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Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF 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
7.2
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)
Cloudflare Web Application ...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (7th)
F5 Advanced WAF
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)
 

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.
SachidDoshi - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a huge signature repository and is superiorly effective in mitigating DDoS attacks
The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced, which presently stands at two or three months. The product has a custom rule set that users can modify and manifest as needed. The vendor can probably shorten the learning curve using cutting-edge technologies like AI. The solution provider can also work around the web applications and identify the toolset that needs to be implemented to deploy the solution in less time. The vendor has launched a SASE product that can function with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall, but many improvements are needed in terms of features, such as the web filtering feature, and CASB has not yet been added.
Richard Polyak - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy event identification, highly stable, and customizable
Generally, F5 Advanced WAF initial setup is straightforward. However, our environment was more complex and it took us a little more time to customize the solution to where we needed it to be. Additionally, the customization didn't rectify everything. We had to do customization to a certain event to prevent attacks that it wasn't catching, but that might not necessarily be the solutions' fault. It could be more of our setup than the solution's fault and not being able to run the latest version or the newer version could be more of a limitation on our ability to put it in the right place. The whole implementation to have the solution run at the level we wanted it to take approximately five months. Our company's environment is one that we can't put a canned solution in front of. Our environment, cannot have a canned solution that might fit everybody else because of how customized this environment is. It does need a lot of tuning to meet our environment's requirements. I rate the initial setup of F5 Advanced WAF a three out of five.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."
"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"Cloudflare DNS is widely used, and it's good for websites. If we use Cloudflare DNS and update one record, it updates in their office instantly."
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."
"The most valuable feature is its usability."
"The setup process is very simple for me."
"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."
"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."
"The initial setup process is simple."
"There is no need to worry about updating signatures because WAF will automatically update the signatures for you."
"The best solution for WAF."
"The support experience is better than average."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its ability to have a pool of resources that can distribute your traffic, and that is a plus for me. My company tried to look into a competitor, Imperva, but it was lacking that capability, so F5 Advanced WAF outperforms Imperva."
"I appreciate the way F5 Advanced WAF builds policies by configuring a basic policy and queuing it in learning mode."
"I like the security features, especially against SQL injection."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the easy identification of events and customization. We can pinpoint our settings."
"Customers find the load balancer feature as the most valuable."
 

Cons

"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."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"Technical support is lacking."
"Support response time could be improved."
"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"We have noticed multiple instances where Cloudflare falsely indicates that our servers are down, even when there is no actual load on them. This makes it challenging for us to identify the exact issue."
"The pricing could be improved."
"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"Support can be challenging at times."
"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."
"Its stability could be better."
"The GUI interface can be confusing due to similar-looking tabs for policy building, traffic learning, and event logs."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve on its funding for WAF features. There is a need to be more advanced WAF features."
"They could provide better pricing."
"There is a gap in report management."
"Support is a little slow."
"I would not expect traffic details to pass through the web application firewall across the length of the whole application. I think that there is a web application where it can let the application function without traffic going in into the WAF."
"I would like to see improved features in the F5 Advanced WAF solution, especially with a focus on enabling Kubernetes fully."
"I would like to see the API Protection improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"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."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"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."
"We are using the free version."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"It is not too pricey."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high."
"The pricing is too high."
"I am not sure about pricing but licenses are available on Google."
"The price of the solution is reasonable when compared with other products, such as FortiWeb. I am very satisfied with the price."
"I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten."
"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"
"The price of F5 Advanced WAF could improve it is expensive."
"I think the price is very high."
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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%
Educational Organization
23%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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 Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
The product has a valuable security control functionality.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before.
What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available. This improvement wo...
What do you like most about F5 Advanced WAF?
It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the r...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost, leading to amb...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
F5 Advanced WAF sells perpetual licenses as perpetual assets during sales without informing me that support ends afte...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Cloudflare WAF
No data available
 

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.
crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. F5 Advanced WAF and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.