Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Loadbalancer.org comparison

The compared Barracuda Networks and Loadbalancer.org solutions aren't in the same category. Barracuda Networks is ranked #18 in WAF , with an average rating of 8.4, and holds a 1.8% mindshare in the category. Loadbalancer.org is ranked #12 in ADC , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 3.5% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Barracuda Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Loadbalancer.org users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Barracuda Web Application Firewall and Loadbalancer.org based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), F5, Microsoft and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF).

To learn more, read our detailed Web Application Firewall (WAF) Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2025

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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

Mindshare comparison

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

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.

Read full review

Anne-Aimee Wollerich

Cyber Security Consultant at Axle iT

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.

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Roger Seelaender

UCaaS Engineering Manager at EarthLink

Great WAF - low-maintenance solution that performs as advertised

The solution can be improved with the development of a SIP engine because it is difficult to manage SBCs. All SBCs are really tough to write rules for. If we could put this in front of an SBC to have the right rules to possibly block the traffic, that would be very helpful. The solution can also improve the relationship between Loadbalancer.org and Metaswitch, or now, Microsoft because Metaswitch was purchased by Microsoft. They both position themselves as certified but don't always talk to each other. I wish there would be closer integration between the solution and the vendors when either release new upgrades to their product line. Often we find issues on either end post upgrades.

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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

"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."

"The technical support is good."

"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

"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 most valuable feature is its usability."

"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

More Cloudflare pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the simplicity of configuration."

"We run it with no downtime, because it has good support."

"It significantly improved our overall web security posture, addressing intrusions and enhancing control over web URLs in our environment."

"The updating and signature features are my primary use case for the solution. These features are beneficial to my organization."

"One of the strongest points is its robust issue discovery capabilities. Barracuda invests significant efforts in identifying and resolving issues. They have multiple products that work in tandem to perform these checks, which is beneficial because it automates security updates. This is the primary reason I recommend it to my customers."

"The solution ensures layer seven is secure from attacks."

"The stability of the solution is good. I don't think we've experienced bugs, crashes, or glitches."

"The solution is user-friendly and easy to set up."

More Barracuda Web Application Firewall pros

"The user interface precludes need to be well versed with Linux IPVS command line. This make it easy for junior team members to participate in managing load balancing needs."

"The connection that this solution helps our servers maintain has been most useful."

"The features I find valuable in this solution are the ease of managing the logs on the WAFs, the ease to identify break-in attempts into the network, the front-end firewall, and a more specific firewall."

"It helps us to route the traffic to the available servers. If we didn't have Loadbalancer we would fail to set the end-user and it would cause a failure in the cluster."

"The SSL Layer 7 load balancing is valuable."

"With basic network knowledge, our required system functionality can be configured and maintained."

"Existing customers are trying to migrate from the physical F5 load balancer to the AVI load balancer because it is scalable and easily managed."

"It does what it’s supposed to do which is balancing an important intranet site we are using, so if one server dies, the second becomes active straight away."

More Loadbalancer.org pros

Cons

"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."

"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 could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."

"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."

"It should have easier documentation for the configuration. It's very technical and people who aren't technical should also be able to do the configuration."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"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."

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."

More Cloudflare cons

"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."

"Sometimes when we put it in action, we have some blogs that appear as false positives. I think that it's improving. Barracuda should minimize false positives."

"As a service, Barracuda needs to host in Saudi Arabia, as they currently don't have this functionality."

"If you know nothing about networks, then you can't set it up."

"The platform's pricing needs improvement."

"I have issues with the load balancing of the solution which is slow. The connection pooling in Barracuda also doesn't work. There is an issue when someone needs access to a site quickly. The issue is with HTTPS services. I am not sure if they have changed all these in the solution’s latest version."

"The incident reporting needs to be improved."

"Barracuda Web Application Firewall’s scalability needs improvement."

More Barracuda Web Application Firewall cons

"If I have to say something, I suppose they could add an automated configuration backup to an FTP location (or something similar) so you don’t have to manually do it. I don’t see this as a problem, of course, as the configuration rarely changes and we only need one backup, but maybe for other users that feature would be handy."

"There is room for improvement in Loadbalancer.org in certain areas."

"They're mostly designed to balance a particular type of traffic. I wanted to load balance DNS, and they just don't do it the way that we wanted to. So they're not used as DNS load balancers."

