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F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs. NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

    Score9.6 out of 10
    N/AF5 states that the "brain" of the BIG-IP platform, Local Traffic Manager (LTM) intelligently manages network traffic so applications are always fast, available, and secure.N/A

    NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ANETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection security software offers protection across multiple layers of the OSI model. It provides security measures for Layer 2 (Data Link layer) through Layer 7 (Application layer), ensuring complete protection for network infrastructure.N/A
    Pricing
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Considered Both Products
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    NETSCOUT
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    48 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    43 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    46 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    37 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    39 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Cloudflare
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Azure Application Gateway
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Cloudflare
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    NetScaler
    Score8 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.6
    (49 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.7
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    9.5
    (27 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Likelihood to Recommend
    F5
    I mean the only reason we changed away from it was price and it just simply had to do with the licensing that Citrix was offering on the NetScalers. They had basically an all you can eat consumption license that we were easily inside of with all of our VDI usage, whereas with F5 we had to buy the hardware and we had to license the software. Any place you need to actually do traffic balancing at scale, it's a fantastic product. I couldn't recommend it highly enough. There's just some things that hardware SSL offload and hardware load balancing just simply can't be equal that I don't know if there's a better product on the market for that.
    Incentivized
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    NETSCOUT
    Arbor has the propensity to deal with even the larger firms. I have been using it for a year span and I don’t have any such complaint which is affecting us in a bad way. I can recommend this to all the companies who want to have a good network behavior analysis and to monitor the problems if there is any chance of it to occur and which has the potential to affect the whole working environment of the company.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    F5
    • Sure. It does load balancing fantastically. I mean, it's an industry standard product for that. We also use it for TLS offload for applications. Those are the two main use cases for that. We do also use some of the I rules for traffic filtering. We've used that in some of the external facing services. It does a really nice job with that. It's a little bit complicated sometimes and some of the Cipher Suite stuff is interesting.
    Incentivized
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    NETSCOUT
    • Arbor's layer 7 countermeasures are very good out of the box, but it is very easy to reconfigure values and see the impact in real-time.
    • Peakflow SP provides fairly detailed traffic analysis and breakdown for top-N data such as top talkers, top ASNs, top ports and so on. They offer "SP Insight" as a product to build in more powerful reporting on the already-collected metrics with an interface very similar to Kibana or one of its many forks. We are not licensed for that so I can't speak to its capabilities.
    • Arbor allows for a good amount of automation. Fast flood detection ensures that if pre-determined thresholds are quickly exceeded, preconfigured mitigations can be started or in the event of an extremely large volumetric attack you can trigger an Arbor Cloud (sold separately) mitigation or a remotely-triggered blackhole announcement to drop traffic to the attacked destination IP address(es) upstream.
    • ATAC (Arbor support) is very helpful. The level of support our organization maintains covers ATAC performing all update functions to all Arbor appliances - SP and TMS.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    F5
    • Some of the stuff you have to dive into the CLI to really use, I'm going to reach back to the previous employer for this. So I had a much greater degree of involvement with it at that point in time for, I was the crypto guy at the company and I had to design all the cipher suites that we actually implemented on our front end banking products. So in order to do that, I had to dive into it, download all the Cipher suites, figure out the actual order of operation for them, how they were selected because I wanted to design the Cipher Suites to actually provide a specific customer experience for the types of connections that our customers were likely to initiate. Getting at that information was a giant PITA. It was poorly documented at the time. I'm not sure if it's documented any better now. Every time the software changed or got upgraded, made your version, I'd have to do it all over again because the upgrades to the stack, which looked like it was based on open SSL, but it was heavily modified with a different syntax. Oh yay. That's fun too. So I had to write giant documents describing all of the ciphers that I was designing for this because it just kept changing all the time. So I didn't care for that aspect of it. Traffic management does a great job for that.
    Incentivized
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    NETSCOUT
    • Arbor is a highly expensive company. this was the major reason behind not going for the Arbor sightline in the first place. Although its features are good but the cost is unjustifiable.
    • The implementation and the understanding of this tool are full of complexity and perplexity.
    • I am looking forward to having a new update on it. They used to update their versions quite frequently but it's been a long time they haven’t updated or maybe it is not in their priority lists right now.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    F5
    F5 has always been one of the best products we have in the data center. We had few issues with the BUG and Code upgrades but the main use cases for F5 was always top notch. From High availability to Globally load balancing applications across multiple data centers and muti cloud environments.
    Incentivized
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    NETSCOUT
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    F5
    I am very comfortable with this product not only configuring it but automating it as well. There are not many configurations or situations where I do not know how to implement it on the device. I find it straightforward and easy to use.
    Incentivized
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    NETSCOUT
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    F5
    Good after sales support if one purchased direct support from F5.
    Incentivized
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    NETSCOUT
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    F5
    Easy to implement if one had attended F5 Training for Local Traffic Manager (LTM).
    Incentivized
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    NETSCOUT
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    F5
    F5 is doing its specialized function. There is no other product that can beat them. We are extremely happy with the product. Especially on load balancing, traffic redirecting TLS encryption, and SNI modification. We will continue to explore F5's product, especially on the public cloud side. e.g. NGINX.
    Incentivized
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    NETSCOUT
    We evaluated Corero and a number of external scrubbing services. In the POC, we found Corero's mitigation capabilities to extremely limited beyond blocking common traffic types at preconfigured rates. It's not impossible to configure custom mitigation methods and countermeasures, but it requires a deep understanding of BPF and bytecode, where Arbor is checkboxes, radio buttons, and dialog buttons that all sit next to a graph showing traffic dropped and permitted by the current settings. I'm not going to enumerate each of the cloud services evaluated because the decision came down to the same reasoning. The amount of traffic we receive is enough that it would be prohibitively expensive for our use case.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    F5
    • It has allowed us to let application developers know that the issues are with their application and not due to the network, because of where it sits. This has been invaluable when troubleshooting issues when they arise. Knowing whether or not traffic is even hitting the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), either ingress or outgoing. If the Dev's information is not even making it to the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), we can quickly tell them and let them figure the issue out on their own, saving the rest of the Network Team from getting that 2am call.
    Incentivized
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    NETSCOUT
    • Arbor is good in empower us to monitor the issues in the network.
    • We can get better traffic analytics and reports are quite detailed.
    • The price is quite high which makes it a little hard choice for us.
    Incentivized
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