F5 DDoS Hybrid Defender [EOL] vs Radware DDoS comparison

F5 and Radware are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Additionally, 100% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Radware users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 24, 2025

F5 DDoS Hybrid Defender [EOL] and Radware DDoS are competing in the DDoS protection category. Radware DDoS is perceived to have an edge due to its advanced features and higher perceived value.

Features: F5 DDoS Hybrid Defender [EOL] is known for its strong integration capabilities, comprehensive protection against both volumetric and sophisticated DDoS threats, and cost-effectiveness. Radware DDoS stands out with its advanced behavioral analysis, machine-learning capabilities, and adaptive tuning, which enhance threat detection and mitigation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 DDoS Hybrid Defender [EOL] is noted for its straightforward deployment process and customer support. Radware DDoS offers robust documentation and responsive support despite its more complex implementation.

Pricing and ROI: F5 DDoS Hybrid Defender [EOL] offers a lower setup cost suitable for companies seeking essential protection. Radware DDoS, with a higher price point, justifies the investment with superior threat mitigation capabilities and features enhancing long-term ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Report (Updated: May 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

May 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

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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reviewer1326957

Head Solutions and Innovations at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Excellent DDoS protection with responsive technical support and a straightforward setup

It handles the whole process with a very smart configuration. Just like other F5 components, it runs on the BIG-IP appliance platform, which is renowned for F5 and can manage, along with other F5 components, what they call BIG-IP, an analytics platform. F5 can be probably be referred to as an application security company. They have very, very extensive knowledge on the standard application patterns and behaviors of different kinds of applications and protocols to which an application communicates with. Due to this, they can mitigate very effectively against DDoS attacks. That's something that you don't just find in the industry. The extent in which the solution is very effective is due to its ability to handle not just the most current signatures for malware, but also issues around emerging signatures. The Hybrid Defender has the ability to add a very rich source of intelligence via the F5 Threat Intelligence Chip Subscription and that provides a lot of intelligence. The intelligence is aggregated by a 24/7 research center in F5. The learnings are downloaded to every client of a F5 DDoS appliance, and that gives everyone all the contextual information they need to know to in order to analyze traffic effectively. F5 doesn't just block, it provides users with contextual information to go by. Most competitor's environments will have their appliance do a hard stop. This means they weigh traffic from real customers and that affects the overall business experience. F5, on the other hand, uses contextual information to be able to specify what is malicious traffic and what is real traffic. That comes from its pool of intelligence, and from its threat intelligence team.

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reviewer2663061

Program Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Advanced protection has optimized web and API performance while reducing infrastructure costs

From the features perspective and functionality-wise, there are areas of Radware DDoS that I would like to see improved or enhanced in the future. Version upgrades are being provided, but they should communicate with clients about these new features being available so clients can test them and deploy them on the disaster recovery system before moving to the live segment. There should be a test report that will provide confidence that the version is stable and everything will work properly. Last time we faced an issue with a version upgrade, and we faced extensive troubleshooting with littile bit more time in the troubleshooting process. It turned out to be a small issue that was resolved by the engineering team. I would like to see improved support from Radware DDoS. Sometimes in support, we have to log the call with their support partners rather than Radware. After ten years of experience, we know exactly what the issue is, and we understand that it cannot be handled by their support channel or partner level. Radware team always asks us to go through the partners, but sometimes we have found that the issue cannot be handled by the partners. After the partners fail to resolve the issue, it goes to the Radware team. At that time, one to two days of required timeline gets increased by one to two days. If Radware came into immediate action and resolved the issue rather than relying on their service partners, it would be better. After ten years, we have the knowledge of troubleshooting, and we understand that the issues we are facing with Radware can only be resolved by their team. However, due to their policy, they insist we move through the partner first, and only after the partner fails do they escalate to Radware. During that troubleshooting period of twenty-four to forty-eight hours, we remain in an unresolved state with the reported issue.

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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

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."

"This solution has improved the security of our organization."

"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."

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

"Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

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

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

More Cloudflare pros

"F5, on the other hand, uses contextual information to be able to specify what is malicious traffic and what is real traffic."

"The user interface was recently changed in one of the latest versions, but we find it to be very good. The change was an improvement."

"Most competitor's environments will have their appliance do a hard stop. This means they weigh traffic from real customers and that affects the overall business experience. F5, on the other hand, uses contextual information to be able to specify what is malicious traffic and what is real traffic. That comes from its pool of intelligence, and from its threat intelligence team."

"With Radware, there's a lot more granular control of what DDoS you're looking at in terms of DDoS visibility and protection."

"Recently, our company has been facing difficulties due to attacks originating from the Russian Federation. DefenseFlow has proven to be a highly effective solution in protecting our customers."

"The most important part is that Radware DDoS integrates seamlessly and provides anomaly identification, real-time notifications, and security against DDoS attacks. It also helps us with multi-layer volumetric attacks. It shields us from global botnet threats."

"The pricing is reasonable. It's not overly expensive."

"Radware's support is first class."

"Data scrubbing and unmatched DDoS protection are valuable features."

"I've been using this solution for the past two and a half years at my company, and I’m pleased to share that we’ve successfully achieved all of our use cases with their services."

