Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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

Sponsored
 

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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th)
AWS Shield
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall...
Ranking in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 18.8%, up from 17.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Shield is 5.6%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is 1.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cloudflare18.8%
AWS Shield5.6%
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)1.3%
Other74.3%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
 

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.
Manikandan-R - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution provides essential protection with good support and a simple setup
I have noticed a pattern developing in approximately five minutes. If it were possible to provide these patterns with historical data spanning six months, three months, or two months directly from the console, it would be extremely beneficial. It would allow for easy inquiries and facilitate the retrieval of relevant parts without having to manually check logs or examine movements. Instead, if all historical data were available, I could consult six months' worth of identified patterns efficiently through AWS without relying on external sources. This solution is particularly suitable for startups or medium-sized startups. I would rate the overall solution eight out of ten.
Pawel Augustyn - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides outstanding resource management and application security across multiple geographies
The most valuable features for me are stability, availability, and security, along with the ability to manage multiple features to secure my applications. The solution also monitors and blocks unconventional requests and maintains security efficiently. The scalability feature also allows me to manage and allocate resources dynamically without disrupting production traffic.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"The technical support is good."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"The solution's ease of use is the most valuable feature."
"It is quite scalable, and we have not faced any issues with its scalability."
"I am impressed with the product's multiple features like security."
"We have integrated the tool with Active Directory. The most important feature is that it's transparent and doesn't degrade the performance of our solution. Additionally, it's easy to configure, which is crucial for us. It's easy to use and set up and stops attacks on our servers. We haven't encountered any attack problems because the solution stops them in real-time. AWS Shield specifically focuses on defending against denial-of-service attacks, making it a great solution for that type of threat."
"The solution operates smoothly at its baseline level, and we do not encounter any issues at that level."
"The product is easy to use."
"The product has a good mechanism to analyze trends and trigger events."
"It is integrated with AWS. So, it gives you a good first step."
"The most valuable features of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) are the web gateway, load balancing, services, and applications available."
"This product excells in every aspect from installation and the interface to providing superior network security."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is that the blocking of IP's."
"The protection is very useful."
"It is stable."
"The solution provides behavioral analysis via AI to detect malicious traffic."
"I find the signature base is very helpful to see traffic"
"The setup and functionality are fairly straightforward."
 

Cons

"Support response time could be improved."
"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."
"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."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."
"The product is expensive."
"The product should give users more flexibility to customize their security policies according to their requirements."
"The product needs to improve its logs and reports to make it read better."
"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a situation is normal or abnormal."
"The time taken to detect anomalies must be reduced."
"The management of it is a bit hard. If you don't engineer it on the front side, it is hard to go back in and change it. It could be improved in terms of architecture requirements and then ongoing support requirements as a secondary component to it. People tend to set up things like this, and they just expect it to work without the care and feeding that needs to go back into it either from an application team or a network environment team."
"We end up having to pay extra for features that AWS adds that we don't need."
"Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced."
"We needed to protect the database but the solution didn't offer a certain feature to do so."
"There is room for improvement in Advanced Firewall Manager's dashboard statistics, especially during attacks."
"Deployment times vary according to the customer. It needs to be heavily configured. You need to look and you need to observe the behavior of the traffic before you can start configuring everything. It can take time."
"F5 should increase its capability to prevent zero-day attacks."
"The web gateway feature could improve in F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)."
"NGINX, which F5 purchased, has room for improvement in its features, particularly its load balancing or application load balancing features."
"The product is expensive."
"It doesn't compare to next generation firewalls"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"It depends on your subscription level and the volume that you're spending with AWS. So, it is very relative to the consumption alignment in your subscription level. It is a well-constructed, scalable pricing option, but it is relative to how much you're spending on AWS. Because the more you spend, typically, the more you get off on services like this. I find it to be comparable to other solutions."
"The tool is cheap."
"The tool's pricing is good."
"We pay $3000 per month for the solution."
"The cost depends on traffic each month, so on average, it costs us between US$200 and US$300 per month."
"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is an expensive solution. They are one of the best in the market, but the price could be cheaper."
"The product is expensive."
"As per pricing, I would not say cheap, but little higher than cheap, but not very expensive. So you can say kind of value for money solutions."
"F5 BIG-IP AFM is an affordable solution. There were not any additional fees other than the standard licensing."
"It is somewhat on the expensive side although it is worth the additional cost."
"The price of F5 BIG-IP AFM is a little more expensive than other firewalls on the market."
"It's very expensive, and you pay extra for the models."
"We have purchased a five-year licensing package for the product."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Performing Arts
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business45
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
 

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?
Perhaps the time required to detect anomalies can be reduced. Presently, it takes some time to determine whether a si...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?
The standard license is reasonably priced, but additional features like the WAF can be more expensive. There are plen...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?
The appliance and features could be enhanced further, especially in terms of security. Some features like the WAF ( /...
 

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: September 2025.
867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.