Azure Front Door vs F5 Silverline Managed Services comparison

Azure Front Door vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

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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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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Thomas Zebar

Azure Principal Architect at Cloud Computech Consultancy

Provides great security with a good application firewall

The initial setup is straightforward. If you want to use the portal, CLI, or PowerShare, or you want to use automation data for one month, it's straightforward. Even when it comes to operational maintenance, it's pretty easy and straightforward. Microsoft has done a great job on that front. Maintenance generally requires someone who is a cloud administrator or similar to maintain services in general, with Front Door a small piece of a larger maintenance requirement. There's not a lot to manage, the configuration is simple. I encourage people to document the configuration and infrastructure as well as disaster recovery in case anything happens.

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DejanBlagojevic

Presales Engineer at Exclusive-networks

Mitigates more bot activity when defending web applications than any other vendor but comes at a price

F5 Silverline Managed Services is expensive. You do get world-class quality of mitigation, but I think it is still pricey. You can find similar services, potentially of slightly lower quality, from other vendors like Cloudflare or Akamai for about half the price. When you compare what you get for the money you spend at Cloudflare or Akamai, you do get less protection but you are not dishing out too much for it. On the other hand, at F5 Silverline Managed Services, you do get better protection but, but you are paying double for it. We have had mixed feedback from our clients about this. Most of them would rather pay less for a bit of a lower-quality defense than overshoot their budget. The most common piece of feedback we receive is that the difference in protection levels is not reflected in the price.

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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

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

"It is a fast and secure DNS."

"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."

"The overall experience with Cloudflare is positive, with a rating of eight out of ten."

"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"The technical support is good."

More Cloudflare pros

"Has a great application firewall and we like the security."

"The price is one of the most important aspects of the product. It's quite affordable."

"The solution is good."

"The most valuable feature is that I can have CDN and load-balancing capabilities in a single service instead of managing two separate tools."

"You can assign as many web application firewall policies as you want to the same instance of Front Door."

"I find the technical support excellent, and I rate it a ten."

"It inspects the traffic at the network level before it comes into Azure. We can do SSL offloading, and it can detect abnormalities before the traffic comes into the application. It can be used globally and is easy to set up. It is also quite stable and scalable."

"Azure Front Door provides DDoS protection and features related to WAF."

More Azure Front Door pros

"F5 technical support is really good."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is the benchmark performance."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is it becomes similar to a distributed architecture."

"The stability of the solution is very good."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

"The most valuable feature is flexibility."

"Its flexibility is the most valuable because it is a managed service. The good part is that you don't need to set it up. It just needs DNS routing, which is the easiest thing. Our client had Akamai for certain websites because they were using CDN features. They had NetScaler on the internal zone, F5 AWAFs on the data centers, and no WAF at all in the cloud. One of the main activities of the project was to move all these policies into a single WAF so that we could control and use that as a choke point. That exercise itself was very easy because it was a managed service and F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall does that for you. That's the best thing about F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall. It is easy to apply policies on-premises. If you have AWAF on-premises and you want to replicate some policies on F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, other than the policies that it applies by itself, it is easy because you have a team that supports it. F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works perfectly fine. It pretty much does everything that an Advanced WAF on-premises should do."

"The most important feature is that they have seven firewall protection, to protect our web servers."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services pros

Cons

"DNS Management."

"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."

"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

"For large enterprises, the pricing is okay. However, the enterprise price for small projects is a bit high. A mid-tier pricing option would be beneficial."

More Cloudflare cons

"The user interface needs improvement as it is difficult to create the mapping to link the problem with your private address sources."

"This is a relatively expensive solution."

"My suggestion for improvement would be to enhance the Data Export feature to include specific tables, particularly the Azure Diagnostics table."

"It lacks sufficient functionality."

"The product's features are limited compared to Cloudflare. The tool also doesn't work well in a hybrid environment. I would like to see a way to add personalized APIs in the system."

"In the tool, there needs to be a good amount of monitoring in the area of health probes to capture in front of what is happening."

"The tool should improve its cost."

"I'm responsible for the governance and cost control of Azure. I'm not a specialist in any products and therefore I couldn't really speak effectively to features that are lacking or missing."

More Azure Front Door cons

"We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough."

"I just hope the price can be cheaper."

"The product could be improved on the global load and the integration with the other solution like Cisco and Dell. As a representor of the operation, we prefer to have one platform which can accommodate all type of integration. We are also looking for more improvements in the security policy configuration."

"Improvements could include the creation of highly optimized profiles, optimization deployments, and compression profiles for better performance."

"Sometimes tech support can be slow. They take more time assigning engineers to complex issues, however, they resolve the issues by joining me to fix them."

"You need to have Linux knowledge in order to use the shell."

"The navigation is difficult to use."

