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NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection & Mitigation vs Prolexic comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 12, 2026

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

NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protect...
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Prolexic
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection & Mitigation is 5.5%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prolexic is 2.5%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Arbor DDoS5.5%
Prolexic2.5%
Other92.0%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user553896 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Jan 13, 2017
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Gavin Pinho - PeerSpot reviewer
Privacy & Risk Management Vice President, Information Security at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Has faced challenges with bot detection while benefiting from strong threat monitoring and compliance support
Akamai's most valuable features include being industry recognized and PCI compliant, which is really great; their cloud is PCI compliant, and having a vendor that is PCI certified is crucial for organizations focused on PCI compliance. We utilize the real-time monitoring of the solution. Real-time monitoring helps us identify network vulnerabilities by allowing us to see a spike in traffic and understand the traffic levels compared to this time last month or last week. If we notice a sudden increase, we investigate further to determine if it indicates a DDoS attack or a card testing situation. In terms of threat detection capabilities, they are very good because Akamai has a SOC service that we have tapped into for active threat detection and threat hunting, and they monitor everything carefully 24/7. Scrubbing is done by Akamai as a backend service, and we utilize their SOC, which is a service that you pay additional fees for, allowing us to have our queries prioritized. Prolexic features help maintain business continuity during high-volume attacks by having built-in threat detection capabilities in its bot detection and other functionalities, as attacks usually occur through intelligent bots trying to infiltrate the system.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Arbor DDoS offers security features that automatically detect and prevent DDoS attacks."
"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."
"We have gained from this product, and our customers are also satisfied with this solution."
"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 solution is flexible, easy to implement and has an efficient technical support team."
"In terms of Arbor DDoS's reporting and analytics, Arbor DDoS is superior to Radware, especially when comparing it to the Radware model which I used previously."
"When there was an attack, the attack was contained only on the IPs under attack, the rest of the network was not impacted, and that is the most important part."
"The solution does not have hardware or maintenance requirements and is very easy to scale."
"Prolexic technical support is second to none."
"Akamai's most valuable features include being industry recognized and PCI compliant, which is really great; their cloud is PCI compliant, and having a vendor that is PCI certified is crucial for organizations focused on PCI compliance."
"The support from Akamai is great, and they provide excellent information and mitigation services."
"They've scrubbed DDoS traffic that was blasting us offline, thus allowing legitimate traffic through and letting our service return online."
 

Cons

"When it comes to some false positives, we need to tweak the system from time to time. There is room for improvement when it comes to the actual mitigation because of some false positives."
"Arbor DDoS could improve out-of-the-box reporting, it could be better."
"The product could have end-to-end platform visibility."
"We need a SaaS model for the solution."
"There are some price issues with scalability, but technically speaking, the solution is fully scalable."
"Implementation could be better."
"The solution's IT support needs improvement."
"With Arbor DDoS, its integration issues with other technologies or other vendors' technologies is an area of concern that could be improved."
"It's expensive, though."
"The reports provided don’t give detailed information about DDoS mitigations, bandwidth utilization, etc."
"The solution needs additional product options for small and medium enterprises."
"In bot management, there are times when attackers find ways to bypass Akamai, which is a continuously evolving challenge."
"The web portal for checking status and traffic needs improvements."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm a technical guy. But I know it's expensive compared to its competitors. After you have the on-premise solution, for your solution to be effective you have to subscribe to an "upper level," so there's another cost. There is also a subscription to cloud services, which is another cost."
"Arbor DDoS is quite expensive, but all these solutions are expensive because they deal with confidential information."
"Our customers always complain about the price of the product."
"You need to find a way to get a good offering from Arbor by negotiating a price. That is the challenge."
"Start with a small license. Measure your bandwidth requirements."
"The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is expensive when compared to other tools."
"It is an expensive product. I use this product for its different features."
"Arbor's products are very expensive. Their competitors are cheap when compared with Arbor."
"The pricing is a pay-as-you-go model that is charged by the hour."
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Answers from the Community

it_user553896 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Jan 13, 2017
Jan 13, 2017
Both Prolexic and Arbor are OK solutions. Both have a very limited number of PoPs (Only 4-6 global locations, adds significant latency) and both have trouble reacting to attacks quickly and automatically (without human intervention). Also both will have trouble handling Application layer attacks over TLS. Arbor will also requires on-premise equipment which is a lot of hassle and doesn't scale....
2 out of 11 answers
Dec 14, 2016
Hi Dennis, Will you reply to the underneath please. Rgds, Arthur
it_user476130 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works with 501-1,000 employees
Dec 14, 2016
Hi, I would suggest looking at Radware and their solutions as they provide solutions in this space. This includes Cloud WAF, Always-on Cloud DDoS Protection, On-Demand Cloud DDoS Protection and Hybrid Cloud DDoS Protection consisting of both On-Premise mitigation and On-Demand Cloud DDoS. Prolexic – use Radware Attack Mitigation Solutions as part of their DDoS Mitigation solution. This same Attack Mitigation solution is OEM’d by both Checkpoint – Checkpoint DDoS Protector, and Cisco – integrated into the Cisco Firepower 9300 and 41xx Platforms. Note – I am a Radware employee. Thanks Dean,
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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.
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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
What needs improvement with Akamai Prolexic Routed?
For the DDoS protection, I don't see any areas for improvement because they are pretty solid there, though in bot management, there are times when attackers find ways to bypass Akamai, which is a c...
What is your primary use case for Akamai Prolexic Routed?
The main use case for DDoS protection is to mitigate risks, and there are multiple ways Akamai provides DDoS protection; one is application-based DDoS protection and the other is volumetric DDoS pr...
 

Also Known As

Arbor Networks SP, Arbor Networks TMS, Arbor Cloud for ENT
Akamai Prolexic Routed
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Xtel Communications
Fidor Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection & Mitigation vs. Prolexic and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
916,240 professionals have used our research since 2012.