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AWS Shield vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Businesses see financial benefits from Cloudflare through improved uptime, security, and performance, enhancing returns despite measurement challenges.
No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
7.4
Users found F5 BIG-IP AFM valuable when combined with other F5 solutions, despite increased costs for standalone usage.
I mean when your website is offline, you first lose money like daily revenue, around 400$ for us, but you also lose your customer loyalty, and there are many more issues.
CloudFlare provided a solution for all the above, which indirectly affects and improves our business, our ROI has greatly increased.
However, if I have a company that has online sales and sends out many newsletters, then they need to have a CDN.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Customer service is highly rated, especially for Enterprise plans, but response times could improve for complex issues.
Sentiment score
8.0
AWS Shield's customer service excels with responsive support and proactive solutions, earning praise from both new and experienced users.
No sentiment score available
The representatives are knowledgeable and online documentation is great.
Enterprise support is amazing. It's 10 out of 10.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare is highly regarded for its scalability, smoothly accommodating various user needs and handling significant traffic across business sizes.
Sentiment score
7.6
AWS Shield provides excellent scalability by automatically adjusting to traffic demands, satisfying users with both high and low needs.
No sentiment score available
Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users.
Scalability is not a problem for CloudFlare since they are a cloud based solution.
They're expanding and have enough resources worldwide.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudflare is generally praised for stability and reliability, despite occasional issues and past outages, requiring proper configuration for best performance.
Sentiment score
8.5
Users consistently rate AWS Shield highly for its stability and reliable performance with no significant issues over the years.
No sentiment score available
There were a few times when some of their CDN nodes would fail, creating serious speed issues with the site without any warning or notification from their side.
Once the webserver is installed with CloudFlare, it should work like a charm.
Since we switched to the business plan, we encounter no problems.
 

Room For Improvement

Users suggest Cloudflare improve analytics, CDN errors, support, DNS, APIs, pricing, server access, DDoS features, and documentation.
AWS Shield is costly and complex, lacking flexibility, custom reporting, and detailed insights, with limited traffic and anomaly detection.
In CloudFlare's case, I need to get an external server, set up the redirection there using Apache or NGINX and put my own SSL certificates there.
The feature shows a cached version of your live site if your host is offline.
Hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud.
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare provides free and paid plans from $20, with straightforward pricing catering to small, medium, and enterprise businesses.
AWS Shield offers scalable pricing, with costs varying by traffic and organization size, seen as fair despite feature gaps.
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager is costlier but valued for its comprehensive features, with mixed user opinions on pricing.
currently we are using the $20 a month plan
The monthly cost is around $30 for three sites using the Business Cloudflare plan.
You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level.
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare provides speed enhancement, security, and ease of use with CDN, DDoS protection, SSL, and traffic analytics for website optimization.
AWS Shield provides seamless DDoS protection, easy management, deployment, and operational transparency while safeguarding applications from web threats.
The aggressive caching and DDOS mitigation are the most valuable features offered by Cloudflare.
DDoS protection is what CloudFlare is known for.
Web optimization features such as ‘Automatic Content Caching’, ‘Rocket Loader’, and ‘AutoMinify’, which help to minimize the website loading time and increase the website response.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
AWS Shield
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall...
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.9%, down from 20.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 5.9%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is 1.5%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
SteveNg - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution automatically scales according to traffic, only takes minutes to deploy, and is maintenance-free
Ultimately, the cost of the solution goes up as we add features, but I believe over time AWS has been adding more frequently asked features. Depending on the website, if our website has more transactions, more sensitive information, and more value, then, of course, we need more features. For us, we only require basic information, a website, some custom consumer, end user, and front-facing purposes. We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need. The pricing of the solution can be improved.
Richard Polyak - PeerSpot reviewer
Straightforward setup with very good granularity and performance
Our company uses the solution as a data center firewall.  It is hard to determine all users within our infrastructure. It depends on systems we put behind the solution. Its internal but also a data center firewall. Sometimes, there are hooks from the solution to our external infrastructure or…
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
18%
Insurance Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 do you like most about AWS Shield?
We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't de...
What needs improvement with AWS Shield?
The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced. The tool has a few parameters based on which it tries to understa...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?
As per pricing, I would not say cheap, but little higher than cheap, but not very expensive. So you can say kind of v...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?
NGINX, which F5 purchased, has room for improvement in its features, particularly its load balancing or application l...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
F5 AFM, F5 Advanced Firewall Manager
 

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.
netflix, dow jones, mapbox, pearson, rovio, youview, moviestar planet, asurion, payplug, hour of code
City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Shield vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.