The Context for This Comparison
This comparison comes up constantly in infrastructure conversations, and it often starts from a false premise: that AWS Shield and Flowtriq are competing for the same use case. They are not, not entirely. Understanding what each product was designed to do makes the decision clearer and prevents you from buying the wrong thing for your situation.
AWS Shield is a network-layer protection service built into the AWS infrastructure. Flowtriq is a detection and observability platform that runs on your servers regardless of where they live. The overlap is real — both detect DDoS attacks — but the approach, scope, and data you get from each are fundamentally different.
AWS Shield Standard: What You Get for Free
AWS Shield Standard is included with every AWS account at no additional cost. It provides automatic, always-on protection against the most common network and transport layer attacks targeting AWS resources: SYN/UDP floods, reflection attacks, and other volumetric attacks that target EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, CloudFront distributions, and Route 53.
The critical word there is "targeting AWS resources." Shield Standard only protects traffic that flows through AWS infrastructure. It does not protect a bare-metal server at Hetzner, a VPS at Vultr, or an on-premises datacenter. If your infrastructure is entirely on AWS, Shield Standard covers the basics for free.
What Shield Standard does not give you:
- Any alerting or notification when an attack occurs. AWS may be mitigating an attack against your EC2 instance and you will not receive a single notification unless you have set up your own monitoring.
- Detailed logs or data about the attack. You cannot query what attack type was detected, what the source IPs were, or what the peak traffic volume was.
- Attack classification. You will not know whether it was a SYN flood, UDP amplification, or ICMP flood.
- Historical incident records. There is no dashboard showing past events.
- Anything about traffic that does not exceed AWS's internal mitigation thresholds. Small and medium attacks may be absorbed silently without any record.
Shield Standard's mitigation is real and provides meaningful protection against large volumetric attacks on AWS resources. Its weakness is not protection — it is visibility. You are flying blind about your own attack history.
AWS Shield Advanced: $3,000/Month and What You Actually Get
Shield Advanced starts at $3,000 per month with a 12-month commitment, plus data transfer fees. This price covers your entire AWS organization if you have Business or Enterprise support and consolidate billing. For large enterprises with significant AWS spend and a history of targeted attacks, this cost can be justified. For most other organizations, it is hard to rationalize.
What Shield Advanced adds over Standard:
- DDoS cost protection: If an attack causes AWS charges to spike (EC2 auto-scaling, data transfer overages), Shield Advanced will credit those charges. This is the primary financial justification for most organizations that subscribe.
- AWS Shield Response Team (SRT) access: 24/7 access to AWS engineers who can help configure custom mitigations during an active attack. Response time is not guaranteed.
- Detailed attack diagnostics: Via AWS WAF and CloudWatch, you can get metrics on detected attacks including attack vector, start/end time, and estimated magnitude.
- Proactive engagement: AWS will contact you when they detect an attack that may impact your availability, rather than requiring you to open a support case first.
- Global Threat Environment dashboard: A view of attack trends across the AWS network, not specific to your account.
The log fields Shield Advanced exposes through AWS WAF and CloudWatch include: attack start time, attack end time, attack vector (e.g., UDP_REFLECTION, SYN_FLOOD), attack magnitude in requests/second or packets/second, and the protected resource ARN. These are aggregated metrics, not raw packet data. You cannot download a PCAP from Shield Advanced.
What Flowtriq Gives You
Flowtriq is a detection platform, not a mitigation service. It does not absorb traffic — it watches your traffic at the server level, detects anomalies, classifies attacks, and gives your team the data and alerts needed to respond. This distinction matters.
The data fields in a Flowtriq incident report include:
- Attack start time, end time, and total duration (second-level precision)
- Attack classification with confidence score: UDP flood, SYN flood, DNS amplification, NTP amplification, ICMP flood, HTTP flood, TCP ACK flood, and multi-vector combinations
- Peak PPS and peak Mbps with per-second time series data for the full incident duration
- Source IP distribution: top source IPs, source AS numbers, source country distribution, and source diversity score
- Target port(s) and protocol breakdown
- Average packet size during the attack period
- PCAP file of the first 60 seconds of attack traffic, downloadable from the incident page
- Comparison to historical baseline: how much the attack exceeded normal traffic in percentage terms
Flowtriq works on any Linux server with a network interface — EC2, bare metal, VPS, on-premises, edge nodes. There is no dependency on AWS or any specific cloud provider.