"An area for improvement in Loadbalancer.org is that sometimes it works fine, but sometimes, it has issues. The setup for Loadbalancer.org is also complex, so that's another area for improvement."

"The interface from Loadbalancer.org should be improved."

"It would be great if there was a way to gain access to the graphing data, to create custom reports. If we had a way to use the graphing data, we could use it to present certain information to our client, such as the uptime status for their service."

"Compared to the physical products, the solution's throughput is a little less."

"There are many features you can set in the backend of Loadbalancer. They should simplify the configuration. The administrator should be able to configure it more simply. How it is now, you can only configure it if you have a lot of experience."

More Loadbalancer.org cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is reasonable."

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"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."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

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

"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."

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

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution is a little expensive. There is a license for this solution and it can be purchased every one, two, or five years."

"The product is inexpensive."

"In my opinion, the product is fairly priced."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"The pricing is less compared to other web applications."

"While I would have to check on the price of the solution, I feel it to be okay and it matches the market price."

"The solution is based on a licensing model and might be $360 for the hybrid version."

"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."

More Barracuda Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"It is inexpensive, and even their “unlimited” version, the VA MAX is still far cheaper than competitors."

"It was easy to upgrade the license for unlimited clusters and servers. Pricing is fair."

"They're not the cheapest, not the most expensive, but I think value-wise, they're 100%."

"I’m not entirely sure about the rating since I'm not very technical. I haven't thoroughly compared the ratings. So, if you're asking for my impression so far, I would rate it around five out of 10."

"It's worth the cost. It's not cheap, but it's a good solution. If you're looking for a good solution, this is a good solution. Is it cheap? No. Is it worth the money? Yes, I think it is."

"It filled a requirement for our project, and it did so at lesser cost than their competitors."

"I think it’s very affordable."

"The solution requires an annual support license of $2,780 for four systems or $695 a year per unit for support not including the units."

More Loadbalancer.org pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

18%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Government

University

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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

Our primary use case was to track the traffic on websites or webshops to identify potential malicious actors, such as...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Do you recommend Loadbalancer.org?

Since Loadbalancer.org is an open-source solution, I would recommend this solution for smaller businesses that don’t ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Loadbalancer.org?

Existing customers are trying to migrate from the physical F5 load balancer to the AVI load balancer because it is sc...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Loadbalancer.org?

Pricing of Loadbalancer.org is something to consider.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Compared 26% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Compared 22% of the time

NetScaler vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Compared 10% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Compared 4% of the time

More Barracuda Web Application Firewall Competitors

NetScaler vs Loadbalancer.org

Compared 25% of the time

HAProxy vs Loadbalancer.org

Compared 20% of the time

Fortinet FortiADC vs Loadbalancer.org

Compared 16% of the time

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) vs Loadbalancer.org

Compared 13% of the time

Kemp LoadMaster vs Loadbalancer.org

Compared 12% of the time

More Loadbalancer.org Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Barracuda Web Application Firewall

April 2025

Barracuda Web Application Firewall report

Download Barracuda Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Loadbalancer.org

April 2025

Download Loadbalancer.org product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

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

Barracuda Web Application Firewall is a game-changing cloud-connected security solution that enables organizations to safeguard both their applications and their data from an ever-growing array of advanced cyber threats. It offers protection from cyber attacks that target not only data and applications stored on the cloud but also those that are housed on web servers. 43% of the time a breach takes place via a compromised application. Barracuda Web Application Firewall prevents these types of breaches from occurring.

Barracuda Web Application Firewall denies hackers the ability to penetrate your system by using a number of techniques to keep your organization safely insulated. The first method of protection consists of two parts. The first part involves a thorough scanning of all inbound web traffic. This solution monitors everything that comes into the system. It employs IP reputation intelligence, which filters all incoming data. If the source of the data has a bad reputation, it is blocked by the firewall. Administrators now have a way of locking out many common threats that could otherwise compromise sensitive networks. These scans can also allow administrators to protect their systems from within as DLP (Data Loss Prevention) protocols. If any sensitive data attempts to leave, administrators will automatically be alerted and the data will be blocked from exiting.

Barracuda Web Application Firewall can also be set up to apply the AAA (Authentication, Authorization & Accounting) framework to an organization’s network. If an intruder manages to get past the authentication stage, the authorization protocols kick in. After the authorization stage comes accounting, which works by tracking and logging users’ activities so that administrators will be in a position to prevent long-term damage from being done. This three-step process can be implemented without requiring administrators to make changes to their applications.

