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Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Kemp LoadMaster 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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
Barracuda Web Application F...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (18th)
Kemp LoadMaster
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

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.
Anne-Aimee Wollerich - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing bot traffic effectively enhances usability for non-technical users
Barracuda Web Application Firewall ( /products/barracuda-web-application-firewall-reviews ) lacks some of the more specified and structured features offered by solutions like Tenable. Although Tenable is more expensive and less easily deployable, its features are more deepened and chiseled, particularly for IT personnel. For example, Tenable provides more comprehensive dark web scanning capabilities, which Barracuda could improve upon.
PeterForster - PeerSpot reviewer
A highly stable and scalable load-balancing software that offers great technical support
My company is really happy with Kemp LoadMaster as a product. My company is also happy with the support we receive from Kemp LoadMaster. I want Kemp LoadMaster to provide users with better reporting capabilities in relation to TCP packets. In general, the connections that are present in the system require improvement. Feature-wise, Kemp LoadMaster has everything that our company's customers require. Kemp LoadMaster also has features that have supported our company's past projects.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"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."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."
"It is a fast and secure DNS."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"If an attack is coming continuously, you can ask the device to block it temporarily for two to three minutes. F5 has not provided us with an option to block certain IPs for some time. Barracuda can help you block someone if the source is from a different IP. You can apply the rule to the device and block it for whatsoever time you want. The solution will unblock the IP after the prescribed time as well."
"The most valuable features of Barracuda Web Application Firewall include advanced bot protection, DDoS protection, and addressing the top ten vulnerabilities."
"You don't need help from Barracuda to help with the deployment. The deployment is easy."
"The customer service and support are exceptional, and I would give them a ten out of ten."
"The stability of the product is good. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It's very simple and predictable, because Barracuda provides a vision of the current state of your application. It gives you an understanding of what is happening on your site and any attempts against you at your source. This is the main value that Web Application Firewall provides our company. These aspects are also the main reason for this documentation process."
"The solution is user-friendly and easy to set up."
"The most valuable features are the client VPN and content filtering."
"The feature I find most valuable is load balancing with different algorithms."
"The most beneficial function of using the ADC is to ensure this resiliency."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten...The initial setup of Kemp LoadMaster is very simple."
"It is an easy-to-use, user-friendly interface, and you can set up a new VIP in a couple of minutes."
"​Simple to install with good documentation."
"The solution is easy to configure when changing the load balancing method to Round Robin or least connection."
"Mitigates content security policy issues."
"When you configure the listening services, you can implement a lot of security features like the Edge Security Pack that intercepts the requests and processes those before they are sent to the real servers."
 

