Azure Web Application Firewall vs Fastly comparison

Microsoft and Fastly are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Microsoft is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.3, while Fastly is ranked #23 with an average rating of 9.0. Microsoft holds a 2.8% mindshare in WAF, compared to Fastly’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Fastly and Azure Web Application Firewall are competing in the web security space, with Fastly's agile approach often favored for pricing and Azure WAF offering a comprehensive feature set for larger enterprises.

Features: Fastly offers real-time logging, edge cloud computing, and flexible APIs for dynamic protection. Azure WAF integrates with Azure services, providing robust threat intelligence and automated scalability. Its extensive security options make it attractive to enterprises within the Azure environment.

Room for Improvement: Fastly could enhance zero-trust features, user interface customization, and detailed reporting. Azure WAF may improve initial setup processes, offer more competitive pricing models, and expand third-party integration capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly provides straightforward deployment with a user-friendly API and quick customer service. Azure WAF leverages Microsoft's resources for detailed deployments, with extensive documentation and support for complex needs.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly's competitive pay-as-you-go pricing is cost-effective for smaller organizations. Azure WAF, despite its higher price, offers substantial ROI through deep integration with Azure’s suite, appealing to enterprises seeking comprehensive cloud service use.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Azure Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly

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 March 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure Web Application Firewall is 2.8%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 1.4%, up from 1.3% 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	5.4%
Azure Web Application Firewall	2.8%
Fastly	1.4%
Other	90.4%

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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Kevin Rua Jefwa

Global IT Solutions Specialist at RELIEF INTERNATIONAL INC

Offers robust analytics and seamless cloud integration with minor room for user interface improvement

The Microsoft support and the analytics are what I appreciate about Azure Web Application Firewall. It integrates effectively with things such as Sentinel and Defender for Cloud, so mostly it's the analytics and now the AI capabilities that have been introduced with Co-pilot. It helps when looking for threats. It reduces issues significantly because the filtering capabilities are high. Given that it's a cloud solution, we have very minimal downtime, especially because we have Microsoft support. On a scale of one to 10, I would give it an eight.

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Patel Parth

Technical support engineer at Adobe

Optimized ecommerce performance and improved access control through image handling and IP filtering

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP addresses instead of POP IPs. Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list. Additionally, a POP address should be there with a wide range of IP addresses provided, public static IP addresses, so customers can integrate egress IPs. Fastly should provide WebP image processing on the backend instead of on the fly. It would be a very useful feature to avoid unnecessary time for browser to browser and local cookies. I believe that Fastly service has a few gaps. We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers. There should be transparency.

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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

"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."

"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."

"It is configurable via API."

"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."

"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."

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

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

"The initial setup process is simple."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The most valuable feature of Azure Web Application Firewall is its ability to filter requests and block false positives by using custom rules and the OWASP rule set."

"The solution has good dashboards."

"The integration it has with GitHub is great."

"Azure WAF is extremely stable."

"It has been a stable product in my experience."

"We're Microsoft partners and I'd recommend the solution as it is easy to understand and easy to integrate, it is very stable and we trust it as a recognized Microsoft product."

"It is almost impossible to access these assets from outside, requiring a very skilled attacker to obtain asset tokens of a customer using Azure."

"It's a good option if you want a solution that's ready to go and easy for your team to learn. It's cloud-based, so you don't need to buy or maintain any hardware infrastructure."

More Azure Web Application Firewall pros

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"In summary, this solution is easy to manage, quick to deploy, and all of my customers are happy."

"Fastly combines both the CDN side and the Signal Sciences next-generation WAF, which is closely integrated with the CDN, allowing us to use both products seamlessly."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

More Fastly pros

Cons

"Its stability could be better."

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."

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

"A key challenge arises when dealing with numerous integrations with HVAC systems. Depending on the specifics, there might be some configuration mismatches, which necessitate specific support."

"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"We would like to see additional site services using AI to provide information about blocking requests and offer analytics on the origin of calls."

"The support for proxy forwarding could improve."

"Some Azure applications, like the web application firewall, require a certain level of SKU for hosting setup. The basic setup does not allow me to use the web application firewall and other additional services."

"Azure WAF should not be deployed in the middle of the traffic."

"The documentation needs to be improved."

"The support for proxy forwarding could improve."

"Upgrading the platform regularly is necessary for security, however, frequent updates every six months or year from Azure can be a maintenance overhead."

"The management can be improved."

More Azure Web Application Firewall cons

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"It's not easy to start with Fastly if you don't have VCL knowledge, so it appears very complex at the beginning."

"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."

More Fastly cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."

"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"

"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."

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

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

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

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

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The price is for this solution is fair and there is a license needed."

"The price is reasonable. It is approximately $2,000 US per month."

"I give the pricing a nine out of ten."

"We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft and the pricing is good."

"The price of the solution depends on your architecture and how you manage it. You can control the cost in Azure quite well. The costs do not directly correlate to expenses in the features we are using."

"Azure WAF has price advantages over other WAF solutions. The pricing model is flexible because you pay on a scale based on the level of protection you need."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"It is an expensive solution."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Government

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	5

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...

See all answers

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 Azure Web Application Firewall?

I would place Azure Web Application Firewall at an eight on a scale from one to 10, with one being cheap and 10 being...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Azure Web Application Firewall?

The pricing needs improvement, and I think for beginners it will be a little bit complicated, so the ease of use coul...

See all answers

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

Because we mostly operate in the cloud and because we're a Microsoft environment, it was the best option in the scena...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fastly?

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Fastly?

I am using Fastly in the Adobe Commerce Cloud project. In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and ...

See all answers

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Compared 21% of the time

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Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

March 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Azure Web Application Firewall

March 2026

Download Azure Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

March 2026

Download Fastly product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

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

Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides centralized protection of your web applications from common exploits and vulnerabilities. Web applications are increasingly targeted by malicious attacks that exploit commonly known vulnerabilities. SQL injection and cross-site scripting are among the most common attacks.

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Microsoft

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Fastly

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Information Not Available

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

Buyer's Guide

Azure Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly

March 2026

Free Report: Azure Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly

Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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