The Pricing Comparison Table
Before diving into each vendor, here is the summary. All pricing reflects publicly available data as of May 2026. Enterprise custom pricing is estimated based on published case studies, customer reports, and industry analyst data.
| Vendor | Starting Price | Model | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare (Free/Pro) | Free / $20/mo | Per-site, tiered | Websites, L7 protection |
| Cloudflare (Business) | $200/mo | Per-site | Small business websites |
| Cloudflare (Magic Transit) | ~$5,000+/mo | Enterprise custom | Network-layer, own IP space |
| AWS Shield Advanced | $3,000/mo | Flat + data transfer | AWS-native workloads |
| Azure DDoS Protection | $2,944/mo | Flat + overage | Azure-native workloads |
| Google Cloud Armor | $0.75/million req | Per-request + rules | GCP workloads, L7 |
| Akamai Prolexic | ~$10,000+/mo | Enterprise custom | Large enterprise, global scrubbing |
| Arbor/Netscout | $50,000+ upfront | Hardware + licensing | ISPs, large networks |
| Radware DefensePro | $30,000+ upfront | Hardware + licensing | On-premise, data centers |
| Corero SmartWall | Custom | Hardware + licensing | ISPs, real-time inline |
| FastNetMon Advanced | $115+/mo | Per-host license | Network monitoring, flow analysis |
| Flowtriq | $9.99/node/mo | Per-node or per-source | Bare metal, hybrid, multi-cloud |
Now let us break down what you actually get at each price point, including the hidden costs that do not appear on the pricing page.
Cloudflare
Free and Pro Tiers
Cloudflare's free tier includes unlimited, unmetered DDoS mitigation for websites proxied through their network. This is genuinely free and genuinely effective for L3/L4 volumetric attacks against web properties. The Pro tier at $20/month adds a WAF with managed rulesets and faster support response. For a single website that only needs basic DDoS protection, Cloudflare's free tier is hard to beat on value.
The catch: Cloudflare's free and Pro tiers only protect HTTP/HTTPS traffic that is proxied through their network. If you run game servers, VoIP, custom TCP/UDP services, email infrastructure, or anything that is not a website, the free tier does not apply. You also get no visibility into attack details beyond basic analytics. There are no PCAPs, no per-second metrics, and no forensic data.
Business Tier ($200/month)
The Business tier adds advanced DDoS analytics, custom WAF rules, and SLA guarantees. At $200/month per site, it is a reasonable investment for businesses that depend on a single web property. But costs scale linearly with the number of sites: 10 sites means $2,000/month.
Enterprise and Magic Transit ($5,000+/month)
Cloudflare Magic Transit extends DDoS protection to your entire network by routing your IP prefixes through Cloudflare's network. This protects non-web services, custom protocols, and your entire IP range. Pricing is custom and starts around $5,000/month for smaller deployments, scaling to $20,000+ for large networks. Magic Transit requires that you own your own IP space and can announce BGP prefixes, which limits it to organizations with at least a /24.
Hidden costs: Magic Transit pricing is bandwidth-based, and overages can be significant during sustained attacks. Some customers report bill surprises during attack months. Enterprise support is an additional cost for dedicated account teams.
AWS Shield
Shield Standard (Free)
AWS Shield Standard is included with every AWS account at no additional cost. It provides automatic protection against common L3/L4 attacks targeting AWS resources. You get no visibility, no alerts, no forensics, and no control. It works silently in the background, and you have no way to know when it activated or what it mitigated. For underwriter purposes, Shield Standard is not a DDoS detection capability because it provides no evidence.
Shield Advanced ($3,000/month)
AWS Shield Advanced costs a flat $3,000 per month with a one-year commitment, plus data transfer fees during DDoS events. The flat fee covers all AWS resources in your account, which is good for large deployments. You get 24/7 access to the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT), advanced attack visibility in the Shield console, and cost protection that credits you for scaling costs incurred during attacks.
What you get for $3,000/month: Automatic L3/L4/L7 detection and mitigation for AWS resources. Enhanced visibility with attack summaries. DRT access for manual escalation. WAF integration for L7 rules. Cost protection credits.
