Airlock vs NGINX App Protect comparison

Ergon Informatik and F5 are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Ergon Informatik is ranked #40, while F5 is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.4. Ergon Informatik holds a 0.8% 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: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 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 April 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.7%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Airlock is 0.8%, 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) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	4.7%
NGINX App Protect	2.1%
Airlock	0.8%
Other	92.4%

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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Valerio Guaglianone

Dev Ops Engineer at adesso AG

Long-term web protection has supported reliable traffic management but needs a simpler interface

NGINX App Protect is a good product. I have used both versions from F5 -also the free version- (I mean the NGINX/NGINX One/App Protect free trial period), and I think it is a good product. It's stable, affordable, and easy to manage. NGINX App Protect is a comprehensive security solution that combines advanced WAF, DoS protection, API security, and DevSecOps automation in a lightweight, scalable package ideal for modern cloud-native architectures. The adaptive machine learning capabilities are truly commendable, as the solution can establish traffic baselines and detect anomalies in real time. It automatically adjusts security policies, minimizing the need for manual intervention and reducing false positives. Additionally, it supports scalable deployment across diverse environments, including on-premises, cloud, Kubernetes, and containers, offering both flexibility and scalability I have experience with the web server, F5 load balancer, and similar products provided by Ergon, for eg. the web application firewall and the Microgateway for K8S. I'm also familiar with F5 BIG-IP products.

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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

"The most valuable part of the solution for us overall is exactly that it is a Software-as-a-Service product."

"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."

"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."

"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."

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

"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."

"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."

"The initial setup process is simple."

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."

"NGINX App Protect has complete control over the HTTP session."

"The tool is not complex and is very user-friendly."

"The policies are flexible based on the technologies you use."

"I tested specific features and evaluated the solution against the Web Application Firewall. I conducted research to test different detection percentages. I did not use it directly for protection but for evaluation purposes."

"The solution is very good overall."

"NGINX is very scalable, which is a great advantage of this product."

"Overall, I rate NGINX App Protect between eight and nine."

More NGINX App Protect pros

Cons

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well."

"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."

"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."

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

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

"The learning curve was steep initially."

"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."

"Its stability could be better."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"The tool must be simplified."

"The setup of NGINX App Protect is complex. The full process took one week to complete. Additionally, we had to change the network infrastructure platform which took one month."

"Currently, the policies have to be handled manually, and you have to create from scratch, which can be a bit time-consuming, in a large environment."

"The price of NGINX App Protect could improve."

"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 contributions I think sometimes take a toll on you like you're going to spend a lot of time on the right contributions."

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

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

"NGINX App Protect would be improved with integration with Shape and F5 WAF, which would make it easy for users to manage all their web application security with a single solution."

More NGINX App Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"The solution is expensive."

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The tool is cheap."

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

"There are no additional fees."

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

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

"Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."

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

"NGINX is not expensive."

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

More NGINX App Protect pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Computer Software Company

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	6
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 see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...

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

We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...

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

I will not be able to answer about my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for NGINX App Protect, as so...

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What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?

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

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What is your primary use case for NGINX App Protect?

My main use case for NGINX App Protect is primarily in our infrastructure layer with Kubernetes, as I am using it to ...

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Comparisons

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% 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

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall Competitors

AWS WAF vs Airlock

Compared 18% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Airlock

Compared 15% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Airlock

Compared 9% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Airlock

Compared 8% of the time

More Airlock Competitors

AWS WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 8% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 6% of the time

Haltdos Enterprise WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 6% of the time

Sqreen vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 4% of the time

More NGINX App Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

April 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2026

Download Airlock product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect

March 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)

March 2026

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Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: March 2026.

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