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Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs F5 Advanced WAF comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (34th)
F5 Advanced WAF
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
Hadar Eshel - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to install platform with valuable policy management features
We use the product for securing email systems, protecting websites, and safeguarding web-based applications and portals One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy. Additionally, it could operate in a local data center.…
Ahmed Moamen - PeerSpot reviewer
Protects applications with versatile authentication features
F5 offers a versatile solution that can be integrated with APM in cases where integration with an external IDB is needed. It is useful for authentication backup if the on-prem directory service is unavailable. Additionally, its WAF functionality is valuable for protecting applications from attacks. It is a versatile and strong solution that's easy to understand and deploy.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"The technical support is good."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."
"The solution can be used for threat prevention or as a cloud-to-cloud backup system"
"It provides an ease of policy management."
"I like its ability to identify known attacks, including DDOS attacks. It's valuable because software must be able to stop known attacks. Application attacks are evolving all the time. When it comes to software-as-a-service, we need to have software that knows about all the latest attacks. It should also protect against major unknown attacks."
"The most valuable features of the solution are it is plug and play, has automated policies, a simple configuration, and is easy to create rules."
"The product's bot protection feature is valuable for our company."
"The AOF solution provides numerous security features."
"F5 technical support is excellent. They are experts who always provide the right solution, and they understand the problem. Their response and resolution times are good."
"It is easy to obtain dashboard compliance because security policy views are included."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its extensive set of capabilities for application protection, including DDoS prevention, and its ability to work with Pentesters and external scanners to observe user activity and eliminate false positives."
"I appreciate the way F5 Advanced WAF builds policies by configuring a basic policy and queuing it in learning mode."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the overall capabilities, there is not a comparable solution on the market."
"Very easy to implement and works well."
"The support experience is better than average."
 

Cons

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"The pricing could be improved."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"Technical support is lacking."
"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."
"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."
"It's a very specific solution that is only requested for a customer's web code or their global IT policy."
"The stability of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strategy."
"The solution can improve by bundling Security Operation Center (SOC) with the WAF-as-a-Service, it would provide a lot more value to customers."
"We found it a bit slow when accessing it through the web browser. The URL also exposed the user name and the hashed password. When I log into my Barracuda WAF user portal, I could see the username and the hashed password on the URL itself. So, it is not very secure, and it is important to take that off."
"The solution should include RASP for another level of protection at the code itself."
"There should be more ability to rate limit certain scenarios. The majority of the time, it is either on or off. For certain types of use cases, there should be the ability to rate limit, not just enable or disable."
"F5 needs to improve API protection with a single F5 solution, without requiring additional modules."
"The DDoS capabilities should be enhanced."
"The pricing could be more flexible."
"Most customers encounter stability issues with the product's Big-IP logs."
"The solution is tedious. It takes a lot of discrete settings so one needs to get detailed and granular when they use the solution. It takes you a whole lot of energy and concentration to configure. It needs to be much more straight-forward, like other web solutions."
"The reporting portion of F5 Advance WAF is not great. They need to work out something better, as it is very basic. You only see the top IPs, I think there is more they can offer."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"We are using the free version."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The price is reasonable."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The product is expensive but it offers flexible pricing. It could be affordable."
"I rate the product's price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high. There are no additional costs to be paid apart from the standard licensing fees attached to the solution."
"It's very difficult for me to give an estimate of the cost. All I know is that we sell the box itself as a service."
"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."
"As far as the pricing of F5 Advanced WAF I would rate it a four out of five depending on what features I am looking for. Imperva is more expensive."
"The pricing of F5 Advanced WAF is more expensive than other solutions like Radware and CD18, it is quite high."
"I think the price is very high."
"There are various plans available for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF as a Service, including a trial version."
"F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high."
"F5 bundles up services and the bundle is what you pay for rather than individual components."
"The price of the solution is reasonable when compared with other products, such as FortiWeb. I am very satisfied with the price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Media Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What needs improvement with Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?
One significant area for improvement in Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service lies in its market positioning and pricing strateg...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service?
We use the product for securing email systems, protecting websites, and safeguarding web-based applications and portals.
What do you like most about F5 Advanced WAF?
It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the r...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
I do not have anything in mind right now that needs improvement. Generally, it works well. If we need any specific fe...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Barracuda WAF as a Service
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
Salvation Army
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs. F5 Advanced WAF and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,952 professionals have used our research since 2012.