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, being a new product in the market or comparatively related to a new product, currently supports less number of PoPs. They should introduce more PoPs. The current number of PoPs that they have is around 10 or 12, which is still relatively less as compared to 2,400 plus PoPs that Akamai offers. The user latency or the number of hops a user needs before reaching the actual web application is less in Akamai because it has its internal fabric to route the traffic. They need to spin up more data to increase its traffic handling capability. They can also include the bot detection capability, though it is a pretty advanced functionality. If they could include DataDome like functionality, that is, bot prediction, then F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall will be top-notch in the market."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"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."

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

"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 minimal compared to other products."

"I give the price a five out of ten."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"It is on a pay-as-you-go basis."

"The transition to the premium tier has led to increased costs, making it more expensive than the classic tier."

"The pricing of the solution is good."

"Considering the standard licensing of the tool, even though we have not checked the billing as of now, it might not be very costly."

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"The product is expensive."

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works based on your bandwidth. They look at the clean bandwidth and do the pricing. 20% of a total pipe would be a clean bandwidth. The list price or a non-negotiated price for F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall would be around $2,200 per application per year for everything that you need. When you get into an enterprise kind of a setup, they negotiate this to the last bit. I would easily take 20% on that, which would be the cost, but it should cover all your Advance WAF features, bot protection, tech campaign, etc. It is built as a package and gives you most of the capability. You don't get the mobile SDK, which is an additional license. Mobile SDK is required only if you're buying or if you have a mobile application, and you are going to instrument F5 or Imperva into your mobile appliance. This anyways would be an additional module. It doesn't come within the WAF, but it is a WAF feature."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better, they are not very flexible. The price of the solution is based on the requirements of the enterprise."

"The product’s pricing is reasonable."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

19%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

21%

Insurance Company

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?

We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...

What do you like most about Azure Front Door?

Rules Engine is a valuable feature.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Front Door?

Azure Front Door is cheaper for small projects, companies, or applications compared to using separate tools.

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you hav...

What do you like most about F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The initial setup is straightforward.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The solution is expensive, however, the quality and performance are good.

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Compared 2% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Amazon CloudFront vs Azure Front Door

Compared 17% of the time

Akamai vs Azure Front Door

Compared 13% of the time

AWS Global Accelerator vs Azure Front Door

Compared 11% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Azure Front Door

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Firewall vs Azure Front Door

Compared 4% of the time

More Azure Front Door Competitors

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 23% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 11% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 8% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 5% of the time

More F5 Silverline Managed Services Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

Azure Front Door

Download Azure Front Door product report

F5 Silverline Managed Services

Download F5 Silverline Managed Services product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Azure Front-Door

F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Azure Front Door is employed for securing external traffic, global load balancing, integrating web application firewalls, enabling disaster recovery, and enhancing application accessibility.

Organizations leverage Azure Front Door to support data publishing, act as a CDN, and ensure low latency for global users. Clients use it to protect numerous internet-accessible applications, integrate with DNS, and implement custom routes. Favored for caching web content and securely, efficiently distributing traffic to backend services, Azure Front Door offers SSL offloading, traffic inspection, and global scalability. Users value its affordability, ease of implementation, and web application firewall. Azure Front Door provides rich security features, traffic management, and URL rewriting. Load-balancing capabilities enhance performance with additional content security policies and bot protection. Integrations, including with GitOps, along with combined CDN and load-balancing, are also highlighted.

What are the most important features?

SSL Offloading: Reduces the burden on backend services
Traffic Inspection: Enhances security by inspecting incoming traffic
Global Scalability: Ensures performance for users worldwide
Web Application Firewall: Provides in-depth security features
Load Balancing: Distributes traffic to improve performance
URL Rewriting: Customizes URL paths for better navigation
Bot Protection: Shields applications from automated threats
Integrations: Supports technologies like GitOps
Combined CDN and Load-Balancing: Streamlines content delivery and traffic management

What are the benefits or ROI of using this service?

Affordability: Provides cost-effective solutions for web traffic management
Ease of Implementation: Streamlines setup processes for quick deployment
Enhanced Security: Offers robust protection for web applications
Improved Performance: Optimizes traffic distribution and latency
Scalability: Supports growing application demands with global reach

Azure Front Door finds usage across multiple industries due to its versatile applications. E-commerce companies benefit from improved global accessibility and speed, while financial institutions leverage its security features for protecting sensitive data. Media and entertainment sectors use its CDN capabilities for seamless content delivery, and healthcare providers rely on its compliance and protection standards for patient data security.

Microsoft

F5's Silverline Managed Services is a SaaS solution delivering DDoS protection, managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) services, and managed Shape Security Fraud and Anti-bot solutions.

Silverline services include 24x7 access to F5's Security Operations Center (SOC). F5's expert security professionals use F5 products with state-of-the-art security tools to ensure the best protection possible. As an add-on to Silverline DDoS or WAF services, Silverline Threat Intelligence integrates dynamic lists of threatening IP addresses to give context for policy decisions.

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Information Not Available

City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office

Azure Front Door vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services