Cons

"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."
"The product support needs to be accessible from more places, a wider area of coverage."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"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."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"They could improve their performance, support, and their upgrades. Their updates used to be good. Their improvements were right on the money but nowadays, the updates are minor."
"I would like to see an improved capacity to store logs so that they will be available for a longer time."
"As a service, Barracuda needs to host in Saudi Arabia, as they currently don't have this functionality."
"The solution could use more reports."
"We get false positives about phishing emails."
"An area for improvement in Barracuda Web Application Firewall is attack identification. Other banks identified attacks and tracked logs that the solution wasn't able to identify because of its ready-made rules pre-deployed by the vendor. My organization raised this issue with the technical support team. Another area to improve in Barracuda Web Application Firewall is its service desk. The team resorted to stonewalling because they couldn't accept that a feature was missing in the solution, and it was only after a lot of drilling down that the service desk team accepted that, and would be adding that feature in the future. My organization had to submit a report to the Reserve Bank of India with information on the logs identified and the attacks that happened, and that there was a failure on the part of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. The Reserve Bank of India conducts a tri-monthly cyber risk audit in all Indian banks. Even smaller banks identified and caught attacks that my organization wasn't able to do, so I was looking into other solutions that competitor banks could be using because Barracuda Web Application Firewall failed to identify some of the attacks."
"While the UI is good, it can get a little bit complicated."
"We've had some blocks of the application and some false positives."
"Certificate installations could be simplified and modernized, and allowed to be monitored for expirations/issues."
"If I had to change something it would maybe be to have a little better reporting graphics that show more details in the reporting. It seems to be a little small in the graphic, and I'm not sure if possible but maybe a GUI page that one can use to monitor if any server goes down."
"I want to have the ability to pull a particular server. The DevOps portion was challenging for me, like if I needed to redirect from one IP to another URL. I needed to look that up, and the knowledge base is not well organized. When I look for information about Kemp on the Internet, I don't find many articles or something like that."
"It would be very helpful to get all the http/https session logs by default in the log monitor without activating debugging mode like an apache web sever natively does"
"In the web interface, there are a lot of settings in the different menus and it would be helpful if there were an interactive help system or tooltips to help the administrators find and configure the right settings."
"I definitely think that the WAF can be improved."
"In the next release, Kemp should include the ability for LoadMaster to create different DNS record types."
"They were still in the process of development, and for example, we set it up in a cluster. So it was one logistical unit built out of two physical devices. And the expected behavior, which I know from other devices, will be formed into a logic cluster. It's that you configure one unit. Then you bring the second unit into this cluster with the already configured primary unit. So the secondary box pulls all the configured ones from its neighbor, does everything automatically, and then synchronizes with this primary neighbor. And then it works, like, one logical unit. And this didn't work with the Kemp's initially, where they caused a lot of issues when building up a cluster, so there were some specials on how to set this up. When we built or set them up for the first time and the months afterward with no new software releases, there were a couple of problems, but in the end, they worked fine. So, they developed a lot and learned from what they've responded to, what we responded to them, and what needs fixing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"We are using the free tier of the solution."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"For small companies, the price is very expensive because the WAF is an enterprise-level application, not intended for smaller businesses. In my opinion, the price is right for enterprise-level use."
"The price is reasonable, more so than other products."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The product pricing was competitive for the value it offers regarding security features."
"Barracuda costs us $8,000 per year. Barracuda costs $20,000 for a full subscription, when you try to protect multi-site infrastructure, in different geographical zones and for different data centers. If you have only one site, Barracuda will be cheaper."
"The product is inexpensive."
"The solution is based on a licensing model and might be $360 for the hybrid version."
"The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is quite expensive."
"It is well-priced and licensing is very flexible."
"The setup cost and pricing plan is reasonable and will ultimately give you a worthy return."
"KEMP gives away free trials for 30 days. This can be stretched if you want. During the test, you will have access to KEMP support.​"
"The price is great and the value is definitely there."
"The costs for the Kemp Load Balancer solution are okay because, for a good product, you have to spend money."
"This product has good value and features for the money."
"Setup is easy, the cost is affordable, and the licensing is quick and simple."
"Nowadays, going with the virtual appliance is the easiest way and the cost is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
6%
Educational Organization
61%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
3%
Government
3%
 

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 Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
It significantly improved our overall web security posture, addressing intrusions and enhancing control over web URLs...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
I use Barracuda Web Application Firewall mainly for web application protection. I have worked with Barracuda for six ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
The pricing for Barracuda is quite high compared to other OEMs. Each transaction requires my purchase team to negotia...
What do you like most about Kemp LoadMaster?
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten...The initial ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kemp LoadMaster?
LoadMaster is cheaper than some other solutions. It has a perpetual license, so it's a one-time cost.
What needs improvement with Kemp LoadMaster?
There are some challenges with updates on certain models that don't have a few features. The support team often takes...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
LoadMaster Load Balancer
 

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.
Oracle, CBS, Pioneer, Hyundai, Publix, Barnes Noble, Calzedonia, Nordstrom, Samsung, Nascar
Kent County Council, KEMP, SMA Solar Technology AG, RT€ Player , Victrix (Quebec, Canada), Texas A&M, Macmillan Cancer Support, Cisco, Austin Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), F5, Microsoft and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: March 2025.
847,862 professionals have used our research since 2012.