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F5 Shape Security vs NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection & Mitigation comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

F5 Shape Security
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Fraud Detection and Prevention (21st)
NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protect...
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

F5 Shape Security and NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection & Mitigation aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. F5 Shape Security is designed for Fraud Detection and Prevention and holds a mindshare of 1.7%, down 2.2% compared to last year.
NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection & Mitigation, on the other hand, focuses on Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection, holds 5.5% mindshare, down 11.4% since last year.
Fraud Detection and Prevention Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Shape Security1.7%
ThreatMetrix4.4%
Riskified3.0%
Other90.9%
Fraud Detection and Prevention
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Arbor DDoS5.5%
Cloudflare11.7%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.6%
Other75.2%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Nikolay Dimitrov - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Engineer at Paysafe / IBM
Easy to configure and blocks bot attacks for web users
The solution is deployed on the F5 cloud. The solution's real-time analytics help you see what has been blocked. It helps to see whether the attack category was an automation attack or a fake browser. F5 Shape Security has a normal dashboard. We are doing F5 Shape Security migrations for 30 customers. F5 Shape Security uses Javascript. For a lot of competitors, the Javascript can be reverse-engineered by attackers to bypass the protection. F5 Shape Security has machine learning authentication of the Java script. If you had hacked it, the encryption would have been changed. It's really hard for attackers to reverse engineer the F5 Shape Security JavaScript. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
reviewer1331304 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Of Research And Development at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Automated threat intelligence and flow-based mitigation have improved our DDoS defense
A very useful feature in Arbor DDoS is its ability to send flow spec announcements to routers. For example, if it is clear that a Layer 3 or Layer 4 attack is occurring and the attack pattern is identified through source and destination IP addresses and ports, you can generate flow spec filters. These filters are transferred through BGP to border routers, which automatically build filters, mitigating the attack even at the network's boundary and preventing it from reaching the TMS. This allows the TMS to focus on other tasks. This is a highly effective feature that can mitigate huge volumetric attacks; for example, we experienced a 32-gigabit attack, and all those 32 gigabits were dropped by our border routers, not by Arbor DDoS itself. The flow spec announcement was generated by Arbor DDoS, and as far as I know, the same technology is used by Radware, but it comes under a different feature and a different license. At the time, we were told that flow spec mitigation was an additional very expensive license to purchase from Radware, while Radware included everything in one package.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"F5 Shape Security's most valuable feature is performance."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of configuration."
"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."
"Arbor is a great network service solution."
"Reporting is quite good. There are several pages of reporting on DDoS attacks, and you can find all the details that you need."
"The AI capabilities and anomaly detection using machine learning modules like isolation forests and auto-encoders are the most effective in mitigating DDoS attacks."
"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."
"The analytics part of Arbor DDoS is great, and we are satisfied with the reporting and analytics part, especially the new version."
"The ability to correlate Arbor managed objects with internet services deployed accurately profiles traffic and makes coordinating appropriate mitigation response simple."
"The solution is easy to use."
 

Cons

"I want the solution's custom exclusion rules to be more granular."
"The tool's price is high."
"An improvement to Arbor DDoS would be to make evaluation licenses and virtual machines available."
"An improvement would be to provide information on how pricing is done on different customer levels (e.g. is it done per gig or bandwidth?)."
"This is a disadvantage of Arbor DDoS, as it operates merely as a flow collector, generating alerts only after a violation occurs."
"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."
"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."
"We need a SaaS model for the solution."
"There is some room for AI to take place."
"Arbor's SSL decryption is confusing and needs external cards to be installed in the devices. This is not the best solution from an architectural point of view for protecting HTTPS and every other protocol that is SSL encrypted."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is moderately priced."
"The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is expensive when compared to other tools."
"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 is a little high."
"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."
"We do not use the Arbor Cloud DDoS solution because it is too costly."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Healthcare Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Retailer
5%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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 solutions, Imperva is a great choice.
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 prefer Arbor.
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 that prices are very high.
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Wells Fargo, Loblaw, JetBlue, Zoosk
Xtel Communications
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