Fastly vs Fortinet FortiDDoS comparison

Fastly and Fortinet are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Fastly is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.5, while Fortinet is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.0. Fastly holds a 2.2% mindshare in DDOS, compared to Fortinet’s 2.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Fastly users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Fortinet users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Fastly and Fortinet FortiDDoS compete in the network performance and security sector. Fastly seems to have an edge in pricing and support, whereas Fortinet FortiDDoS leads in advanced security features.

Features: Fastly offers benefits such as real-time analytics, edge computing resources, and CDN capabilities. Fortinet FortiDDoS provides innovative DDoS protection, multi-layer security architecture, and anomaly detection.

Room for Improvement: Fastly could enhance its zero-trust solutions, interface customization, and API functionalities. Fortinet FortiDDoS could improve its configuration complexity, reporting capabilities, and network visibility features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly's deployment is developer-friendly, focusing on flexibility and scalability, whereas Fortinet FortiDDoS offers a more structured deployment with detailed technical guidance and 24/7 support services.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly is noted for competitive pricing and promising performance-driven ROI. Fortinet FortiDDoS tends to have higher initial costs due to its robust security but is regarded for delivering ROI through its comprehensive protection against sophisticated attacks.

To learn more, read our detailed Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

April 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 May 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.6%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 2.2%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortinet FortiDDoS is 2.9%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

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Yazan Omar

Systems Engineer at aic²

An easy-to-use tool with great GUI

The product's initial setup phase was really easy. There is a lot of time involved in the testing phase and other processes related to the area of deployment, so it may take up to two weeks to deploy the solution. The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. One person is enough to take care of the deployment phase of the product. The person involved in the deployment phase needs to better understand topologies when dealing with Fortinet.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"The UI is good."

"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

"The technical support is good."

More Cloudflare pros

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

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

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

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

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

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

"The protection resources and the support are valuable features of the solution."

"The product allows the users to adjust the thresholds."

"The solution already has security profiles and it can protect from DDoS attacks and other kinds of attacks."

"Among its key features: Detects and mitigates DDoS attacks at L3 to L7; negligible to zero false-positives; Generates and sends reports without the need for an expensive third-party solution."

"The equipment works very well, and I have not encountered any issues with it. It is a good solution for my company."

"The most valuable feature is the cloud DDoS scrubbing capability."

"Packet inspection has been effective for mitigating DDoS attacks."

"The equipment works very well, and I have not encountered any issues with it."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS pros

Cons

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."

"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."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

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

"The pricing could be improved."

"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."

"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."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

More Cloudflare cons

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

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"Support is not that great."

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

"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."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"The main improvement would be to change the firewall model, however, currently, everything is fixed and working well."

"The primary area for improvement is the on-premises capacity limit, currently fixed at 10 GB."

"Alerts and reporting features must be improved."

"I find that there have been issues in the past year with the solution hanging. It freezes often."

"The tool needs to focus more on the area of application traffic management, where it currently has some shortcomings."

"The solution can be a little more user-friendly and it can be more affordable."

"The challenge lies within the customer environment, particularly in Brazil, where companies have stringent security requirements for implementing solutions."

"All the thresholds that need to be configured should be included in the default so that user will not forget or misconfigure."

More Fortinet FortiDDoS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"I give the price a five out of ten."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"We are using the free version."

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

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

"The price is reasonable."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"It is an expensive solution."

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

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

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

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

"It's quite pricey."

"The solution is reasonably priced."

"The product’s pricing needs improvement."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

18%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

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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?

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiDDoS?

The product's initial setup phase was really easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiDDoS?

Fortinet FortiDDoS offers lower costs compared to other solutions. The licensing costs are annually renewed.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 20% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Edgio vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Arbor DDoS vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 27% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 11% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 11% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 7% of the time

AWS Shield vs Fortinet FortiDDoS

Compared 7% of the time

More Fortinet FortiDDoS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

April 2025

Download Fastly product report

Buyer's Guide

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

March 2025

Download Fortinet FortiDDoS product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Fortinet DDoS, FortiDDos

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“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. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

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

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are ever-evolving and use a variety of technologies. To successfully combat these attacks, you need a dynamic, multi-layered security solution. FortiDDoS protects from both known and zero day attacks with very low latency. It’s easy to deploy and manage, and includes comprehensive reporting and analysis tools.

Fortinet

Sample Customers

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

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

Black Gold Regional Schools, Amadeus Hospitality, Jefferson County, Chunghwa Telecom, City of Boroondara, Dimension Data

Buyer's Guide

Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

April 2025

Free Report: Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS

Find out what your peers are saying about Fastly vs. Fortinet FortiDDoS and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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