Check Point DDoS Protector vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) comparison

Check Point Software Technologies and F5 are both solutions in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category. Check Point Software Technologies is ranked #21 with an average rating of 9.0, while F5 is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.6. Check Point Software Technologies holds a 1.0% mindshare in DDOS, compared to F5’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Check Point Software Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of F5 users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Check Point DDoS Protector and F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) compete in network security. Check Point stands out in pricing and customer support, while F5 BIG-IP AFM offers comprehensive features that justify its higher investment.

Features: Check Point DDoS Protector provides rapid deployment, comprehensive DDoS protection, and easy management. Its advanced threat mitigation capabilities, behavior-based protection, and support for layer three to layer seven environments set it apart. F5 BIG-IP AFM’s key features include advanced threat mitigation, deep traffic inspection, and robust firewall capabilities, which make it suitable for complex network infrastructures. Additionally, it offers load balancing and application firewall features.

Room for Improvement: Check Point could enhance its feature set by including more granular configuration options and improving user interface intuitiveness. Incorporating more automation in threat detection could be beneficial. Enhancing cloud integration capabilities would also help. F5 BIG-IP AFM could be improved by simplifying the deployment process, as it can be challenging. It should offer more flexible pricing models and expand its support for smaller scale implementations. Simplifying its interface would improve usability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Check Point DDoS Protector is known for its seamless deployment process and strong customer service, making it easier for businesses to integrate into existing systems. F5 BIG-IP AFM presents a more complex deployment but compensates with effective technical support to assist in implementation and management.

Pricing and ROI: Check Point DDoS Protector is cost-effective with affordable initial costs and faster ROI due to easier deployment and maintenance. In contrast, F5 BIG-IP AFM requires a higher upfront investment but offers significant long-term value, especially in demanding security environments.

To learn more, read our detailed Check Point DDoS Protector vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Check Point DDoS Protector vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

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

As of April 2025, in the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection category, the mindshare of Cloudflare is 19.4%, up from 19.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Check Point DDoS Protector is 1.0%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is 1.4%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection

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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Petr Zemánek

Security Architect at Czech National Bank

Protect from DDoS attacks with good management and easy setup

I have used Fortinet FortiDDoS. Fortinet is a little bit cheaper. Both solution was effective. The management of Check Point solution is a little bit better. It is 50 percent cheaper than Fortinet. It's very modern now to have an AI in the management for fast finding of attacks or investigation. Check Point have these features in a new releases.

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Richard Polyak

Sr. Architect at NBC Universal

Straightforward setup with very good granularity and performance

Our company uses the solution as a data center firewall. It is hard to determine all users within our infrastructure. It depends on systems we put behind the solution. Its internal but also a data center firewall. Sometimes, there are hooks from the solution to our external infrastructure or…

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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

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

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

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"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."

More Cloudflare pros

"Check Point detects and automatically mitigates attacks, which helps our organization protect our infrastructure."

"It uses several layers of security."

"One of its most outstanding functions is the zero-day DDOS."

"Currently, we have fewer incidents with viruses. We improved our IQ operations and security using this solution. Our company's better after using Check Point."

"Check Point DDoS Protector is a product that uses machine learning and behavior analysis."

"The is a really low level of the false-positive alerts (when the clean traffic is marked as DDoS) due to some advanced techniques used by Check Point under the hood."

"This product uses auto-learning and behavioral analysis to establish baselines for legitimate traffic, and automatically detects and blocks traffic behavior that does not conform."

"The initial setup takes two hours."

More Check Point DDoS Protector pros

"The setup and functionality are fairly straightforward."

"The product’s most valuable features are LTM and WAF."

"It is stable."

"The most valuable features for me are stability, availability, and security, along with the ability to manage multiple features to secure my applications."

"The decryption is great."

"The protection is very useful."

"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager's most valuable feature is load balance. It is readily available and uncomplicated."

"The solution provides behavioral analysis via AI to detect malicious traffic."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) pros

Cons

"DNS Management."

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

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."

"Cloudflare could be improved by introducing a mid-tier pricing option."

"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."

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"Support response time could be improved."

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

More Cloudflare cons

"I would like applications for Android and IOS where we can follow the events, and, if necessary, make changes."

"Check Point should develop a DDoS solution because they don't have one and we need to use another solution, in our case, Imperva. This is a problem because we need to have two firewalls. We would like to only have one solution because it would improve the management, we would have fewer incidents, and we wouldn't need to talk to more than one person for support."