Hidden costs: The $3,000/month is the floor. Data transfer out (DTO) charges still apply, and during a volumetric attack, DTO can add thousands to your bill. Shield Advanced cost protection credits help, but the process for claiming them is not automatic and requires engaging AWS support. You also pay separately for WAF rules ($5/rule/month plus request charges) and any CloudFront or ALB resources required. A realistic all-in cost for Shield Advanced with WAF and CloudFront is $4,000 to $6,000/month for a typical deployment.
Lock-in factor: Shield Advanced only protects AWS resources. If you run a hybrid or multi-cloud environment, you need a separate solution for everything outside AWS.
Azure DDoS Protection
Azure DDoS Protection costs $2,944 per month (billed as a fixed monthly fee) and covers up to 100 public IP resources. Additional public IPs are charged at approximately $29.50 per resource per month. Like AWS Shield Advanced, the flat fee model is advantageous for large deployments but expensive if you only have a few resources to protect.
What you get: Automatic L3/L4 detection and mitigation. Attack analytics and reporting. Rapid response support from Microsoft's DDoS experts. Integration with Azure Monitor and Azure Sentinel. Cost protection for resource scaling during attacks.
Hidden costs: The $2,944/month covers detection and standard mitigation only. If you need more than 100 protected resources, per-resource charges add up. Application-layer (L7) protection requires Azure WAF, which is priced separately based on gateway hours and capacity units. Realistic all-in cost for a medium deployment: $3,500 to $5,000/month.
Lock-in factor: Azure-only. No protection for on-premise, bare-metal, or multi-cloud resources.
Google Cloud Armor
Google Cloud Armor takes a different pricing approach: per-request and per-rule rather than a flat monthly fee. Security policies cost $5/month each, rules cost $1/month each, and request evaluation is $0.75 per million requests. For low-traffic sites, this is very affordable. For high-traffic sites, costs scale quickly.
Adaptive Protection (Google's ML-based L7 detection) is available on the Enterprise tier, which requires a Cloud Armor Enterprise subscription at approximately $3,000/month plus per-request fees. This puts the total cost in a similar range to AWS Shield Advanced and Azure DDoS Protection for comparable functionality.
Hidden costs: Request-based pricing means costs spike during attacks when request volume is highest. A 1-million request per second L7 attack lasting one hour generates 3.6 billion requests, which at standard rates would cost $2,700 in request evaluation fees for that single attack. Google provides some cost protection through their DDoS pricing guarantee, but reading the fine print is essential.
Akamai Prolexic
Akamai Prolexic is the established enterprise choice for dedicated DDoS scrubbing. Pricing is entirely custom and negotiated through sales, but industry sources and customer reports consistently place entry-level Prolexic contracts at $10,000 to $15,000 per month, with large enterprise deployments running $30,000 to $100,000+ per month depending on clean bandwidth requirements and the number of protected prefixes.
What you get: Dedicated scrubbing centers with over 20 Tbps of total capacity. BGP-based traffic diversion during attacks. 24/7 SOC with human analysts. Sub-10-second mitigation SLA for known attack vectors. Comprehensive post-attack reports.
What you do not get: Visibility into your traffic when you are not under attack. Prolexic is a mitigation service, not a continuous monitoring platform. Between attacks, you have no per-second traffic analysis, no baseline modeling, and no detection. You rely on Akamai's SOC to notice when an attack starts, or you need a separate detection solution feeding alerts to trigger Prolexic diversion.
Hidden costs: Prolexic contracts typically include a clean bandwidth commitment. If your legitimate traffic exceeds that commitment, you pay overages. Onboarding and professional services are additional. Some contracts include per-mitigation-event fees for attacks exceeding certain thresholds. Annual commitments with auto-renewal are standard.
Arbor/Netscout (Sightline + TMS)
Arbor (now Netscout) is the legacy market leader for ISP and large enterprise DDoS detection and mitigation. Arbor Sightline provides flow-based detection, and the Threat Mitigation System (TMS) provides inline scrubbing. These are hardware appliances with software licensing.
Pricing: Hardware costs start at approximately $50,000 for a basic Sightline deployment and $75,000+ for TMS appliances. Annual software licensing and support adds 15% to 20% of the hardware cost per year. A production deployment with redundancy typically runs $150,000 to $500,000 upfront plus $30,000 to $100,000 per year in ongoing licensing and support.
What you get: The most comprehensive flow-based detection platform in the market with decades of refinement. Deep NetFlow/sFlow/IPFIX analysis. Extensive protocol classification. Integration with virtually every network equipment vendor. The industry benchmark for ISP-scale detection.
