Azure Web Application Firewall vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

Azure Web Application Firewall vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

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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

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.

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Sooryanarayan Hegde

Technical Architect at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Easy management and configuration, affordable, and has good features

We use all the features. It is very useful. Using WAF, we can control the WAF rules based on our application requirements. We can control what rules should be used and what should be disabled. The role of the tool is limited to HTTP traffic. It does exactly what it must do. It's a regional service. We know how to use it for DR scenarios. WAF has been the most valuable in protecting applications. We use at least three instances in the back end to give the best performance for our applications. The management and configuration of the solution is quite easy. All certificate renewals are automatically taken care of by Key Vault.

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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're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."

"The UI is good."

"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."

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

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

"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."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."

More Cloudflare pros

"The initial setup is easy and straightforward...Azure Web Application Firewall is a scalable product."

"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."

"Azure WAF is extremely stable."

"It's great for protecting against DDoS attacks."

"It's quite a stable product and works well with Microsoft products."

"The most valuable feature is that it allows us to publish our applications behind the firewall."

"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."

More Azure Web Application Firewall pros

"The security feature in all the layers of the application is the most valuable."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is its ease of use."

"The simplicity of the solution and its ability to integrate easily with others are its most valuable aspects."

"I like the tool's stability and performance."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is traffic management."

"The solution is easy to set up."

"The production is a valuable feature."

"The pricing is quite good."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pros

Cons

"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."

"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."

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

"Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements."

More Cloudflare cons

"There is a need to be able to configure the solution more."

"From a reporting perspective, they could do more there."

"The support for proxy forwarding could improve."

"In Brazil, we have some problems with the phone service that affect our connection with the cloud. However, it isn't common."

"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."

"The documentation needs to be improved."

More Azure Web Application Firewall cons

"The solution should provide more security for certificate-based services so that we can implement more security on that."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing model."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is harder to manage than Imperva. It is not intuitive and stable compared to other products."

"The solution could improve by increasing the performance when doing updates. For example, if I change the certificate it can take 30 minutes. Other vendors do not have this type of problem."

"It takes a lot of time for a certificate to update in the system. That is a huge drawback, affecting the load-balancing side. And when there are changes to the load balancing, it affects the end-user."

"It does not have the flexibility for using public IPs in version 2."

"The pricing of the solution is a bit high. The solution should offer different pricing systems."

"The support can be improved when you are configuring the system rules. The Disaster Recovery feature can be added in the next release. The price of the solution can be reduced a bit."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

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

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"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."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"We are using the free version."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

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

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

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

"The solution is fairly priced."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway has less price than other application gateway solutions."

"The tool's pricing model is pay-as-you-go."

"The solution is reasonably priced."

"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten."

"There is a need to pay a fixed price per month to use the product. There are no additional payments to be made to Microsoft apart from the charges paid towards the monthly licensing costs attached to the solution."

"Every solution comes with a license and cost. Microsoft provides the license and the total cost is for the maintenance every year."

"I rate the pricing seven out of ten because some third-party solutions are even costlier than this."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

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 do you like most about Azure Web Application Firewall?

The integration it has with GitHub is great.

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'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...

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 Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the...

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

AWS Shield vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

AWS WAF vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 43% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Azure Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

More Azure Web Application Firewall Competitors

F5 Advanced WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 13% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 11% of the time

AWS WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 10% of the time

HAProxy vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 9% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 7% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Download Azure Web Application Firewall product report

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Download Microsoft Azure Application Gateway product report

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway

Learn More

Cloudflare

Microsoft

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

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.

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.

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

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

Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell

Azure Web Application Firewall vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway