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AWS WAF vs Human Defense Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 ...
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (6th)
AWS WAF
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (5th)
Human Defense Platform
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Fraud Detection and Prevention (31st), Bot Management (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS WAF4.8%
Imperva Application Security Platform7.6%
Fortinet FortiWeb6.5%
Other81.1%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Fraud Detection and Prevention Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Human Defense Platform1.3%
ThreatMetrix5.4%
BioCatch3.5%
Other89.8%
Fraud Detection and Prevention
 

Featured Reviews

DB
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.
Azam S M - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Lead at Danat Fz LLC
Has successfully filtered malicious traffic and allowed country-specific access controls
For improvement in AWS WAF, we can have better monitoring. One of the things that should be improved in AWS WAF is the monitoring; we need to identify the requests and where they are coming from. If it's a bot, we should differentiate the requests, whether they are automated or not. The way we see it now is just mentioned as a percentage from bots and actual users, which should include proper graphs and detailed information. We also need a feature where we can filter specific requests. If there are scripts in the requests, we should be able to filter those requests to see if there are any scripts running from them.
it_user785406 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager/Team Leader at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
They ensure that our campaigns have run in the highest quality of settings, leading to savings on ad spending
Primary use case of this solution is to detect fraud traffic (also mark the network which is sending the fraud traffic) and block the fraud traffic. These metrics help us to minimize wasted ad spend and provide our clients an extra layer of confidence around our campaigns As a result of the…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."
"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."
"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."
"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."
"Cloudflare has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple clients; I can easily go in and access their accounts, make changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"The solution is stable."
"Its best feature is that it is on the cloud and does not require local hardware resources."
"The most valuable feature is the scalability because it automatically scales up or scales down as per our requirements."
"The biggest benefit of AWS WAF for us is to filter malicious requests, so we can protect our environment and application from malicious actors."
"Rule groups are valuable."
"AWS WAF helps us a lot to make sure that the right customer gets the right access to the system."
"Because it integrates with the existing AWS solution, we get a lot of support without having to do much extra work."
"The interface is good."
"PerimeterX helped us to ensure that our campaigns have run in the highest quality of settings, leading to savings on ad spending."
 

Cons

"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"The reporting could be more granular."
"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"The reporting could be improved if it were more granular."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."
"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."
"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."
"The product should improve the DDoS-related features."
"The default content policy available in the tool is not very strong compared to the competitors."
"In a future release I would like to see automation. There's no interaction between the applications and that makes it tedious."
"AWS WAF should provide better protection to its users, and the security features need to improve."
"This solution could be improved if the configuration steps were more specific to WAF, compared to other cloud services."
"AWS WAF could improve by making the overall management easier. Many people that have started working with AWS WAF do not have an easy time."
"It is sometimes a lot of work going through the rules and making sure you have everything covered for a use case. It is just the way rules are set and maintained in this solution. Some UI changes will probably be helpful. It is not easy to find the documentation of new features. Documentation not being updated is a common problem with all services, including this one. You have different versions of the console, and the options shown in the documentation are not there. For a new feature, there is probably an announcement about being released, but when it comes out, there is no actual documentation about how to use it. This makes you either go to technical support or community, which probably doesn't have an idea either. The documentation on the cloud should be the latest one. Finding information about a specific event can be a bit challenging. For this solution, not much documentation is available in the community. It could be because it is a new tool. Whenever there is an issue, it is just not that simple to resolve, especially if you don't have premium support. You have pretty much nowhere to look around, and you just need to poke around to try and make it work right."
"This solution could be improved if the configuration steps were more specific to WAF, compared to other cloud services."
"As bots are getting better and the product should keep getting updates in preventing new ways of attack and security."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"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."
"It is not too pricey."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"AWS WAF costs $5 monthly plus $1 for the rule. It's cheap, cost-wise. It's worth the money."
"The price of AWS WAF is reasonable, it is not expensive and it is not cheap."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven or eight out of ten."
"It's quite affordable. It's in the middle."
"I would rate AWS WAF's pricing a seven out of ten."
"It has a variable pricing scheme."
"For our infrastructure, we probably pay around $16,000 per month for AWS WAF. Because alternative WAF solutions provide even more features, I think the AWS WAF is a bit pricey"
"AWS is not that costly by comparison. They are maybe close to $40 per month. I think it was between $29 or $39."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Retailer
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
University
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise26
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
What are the limitations of AWS WAF vs alternative WAFs?
Hi Varun, I have had experienced with several WAF deployments and deep technical assessments of the following: 1. Im...
How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...
What do you like most about AWS WAF?
The most valuable feature of AWS WAF is its highly configurable rules system.
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Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
AWS Web Application Firewall
PerimeterX Bot Defender, BotGuard for Applications, HUMAN MediaGuard
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
eVitamins, 9Splay, Senao International
theTradeDesk
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: April 2026.
892,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.