What you do not get: Speed. Arbor's flow-based detection operates on the export intervals of your routers, which means detection latency is typically 30 seconds to 5 minutes depending on flow export configuration. For organizations where sub-second detection matters, Arbor's architecture imposes a fundamental speed limit. Deployment also requires significant professional services and typically takes weeks to months.
Radware DefensePro
Radware DefensePro is an inline hardware appliance that provides real-time DDoS detection and mitigation. It sits in the network path and inspects traffic as it passes through, enabling immediate filtering without traffic diversion.
Pricing: DefensePro appliances start at approximately $30,000 for entry-level models and scale to $200,000+ for high-capacity units. Annual licensing, signature updates, and support add 15% to 25% of the hardware cost per year. A redundant pair of mid-range appliances with licensing runs approximately $100,000 to $150,000 upfront plus $20,000 to $35,000 annually.
What you get: Real-time inline detection and mitigation with low latency. Behavioral analysis for zero-day attack detection. SSL/TLS inspection capability. Granular traffic management and rate limiting.
Trade-offs: Inline deployment means the appliance is in the data path. If it fails, traffic stops unless you have bypass mechanisms. Capacity is limited by the hardware throughput of the appliance. When attack traffic exceeds the appliance capacity, it cannot absorb the volume. Radware offers a cloud scrubbing service (DefensePipe) for overflow, but that is an additional cost.
Corero SmartWall
Corero SmartWall is purpose-built for ISPs and hosting providers, offering inline, real-time DDoS protection at the network edge. SmartWall is deployed at peering points and network boundaries to filter attack traffic before it enters the network.
Pricing: Entirely custom based on deployment size and throughput requirements. Industry sources estimate entry-level SmartWall deployments at $50,000 to $100,000+ with annual licensing on top. Corero positions itself for high-throughput environments where inline filtering at 100 Gbps+ is required. For smaller deployments, the cost-per-protected-Gbps is high.
What you get: Sub-second inline mitigation. Automatic attack detection and filtering without manual intervention. Designed for always-on protection rather than on-demand scrubbing. Strong integration with service provider infrastructure.
Trade-offs: Corero is optimized for ISP and hosting provider use cases. Enterprise customers without large network edge deployments may find the solution oversized for their needs. The hardware-dependent architecture means capacity upgrades require new appliances.
FastNetMon
FastNetMon is a software-based network monitoring and DDoS detection tool. FastNetMon Advanced (the commercial version) provides flow-based and packet-based detection with BGP blackhole and FlowSpec mitigation integration.
Pricing: FastNetMon Advanced starts at $115/month for a single-host license. Multi-host licenses scale based on the number of monitored hosts or network size. Enterprise licenses with additional features (multi-tenant support, advanced analytics, priority support) run higher. There is also a free open-source version (FastNetMon Community) with limited functionality.
What you get: Software-based detection that runs on your own hardware. NetFlow/sFlow/IPFIX analysis plus optional packet capture. BGP blackhole and FlowSpec automation. Threshold-based and behavioral detection. A solid tool for network operators who want detection without hardware appliance costs.
Trade-offs: Detection speed depends on flow export intervals from your routers, which typically means 30-second to 5-minute detection latency for flow-based monitoring. The packet capture mode is faster but requires dedicated hardware with span ports or tap infrastructure. The interface is functional but not polished compared to cloud-native platforms. Documentation can be sparse for advanced configurations.
Flowtriq
Flowtriq is a cloud-native DDoS detection platform that supports both agent-based and flow-based monitoring. Agents installed on servers or network devices analyze traffic per second, providing sub-second detection. Flow sources ingest NetFlow/sFlow/IPFIX for broader network visibility.
Pricing: $9.99 per node per month for agent-based monitoring. From $19 per source per month for flow-based monitoring. No minimum commitment. No overage charges. No per-attack fees. Free 7-day trial with full functionality.
What you get: Sub-second detection with per-second traffic analysis. Protocol-level attack classification across 30+ vectors. PCAP forensics for every detected incident. Automated incident reports. Webhook-based mitigation automation (BGP blackhole, FlowSpec, custom integrations). Multi-tenant dashboards. Full REST API. Alerting via email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhook, and more.