Key Features

Some of Barracuda Web Application Firewall’s key features include:

The ability to employ adaptive profiling. Administrators will have an easier time enforcing security policies once this feature is enabled. It takes data from safe sources and builds profiles that can be used to create whitelisting protocols that prevent unsafe actions from occurring on the system.
The ability to assess threats in real time. Barracuda Web Application Firewall uses machine learning to detect new threats and attacks as they emerge.
The ability to manage the Barracuda Web Application Firewall system from a single interface. Administrators can manage their Barracuda Web Application Firewall configurations from one centralized location.

Reviews from Real Users

Barracuda Web Application Firewall stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. One of the main ones is the robustness of the solution. Users are given access to a vast variety of security features in a single product.

PeerSpot user Muhammed S., a Presales Solutions Architect at Hilal Computers, notes this when he writes, "The solution offers multiple security features. There are machine learning features and great URL encryption. It also offers multi-protocol support against DDoS attacks."

Other reviewers note that Barracuda Web Application Firewall is user-friendly, easy to set up, stable, and reliable.

Barracuda Networks

Loadbalancer.org is a versatile solution that offers load balancing for small businesses, multiple instances of applications, web application firewall, publishing Windows and SQL applications, and security for telephone service systems. It is easy to use, cost-effective, and performs well with low latency.

The connection maintenance and security features are valuable, including managing logs on WAFs, identifying break-in attempts writing rules to block them and using HAProxy to control what is allowed. Loadbalancer.org has helped organizations reduce the impact of connection issues, provide security, and ensure no downtime or impact on productivity.

Top Industries that use Loadbalancer.org:

Healthcare: Loadbalancer.org is widely considered the top load balancer provider in the healthcare IT industry. Loadbalancer.org sees that healthcare IT personnel can ensure their organizations are moving seamlessly toward interoperability and are able to easily scale to meet today’s continually growing data demands with no compromise in performance.

Storage solutions: Loadbalancer.org has significant offerings and partnerships with object-based storage providers to ensure they are always ready for today's ever-changing dynamic storage needs. The comprehensive integration offers high-performance scalable solutions which can provide always available next-gen storage solutions.

Security: Loadbalancer.org solutions provide an extra layer of security to protect against the latest risk and threats. Loadbalancer.org will provide a close integration to ensure the organization is always secure.

Print: Loadbalancer.org can work with organizations to ensure their print environments keep working smoothly and is the only organization that fully supports Microsoft Print load balancing. Loadbalancer.org minimizes the complexities of print environments to ensure that all systems are consistently available.

Loadbalancer.org is certified as an OEM provider for all of Microsoft's most popular key applications and solutions. Loadbalancer.org has created and developed streamlined deployments to facilitate improved scalability, performance, and uptime. They offer a tailored GUI to make every process super easy. Loadbalancer.org offers several flexible licensing plans to ensure cost-effectiveness, improved margins, revenue opportunities, and optimized TCO. The numerous robust solutions Loadbalancer.org offers can ensure that any enterprise organization is able to satisfy the growing demands of today’s dynamic marketplace while maintaining an excellent user experience.

Reviews from Real Users

“Loadbalancer.org is less complex than Citrix. In some cases, our customers do not have an engineer on staff who can support this device. These customers have a large number of Linux engineers but don't have the money. We suggested using Loadbalancer.org and other open-source tools. Many customers are of different sizes and have different budgets. Loadbalancer.org has everything that is needed.” - Artem M., System Engineer at CROC

“We use Loadbalancer for balancing loads in our main application. Loadbalancer is easy to use. It performs well, with low latency.” - Walid M., Network and Security Engineer at a logistics company

Loadbalancer.org

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

Vodafone, NASA, Mercedes, NBC, Siemens, AT&T, Barclays, Zurich, Penn State University, Fiserv, Canon, Toyota, University of Cambridge, US Army, US Navy, Ocean Spray, ASOS, Pfizer, BBC, Bacardi, Monsoon, River Island, U.S Air Force, King's College London, NHS, Ricoh, Philips, Santander, TATA Communications, Ericcson, Ross Video, Evertz, TalkTalk TV, Giacom, Rapid Host.

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2025

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We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.