Airlock vs NGINX App Protect comparison

Ergon Informatik and F5 are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Ergon Informatik is ranked #24 with an average rating of 10.0, while F5 is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.3. Ergon Informatik holds a 0.7% mindshare in WAF, compared to F5’s 2.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Ergon Informatik users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of F5 users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Airlock and NGINX App Protect based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF).

To learn more, read our detailed Web Application Firewall (WAF) Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

February 2026

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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 Web Application ...

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.6%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Airlock is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NGINX App Protect is 2.1%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	5.6%
NGINX App Protect	2.1%
Airlock	0.7%
Other	91.6%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

CTO at PlayNirvana

Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.

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Tiodor Jovovic

Chief Business Officer at Sky Express

Provides endless features and can be adapted to every single application that exists in the world

WAF is the most beneficial feature for security posture. Our customers are more than satisfied with the user experience provided by the product. The level of detail of the configuration is the most significant aspect. We can adapt it to every single application that exists in the world. The product helps with the compliance processes.

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Jean-Marc Porchet

Project Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Blocking IPs and detecting bots enhances security for medical websites

I was researching products like NGINX App Protect and F5 Advanced WAF for long-term options. I have some use for such a solution, but probably not before next year Detecting bots and blocking IPs have proven effective for securing applications. We were able to block groups of IP addresses that…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We extensively use the solution every day. The solution is very stable; we haven’t seen any glitches."

"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."

"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."

"The setup process is very simple for me."

"The impact of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's integration with existing web technologies on our site's performance and security measures is quite great, actually."

"The product has a valuable security control functionality."

"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"Our customers are more than satisfied with the user experience provided by the product."

"I would say that the most valuable feature is the ability to operate in a DevOps environment and to be configured through API and pipeline by the developers themselves."

"It is a very good tool for load balancing."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its flexibility."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is the reverse proxy."

"NGINX App Protect is a good product and performs very well even when it is under stress."

"NGINX App Protect's best features are auto-learning, which creates a profile of applications that are deployed, bot protection, and force protection, which lets you configure your brute force policy and alert for and prevent brute force attacks."

"The most valuable feature is that I can establish different services from the firewall."

"The most valuable feature is that there is a link in the system that will help to analyze the security of an application when something abnormal is found."

More NGINX App Protect pros

Cons

"Support can be challenging at times."

"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."

"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."

"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."

"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."

"Its stability could be better."

"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"The tool must be simplified."

"The product's price is high, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. The tool's licensing model is also not good."

"Setting policies and parameters through the UI should be more automated because the process is manual, where we can only edit one rule at a time."

"The dashboard could provide a more comprehensive view of the status of the connections."

"NGINX App Protect could improve security."

"The configuration needs to be more flexible because it is difficult to do things that are outside of the ordinary."

"The GUI and web GUI configuration could be improved to be easier to manage and use."

"Right now, the tool doesn't provide an option revolving around update feeds, specifically the signature update option in the UI."

"I think NGINX App Protect could be improved by having it come out of the box with NGINX."

More NGINX App Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"The solution is expensive."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The tool is cheap."

"The product's price is high."

"There are no additional fees."

"The price of NGINX App Protect is not much different from the products that fall under the leader category of Gartner Magic Quadrant."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."

"There are not any additional costs we had to pay to use NGINX App Protect."

"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."

"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."

More NGINX App Protect pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Government

11%

University

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	12

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

I don't really use the rule-based logic feature or utilize the WAF's ability to scale as a cloud-based service. I don...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

I'm using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall on all my domains and any client domains I have; I set them up with a C...

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What do you like most about Airlock?

Our customers are more than satisfied with the user experience provided by the product.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Airlock?

The tool is cheap. We are protecting very sensitive portals. We didn't have a single incident for the last 15 years.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Airlock?

The tool must be simplified. However, if it is simplified, it will lose its competitive edge. The solution requires a...

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX App Protect?

It's very easy to deploy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?

I don't know the pricing yet because in my other project, I was not part of the buying side and I was just starting t...

See all answers

What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?

It would be better if it were easier to implement and if there was more information from F5 regarding hardware requir...

See all answers

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall Competitors

AWS WAF vs Airlock

Compared 20% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Airlock

Compared 18% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Airlock

Compared 12% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Airlock

Compared 10% of the time

NetScaler vs Airlock

Compared 7% of the time

More Airlock Competitors

Fortinet FortiWeb vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Front Door vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 6% of the time

NEVIS nevisProxy vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 3% of the time

More NGINX App Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

February 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

February 2026

Download Airlock product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect

February 2026

Download NGINX App Protect product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

Airlock Suite

NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

The problem of internet security is almost as old as the internet itself. But there is a reliable solution: Airlock Suite from Ergon. Airlock Suite is underpinned by superb Swiss engineering expertise, many years of experience and well thought-out concepts that master the most complex challenges. Airlock Suite deals with the issues of filtering and authentication in one complete and coordinated solution - setting new standards for usability and services.

Ergon Informatik

NGINX App Protect application security solution combines the efficacy of advanced F5 web application firewall (WAF) technology with the agility and performance of NGINX Plus. The solution runs natively on NGINX Plus and addresses some of the most difficult challenges facing modern DevOps environments:

Integrating security controls directly into the development automation pipeline
Applying and managing security for modern and distributed application environments such as containers and microservices
Providing the right level of security controls without impacting release and go-to-market velocity
Complying with security and regulatory requirements

NGINX App Protect offers:

Expanded security beyond basic signatures to ensure adequate controls
F5 app‑security technology for efficacy superior to ModSecurity and other WAFs
Confidently run in “blocking” mode in production with proven F5 expertise
High‑confidence signatures for extremely low false positives
Increases visibility, integrating with third‑party analytics solutions
Integrates security and WAF natively into the CI/CD pipeline
Deploys as a lightweight software package that is agnostic of underlying infrastructure
Facilitates declarative policies for “security as code” and integration with DevOps tools
Decreases developer burden and provides feedback loop for quick security remediation
Accelerates time to market and reduces costs with DevSecOps‑automated security

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Raiffeisen, SGKB, Generali, Visana

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

February 2026

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