What this costs in practice: A 10-node deployment costs $99.90/month, or $1,198.80/year. A 50-node deployment costs $499.50/month. A hybrid deployment with 20 agents and 5 flow sources costs $294.80/month. These are all-in costs with no hidden fees, no overage charges, and no minimum commitments.
Trade-offs: Flowtriq is a detection and analysis platform. It does not operate a scrubbing network. Mitigation is handled through integrations with your existing infrastructure (BGP automation, firewall APIs, upstream scrubbing services). If you need a turnkey scrubbing solution, you will need to pair Flowtriq with a mitigation provider. For organizations that already have mitigation infrastructure and need faster, more granular detection, this is an advantage because you are not paying for scrubbing capacity you may already have.
Hidden Costs to Watch For
Across all vendors, several hidden cost patterns emerge repeatedly. Ask about each one explicitly during your evaluation:
- Overage charges during attacks. Bandwidth-based and request-based pricing models charge more when you are under attack. This is the exact moment when you need protection most, and some vendors will charge you extra for receiving it. Ask whether costs increase during attack events.
- Per-attack or per-mitigation fees. Some scrubbing services charge per mitigation event, per diversion, or per incident. If you face 10+ attacks per month (which is common for many organizations), per-event fees add up quickly.
- Minimum bandwidth commitments. Scrubbing services often require you to commit to a minimum clean bandwidth tier. If your traffic grows beyond that tier, you pay overages. If your traffic is below the tier, you are paying for unused capacity.
- Professional services and onboarding. Hardware appliances and enterprise cloud services frequently require paid professional services for deployment, configuration, and tuning. These one-time fees can add $10,000 to $50,000+ on top of the product cost.
- Annual commitment with auto-renewal. Many enterprise contracts auto-renew for another year if you do not provide 60 to 90 days written notice before the renewal date. Read the termination clause carefully.
- Support tiers. Basic support is often included, but priority support, 24/7 support, or dedicated account teams are additional. For DDoS protection, where response speed matters, basic support may not be sufficient.
- Feature gating. Some vendors include detection in the base price but charge extra for forensics, PCAPs, API access, or multi-tenancy. Ensure the features you need are included in the quoted price.
The cheapest DDoS protection is the one that actually detects attacks before they cause damage. A $3,000/month service with 5-minute detection may cost more in downtime than a $100/month service with sub-second detection. Always calculate total cost of ownership including expected downtime costs.
What You Get at Each Price Point
Here is an honest assessment of what each price tier actually delivers:
Free to $25/month
Cloudflare Free/Pro and basic monitoring tools. Good for single websites that need L7 DDoS protection. No visibility into network-level attacks, no forensics, no PCAP capture. Sufficient for personal projects and small websites. Not sufficient for business-critical infrastructure or insurance documentation.
$100 to $500/month
FastNetMon Advanced, Flowtriq (small to medium deployments), and Cloudflare Business. This tier gives you real detection capabilities: attack classification, alerting, and basic automation. Flowtriq adds sub-second detection, PCAP forensics, and incident reports at this price point, which is unusual for the tier. Good for startups, SMBs, and small infrastructure teams.
$2,000 to $5,000/month
AWS Shield Advanced, Azure DDoS Protection, Google Cloud Armor Enterprise, and Flowtriq (large deployments). Cloud-native protection for cloud-native workloads. Strong integration with the respective cloud platform. Detection is good for volumetric attacks but varies for application-layer. Forensic capabilities are improving but still lack packet-level depth compared to dedicated tools. Best for organizations heavily invested in a single cloud provider.
$5,000 to $15,000/month
Cloudflare Magic Transit and Akamai Prolexic entry level. Full network-layer protection with dedicated scrubbing infrastructure. This is where you get always-on or on-demand traffic scrubbing with global capacity. Best for organizations with their own IP space that need to protect non-web services.
$50,000+ upfront
Arbor/Netscout, Radware DefensePro, and Corero SmartWall. Hardware appliances for ISPs, large hosting providers, and enterprises with significant network infrastructure. The most comprehensive solutions available, but the cost, deployment complexity, and maintenance overhead are significant. Best for organizations operating their own network edge or running as a service provider.
Get enterprise-grade detection at startup-friendly pricing. Flowtriq delivers sub-second detection, PCAP forensics, automated incident reports, and webhook-based mitigation automation starting at $9.99/node/month. No overage charges. No per-attack fees. No minimum commitment. Start your free 7-day trial and see what you have been missing.