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To make the data gap concrete, here is what each product provides for the same hypothetical event: a 45-second UDP flood at 280,000 PPS targeting an EC2 instance.
AWS Shield Standard: No data. The attack is mitigated automatically. No log entry, no alert, no record in any dashboard. You may notice a brief latency spike in your application monitoring, or you may not notice at all.
AWS Shield Advanced: A CloudWatch metric shows an attack event with vector UDP_REFLECTION, approximate start time within a 5-minute window, and estimated magnitude. No source IPs, no per-second time series, no PCAP, no target port information. A support case can be opened to request additional detail from the SRT, with response time measured in hours.
Flowtriq: An alert fires within 2 seconds of attack onset. The incident record shows exact start/end times, 45-second duration, peak 280,000 PPS at 2:14:23 UTC, attack type UDP Flood (confidence 97%), top 10 source IPs and their AS numbers, target port 27015, average packet size 82 bytes, and a PCAP download. The alert was sent to Discord and email before the attack reached 5 seconds of duration.
Pricing Comparison
Pricing context matters for this comparison. AWS Shield Standard is free. AWS Shield Advanced is $3,000/month minimum with a 12-month commitment — $36,000/year minimum, before data transfer fees. Flowtriq is $9.99/node/month, or $7.99/node/month on annual billing. A 20-node deployment costs $199.80/month or $1,918.80/year.
The comparison is not really $9.99 vs $3,000. Shield Advanced's primary financial value proposition is cost protection against DDoS-induced AWS bills, not the detection data itself. If you run large EC2 auto-scaling groups and a volumetric attack could generate $50,000 in unexpected AWS charges, Shield Advanced's cost protection clause pays for itself in a single incident. If you do not have that exposure, the math is different.
Hybrid Deployments: Using Both
The most practical deployment for AWS-heavy organizations is to run Shield Advanced for cost protection and mitigation capacity, while running Flowtriq on every node for detection visibility and alerting. These products do not overlap in a meaningful way — Shield Advanced mitigates at the network edge before traffic reaches your instances; Flowtriq monitors what traffic does reach your instances and gives you the operational data that Shield Advanced lacks.
In this hybrid model, Shield Advanced handles the volumetric attacks large enough to cause billing exposure, while Flowtriq catches the smaller attacks that fall below Shield's internal action threshold, provides the per-second detection data your team needs for rapid response, and extends protection to any non-AWS infrastructure in your environment — bare-metal nodes, edge servers, or on-premises equipment that Shield cannot protect.
When to Use Shield vs When Flowtriq Is Enough
Choose Shield Advanced when:
- Your infrastructure is primarily AWS and you have significant auto-scaling exposure that could generate five-figure unexpected bills during a sustained attack.
- You need AWS SRT engagement for custom mitigation during attacks and have the budget for the retainer model.
- Regulatory or compliance requirements specifically mandate cloud-provider-managed DDoS protection.
Flowtriq alone is sufficient when:
- Your infrastructure includes non-AWS servers (bare metal, other cloud providers, on-premises) that need detection coverage.
- You need per-second detection data, attack classification, source analysis, and PCAP for incident response and forensics.
- You want to know immediately when an attack starts and what type it is, regardless of whether the upstream is mitigating it.
- Your organization cannot justify $36,000/year for Shield Advanced, but needs more visibility than Shield Standard provides.
The honest answer for most organizations: run Flowtriq on every node as your primary visibility layer. Add Shield Advanced only if your AWS billing exposure from DDoS-induced scaling events is a real financial risk. Do not buy Shield Advanced for the detection data — Flowtriq's data is substantially richer and costs a fraction of the price.
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