"The key strength of Radware's Cloud DDoS Protection Service is its behavior engine, which uses anomaly detection to identify and stop DDoS attacks."

More Radware DDoS pros

Cons

"Yes, there were a few times when some of their CDN nodes would fail, creating serious speed issues with the site without any warning or notification from their side."

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."

"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."

"At the end, it is worth than giving your house keys to the NSA."

"For the services I am using, it is a bit expensive."

More Cloudflare cons

"The solution needs better stability when it's utilized with virtual solutions."

"We've seen the rise of smaller entities, and their requirements grow by the day. Having the ability to give them appliances that fit their needs in terms of that small or medium-sized segment and the pricing they can handle would be something that's great to see."

"As price increases based on the volume of net traffic, it can get expensive."

"When the core services and the ERP are exposed to the internet, Radware DDoS has not managed to mitigate any specific attack with major impact that I can recall."

"To improve my ability to monitor security events, I would like Radware to strengthen its integration with SIEM for better logging capabilities."

"The solution is a little more pricey than other options on the market."

"Last time we faced an issue with a version upgrade, and we faced extensive troubleshooting with one to two months wasted in the troubleshooting process."

"I believe Radware DDoS could be improved for cloud deployments with more granular controls that could provide valuable gains for the company, especially by verifying whether the client is genuine or not with additional metrics."

"Customization could be improved."

"In terms of the defense devices, I would like to see an improvement within the implementation and upgrade phases."

More Radware DDoS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 price is reasonable."

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

"A free version of the solution is available."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

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

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"The licensing cost is about $50,000."

"Its pricing is competitive. The licensing model is also very competitive. It is customizable, so there is no issue at all. They have given us whatever we have asked in terms of the pricing model and SLA."

"Licensing of Radware is quite simple and straightforward, while Arbor DDos is a bit complicated."

"Radware's switch to a pay-as-you-go model last year provides great flexibility."

"When compared with other solutions, my end user is satisfied with the costs and believes that Radware Cloud DDoS Protection Service is worth the price paid."

"The NetFlow security could be improved too."

"Radware DefensePro is expensive when considering the issue we have and its limitations."

"It is expensive. I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing."

More Radware DDoS pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	46
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	26

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	23

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare DNS?

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cloudflare are a bit on the higher side overall.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Radware Cloud DDoS Protection Service?

For Radware Cloud DDoS Protection, the pricing model can vary based on a number of factors such as the scale of the b...

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What needs improvement with Radware Cloud DDoS Protection Service?

The time it takes to upload a site to the cloud is critical when under attack. If a site is down, a quick response to...

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What is your primary use case for Radware Cloud DDoS Protection Service?

We use Radware's Cloud DDoS Protection Service to safeguard Cloud Graph with Layer Seven protection. To mitigate Laye...

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Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 36% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Fastly vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

Link11 vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

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F5 Shape Security vs F5 DDoS Hybrid Defender [EOL]

Compared 48% of the time

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Arbor DDoS vs Radware DDoS

Compared 13% of the time

Cisco Secure DDoS Protection vs Radware DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Radware DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Corero vs Radware DDoS

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs Radware DDoS

Compared 5% of the time

More Radware DDoS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

June 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

May 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Radware DDoS

June 2026

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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Radware DDoS Protection Service, Radware DefensePro, Radware DefenseFlow

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

At F5, we give our customers the freedom to securely deliver every app, anywhere—with confidence. All F5 products are highly programmable and integrate into any environment, whether on premises or in any cloud. To date, 48 of the Fortune 50 companies rely on F5 to deliver apps that customers and employees can securely access at any time, on any device, from any location.

Radware DDoS provides robust multi-layer protection against distributed denial of service attacks, featuring real-time monitoring and anomaly detection. Its scalable cloud-based and on-site deployment options ensure effective safeguarding of critical infrastructure.

Offering comprehensive defense, Radware DDoS includes features like data scrubbing, signature updates, and SSL-based mitigation. Integrated platforms and a user-friendly interface streamline its deployment. With advanced reporting, analytics, and behavioral analysis powered by machine learning, users experience fewer false positives. Despite these strengths, users highlight the need for improved scalability, seamless deployment, and enhanced machine learning capabilities. Better documentation, pricing, and customer service remain areas of improvement.

What features does Radware DDoS offer?

Data Scrubbing: Filters malicious data from incoming traffic.
Signature Updates: Keeps threat signatures current.
SSL-Based Mitigation: Protects against SSL attacks.
Auto Mitigation: Quickly responds to detected threats.
Multi-Layer Protection: Defends across several attack vectors.

What benefits should users expect?

Scalable Protection: Adaptable to increasing demands.
Proactive Notifications: Alerts in real-time to threats.
Live Attack Insights: Provides real-time analytics.
Enhanced Security: Shields diverse sectors.
Reduced False Positives: Enabled by machine learning.

In industries like banking, telecom, and government, organizations employ Radware DDoS to protect networks from DDoS attacks. It ensures server, web service, and mail security while enabling traffic monitoring and unauthorized access blocking. Its cloud-based options serve entities seeking infrastructure security and network traffic analysis.

Radware

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office

Myntex, APAC retailers

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Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

May 2026

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