"The solution should greatly improve its interface."

"Monitoring and reporting are the things that can be introduced in the future."

"The product is expensive."

"It does not provide the capability to upload data for blacklisting/whitelisting in bulk."

"The mitigation part could be improved."

"The public documentation is a detail that must be improved in order to have greater implementations with the best practices in this case of the Check Point manufacturer."

More Check Point DDoS Protector cons

"The initial setup of F5 BIG-IP AFM in a complex environment was simple. However, the full deployment took us approximately one year."

"The solution's UI could be improved."

"There is room for improvement in Advanced Firewall Manager's dashboard statistics, especially during attacks."

"The web gateway feature could improve in F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)."

"It doesn't compare to next generation firewalls"

"The solution doesn't really meet our requirements for an edge firewall."

"For configuring the firewall, every single vendor on the planet has pretty much the same logic when it comes to firewalls, and F5 has a completely different approach and completely different behavior."

"F5 should increase its capability to prevent zero-day attacks."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"A free version of the solution is available."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

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

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

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

"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."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The appliance comes with a loaded hardware license, and additional options such as SSL can be purchased and enabled."

"I don't deal with the pricing, but it seems that you need to get basic support in order to upgrade the DDoS database for new attacks and so on."

"It's an expensive solution. It's one of the most expensive solutions in the world. It's cheaper than Palo Alto and Cisco but these are expensive solutions. Fortinet is cheaper."

"The price of F5 BIG-IP AFM is a little more expensive than other firewalls on the market."

"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is an expensive solution. They are one of the best in the market, but the price could be cheaper."

"The product is expensive."

"F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager is not an expensive solution."

"It's very expensive, and you pay extra for the models."

"As per pricing, I would not say cheap, but little higher than cheap, but not very expensive. So you can say kind of value for money solutions."

"We have purchased a five-year licensing package for the product."

"It is somewhat on the expensive side although it is worth the additional cost."

More F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

32%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

19%

Insurance Company

Government

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point DDoS Protector?

The product is expensive.

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What needs improvement with Check Point DDoS Protector?

The pricing could be cheaper.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Check Point DDoS Protector?

The main use case is to protect bank from DDoS attacks. We have it as a service device in network and but it's a comm...

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What do you like most about F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?

CGNAT is one of its strong areas.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?

If considering a one-stop solution that provides load balancing, DNS security, AAA authentication, and firewalling on...

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced Firewall Manager?

F5 should increase its capability to prevent zero-day attacks. Having advanced technology similar to other vendors li...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 50% of the time

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Compared 3% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Radware DDoS Protection Service vs Check Point DDoS Protector

Compared 44% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs Check Point DDoS Protector

Compared 40% of the time

Fortinet FortiDDoS vs Check Point DDoS Protector

Compared 16% of the time

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Arbor DDoS vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 52% of the time

AWS Shield vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 16% of the time

Radware DDoS Protection Service vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 15% of the time

A10 Thunder TPS vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Compared 9% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

April 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Check Point DDoS Protector

April 2025

Download Check Point DDoS Protector product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

April 2025

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) report

Download F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

F5 AFM, F5 Advanced Firewall Manager

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

Modern DDoS attacks use new techniques to exploit areas that traditional security solutions are not equipped to protect. These attacks can cause serious network downtime to businesses who rely on networks and Web services to operate. DDoS Protector Security Appliances and Cloud DDoS Protection Services block destructive DDoS attacks before they cause damage
Learn more about Ddos Protector.

Check Point Software Technologies

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is a high-performance, full-proxy network security solution designed to protect networks and data centers against incoming threats that enter the network. Built on F5’s industry-leading BIG-IP hardware and software platforms, BIG-IP AFM provides a scalable platform that delivers the flexible performance and control needed to mitigate aggressive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and protocol attacks before they overwhelm and degrade applications and infrastructure availability.

For service providers, BIG-IP AFM IPS does even more, protecting the network edge and performing traffic inspection and protocol adherence for prevalent service provider protocols such as SS7, Diameter, HTTP/2, GTP, SCTP and SIP traffic coming into the network over UDP, TCP, and SCTP.

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Boston Properties

City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office

Buyer's Guide

Check Point DDoS Protector vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

March 2025

Free Report: Check Point DDoS Protector vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point DDoS Protector vs. F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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