F5 BIG-IP vs. NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
F5 BIG-IP
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
F5 BIG-IP software from Seattle-based F5 Networks is a load balancing and application protection solution suite available on cloud or via virtual editions, on a subscription or perpetual licensing basis.N/A
NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
NETSCOUT 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-IPNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
F5 BIG-IPNETSCOUT 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-IPNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
Best Alternatives
F5 BIG-IPNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Akamai App & API Protector
Akamai App & API Protector
Score 8.5 out of 10
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User Ratings
F5 BIG-IPNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(265 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(12 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.7
(140 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.6
(12 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
F5 BIG-IPNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
Likelihood to Recommend
F5
LTM's scope of action goes beyond load balancing. Tools for control, governance, and application enhancement, as well as APIs like iRULE, are very important for day-to-day operations. Furthermore, the F5 BIG-IP WAF offers exceptional security. Advanced firewall and routing functionalities are helpful in more complex environments. O LTM possui um escopo de atuacao que vai alem do balanceamento. Ferramentas para controle, governanca e aprimoramento de aplicacoes e API como iRULE sao muito iportantes para o dia a dia a operacao. Alem disso o WAF do F5 BIG-IP tem uma qualidade de seguranca exceptional. As funcionalidades avancadas de firewall e roteamento ajudam em ambientes mais complexos. This review was originally written in Portuguese and has been translated into English using a third-party translation tool. While we strive for accuracy, some nuances or meanings may not be perfectly captured.
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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.
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Pros
F5
  • My company is kind of like it's a safe thing if you log in and you provide another second login to get the code to log in, confirm that it's a correct that you are logged into the account and it just provides more for the company
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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.
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Cons
F5
  • I think a couple of challenges. One, I mean the cost, it's not an inexpensive product, but I think it's probably parity with value, maybe a little on the pricey side of things.
  • As far as features and what we'd like to see more cloud native type experiences like where NGINX and F5 kind of come together, we're moving more of the cloud just like everybody else, and it's a little clunky right now.
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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.
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Likelihood to Renew
F5
Stability of product and easy way to have account manager contact. F5 support team is also always available to help with major issues. Last year during the major OS upgrade F5 team and F5 leadership always shared clear information and F5 team was dedicated to help us to have it closed in record time
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NETSCOUT
No answers on this topic
Usability
F5
It is a good product to use but right now it is lacking the automation of certificates, management of iRules and automation of certain configuration. Also creating an APM policy from scratch with many APM agents take a long time due to slow load times of the GUI and the need to create everything from scratch every time. It's tough to reuse the configuration.
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NETSCOUT
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
F5
I've supported F5 for three different companies. Our F5 support has been very consistent, regardless who the customer is. F5 technicians are very experienced and provide good support, even when issues are more related to knowledge than they are with the ability of the product to do what you need it to do.
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NETSCOUT
No answers on this topic
In-Person Training
F5
Practical cases and hands on , many hours of training with tipical cases
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NETSCOUT
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
F5
implementation is fine
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NETSCOUT
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
F5
We are recently not evaluating, but we have started the deployment for WAF and we're using GTM, LTM, you name it. F5, we are using all of them.
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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.
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Return on Investment
F5
  • The F5 BIG-IP has improved all our load balancing needs, we have over 400 LTM VIPs in our environment this all use to be done with DNS round Robin configurations.
  • we have created unique APM solutions to support our external customer base
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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.
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ScreenShots