellent, and I rate it ten out of ten.
They have monthly calls and discuss the product roadmap with us to determine what is needed.
I have mostly used forums for any support needed because the setup is straightforward and the documentation is quite good.
The solution is highly scalable, allowing me to add or remove nodes and manage traffic without interruption, which is essential for meeting application demands.
Kentik's integration with Kubernetes makes scaling easier.
You can scale as many devices and tests as you want, but you should have a good number of credits in your accounts.
In production, however, dimensioning of the underlying platforms is something to be mindful of.
Based on stability, I would give Kentik a nine.
The appliance and features could be enhanced further, especially in terms of security.
Having advanced technology similar to other vendors like Palo Alto for zero-day attack prevention would be valuable.
More work is required to integrate AI for troubleshooting, simplifying root cause analysis, and providing suggested solutions for network issues.
The standard license is reasonably priced, but additional features like the WAF can be more expensive.
If considering a one-stop solution that provides load balancing, DNS security, AAA authentication, and firewalling on the same hardware, the cost is reasonable.
The pricing is good and aligns with the market target.
Kentik’s pricing is competitive in the marketplace.
The solution provides behavioral analysis via AI to detect malicious traffic.
The most valuable features for me are stability, availability, and security, along with the ability to manage multiple features to secure my applications.
One of the most valuable features of Kentik, especially for service providers, is its ability to visualize all the BGP peering and the status of the BGP peering platform.
Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives.
Kentik is easy to use and set up.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) | 1.2% |
| Kentik | 0.8% |
| Other | 98.0% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 8 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 14 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 4 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is a high-performance, full-proxy network security solution designed to protect networks and data centers against incoming threats that enter the network. Built on F5’s industry-leading BIG-IP hardware and software platforms, BIG-IP AFM provides a scalable platform that delivers the flexible performance and control needed to mitigate aggressive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and protocol attacks before they overwhelm and degrade applications and infrastructure availability.
For service providers, BIG-IP AFM IPS does even more, protecting the network edge and performing traffic inspection and protocol adherence for prevalent service provider protocols such as SS7, Diameter, HTTP/2, GTP, SCTP and SIP traffic coming into the network over UDP, TCP, and SCTP.
Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence.
With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.
We monitor all Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
