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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

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ease of configuration."
"F5 Shape Security's most valuable feature is performance."
"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."
"The technical support of Arbor DDoS is good."
"Arbor is a great network service solution."
"The AI capabilities and anomaly detection using machine learning modules like isolation forests and auto-encoders are the most effective in mitigating DDoS attacks."
"Arbor DDoS's best feature is that we can put the certificates in, and it will look at layer seven and the encrypted traffic and do the required signaling."
"The solution is flexible, easy to implement and has an efficient technical support team."
"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 most valuable feature of Arbor DDoS is that it is based in most of the ISPs all over the world, and Egyptian ISPs are one of them."
 

Cons

"I want the solution's custom exclusion rules to be more granular."
"The tool's price is high."
"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."
"Because we had some routers that were somewhat old, they were not integrated with Arbor. They did not support the NetFlow version that Arbor was running. That was a challenge. We had to upgrade the routers. Some backward-compatibility would be helpful."
"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?)."
"A small improvement could be a better reporting system."
"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."
"For troubleshooting problems, it's not so intuitive. It's not straightforward. This is the core of their kernel, so they need to improve it a little bit... In F5 I have full control of everything."
"Arbor DDoS has some difficult pricing rules. For many different small features, we have to pay additional fees for every small feature."
"It is an expensive product, so there is room for improvement in terms of pricing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is moderately priced."
"As far as I know, they are the best in this sector, in DDoS protection. They know it, I know, because their service prices are too high. They provide cloud DDoS protection for ISPs, but that is also too expensive."
"Arbor is striking a good balance between pricing and what they deliver."
"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 of this solution is a little high in the African market, it should be lower."
"Start with a small license. Measure your bandwidth requirements."
"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."
"The licensing of a complete Arbor solution, including fire-walling and unified site management, can get expensive."
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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
Find out what your peers are saying about BioCatch, NICE, ThreatMetrix and others in Fraud Detection and Prevention. Updated: September 2026.
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