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Azure Web Application Firewall vs Fortinet FortiWeb comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Azure Web Application Firewall
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (13th), Microsoft Security Suite (21st)
Fortinet FortiWeb
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
94
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (4th)
 

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.
Thomas Zebar - PeerSpot reviewer
Is priced well, is stable, and the initial setup is straightforward
I previously used Barracuda Web Application Firewall. I hope that Azure Web Application Firewall will look at other products and replicate some of their functionality. Azure WAF is doing great because it is designed to host web applications in Azure. However, it can be improved with other services. Barracuda is the most advanced firewall in the industry, so Azure WAF could pick some of its features and replicate them into its own application firewall. Barracuda WAF was deployed in parallel to the traffic. Azure WAF should not be deployed in the middle of the traffic. It should support both public and private points of presence. Additionally, like Barracuda, Azure WAF should have an inspection engine that covers not just Microsoft products, but also products from other manufacturers. This would be a great addition to the product and would increase its security functionality.
Kacem CHAMMALI - PeerSpot reviewer
Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb
The xFF, or X-Forwarded-For feature, IP reputation, and protected hostname. We can block access using the IP address, so no one can connect to our web server or website using the real IP. They need to use the FQDN instead. Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb and the option to protect the hostname. All traffic passes through FortiWeb. Machine learning capabilities in FortiWeb: I don't use machine learning all the time. In the initial phase of FortiWeb deployment, we use the learning process to detect the traffic passing through FortiGate to our website.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."
"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."
"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"
"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."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"The integration it has with GitHub is great."
"We have found the most valuable features to be the web application, minimal skills required for management, control through policies, and automation."
"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."
"It's great for protecting against DDoS attacks."
"It's quite a stable product and works well with Microsoft products."
"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."
"It has been a stable product in my experience."
"Azure WAF is extremely stable."
"The GUI is user-friendly and it's easy to understand how to manage it."
"The reason I recommend this product is because it guarantees that your network will be safe if it is set up properly and you fully utilize most of the functions."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiWeb is the ease of integration and configuration."
"The support services, performance, and pricing are all valuable features. The performance is excellent."
"L-7 protection makes possible to protect legacy/not up-to-date servers/applications without changing the application code."
"The most valuable feature is that this product represents a whole solution, including a WAF, and even anti-defacements."
"It's easy to use and allows us to integrate solutions together."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its security profile."
 

Cons

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."
"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."
"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"There is a need to be able to configure the solution more."
"I would say that Azure's customer service is not that good...I am not very happy with the support offered."
"The management can be improved."
"The knowledge base could be improved."
"Deployment should be simplified so that a non-techie can handle it."
"From a reporting perspective, they could do more there."
"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 documentation needs to be improved."
"Sometimes, even if you follow the documentation, it doesn't work as expected."
"When we look at the incident reports in the dashboard, they are available for a maximum duration of 24 hours. They should provide more time for the analysis and increase the duration of the availability of these reports. Currently, it gives the options for 5 minutes, 1 hour, and 24 hours. It would be excellent if there are more options for a longer time period. It may be configurable, but I don't know how to do it."
"The product's scalability could be better."
"It would also be helpful if they could introduce easier reporting. It's good to have those reports that go to C-level management, and Fortinet does provide some graphs, but if they went into some more detail, that would be great."
"Centralized management of multiple devices, and GUI improvement, could reduce the learning curve."
"The initial setup process could be improved."
"In my experience, Fortinet FortiWeb could improve the intelligent features to acknowledge whether any threat or incident that's running happened. Then give us the ability to escalate it to layer 2 or layer 3 in the network operations."
"Most of the deployment is done by our development team because they have some parameters that match the configuration. However, when we initially did the deployment we used a consultant company."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"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."
"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 product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft and the pricing is good."
"I give the pricing a nine out of ten."
"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."
"The price is reasonable. It is approximately $2,000 US per month."
"The price is for this solution is fair and there is a license needed."
"FortiWeb can be purchased in VM mode for a lower price and the same features."
"The solution is cheaper compared with other solutions. It has a yearly license."
"There are no licensing costs."
"Due to the situation in Iran with the sanctions, the price of this solution is very expensive."
"Keep a loose margin between your actual bandwidth and the product sizing when using hardware appliances. Only virtual machines are upgradable to larger sizes."
"The license to use Fortinet FortiWeb is approximately $14,000."
"Cheaper than others."
"The price is competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
5%
Educational Organization
43%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
4%
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Web Application Firewall?
The price is reasonable. It is approximately $2,000 US per month. This cost is one of the main reasons why we selecte...
What needs improvement with Azure Web Application Firewall?
Microsoft is constantly working on improvements. We would like to see additional site services using AI to provide in...
What do you like most about Fortinet FortiWeb?
The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?
I would rate the licensing cost as seven out of ten, considering it good value for money. The price is affordable and...
What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?
There is room for improvement in the portability on multi-cloud environments. Enhanced DDoS integration to make Forti...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
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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.
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Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Web Application Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiWeb and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.