Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fastly comparison

Cloudflare and Fastly are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Cloudflare is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.4, while Fastly is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.5. Additionally, 95% of Cloudflare users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Fastly and Cloudflare Web Application Firewall are key players in the content delivery network market, focusing on web application security solutions. Cloudflare WAF generally has an advantage due to its extensive features and performance optimization, which justifies its pricing for many technical buyers.

Features: Fastly provides advanced real-time log streaming, dynamic site acceleration, and edge computing capabilities. Cloudflare WAF is known for comprehensive threat intelligence, extensive DDoS protection, and integrated analytics. Cloudflare's additional performance-enhancing tools contribute to its leading position in versatility and security.

Room for Improvement: Fastly can enhance its zero-trust solutions and improve some dashboard interfaces. Faster integration with third-party platforms could also be beneficial for Fastly. Meanwhile, Cloudflare could improve its rate-limiting capabilities, simplify some advanced feature setups that require additional subscriptions, and offer more flexible plans for better financial accessibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly's deployment model allows high customization with a focus on edge-based application architecture, supported by a solid support framework. Cloudflare WAF offers a streamlined setup, intuitive management tools, and robust CDN integration with a responsive support experience. Cloudflare's efficient onboarding enhances accessibility for deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly's customizable offerings result in higher setup costs, but can yield a high ROI for specific applications. Cloudflare WAF provides competitive pricing tiers with transparency, ensuring cost-effective scaling and strong security efficiencies. While Fastly offers precise resource allocation benefits, Cloudflare WAF's extensive capabilities typically offer greater financial advantages.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly

January 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

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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SachidDoshi

Senior Enterprise Security Architect at HGS - Hinduja Global Solutions

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.

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Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

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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

"The technical support is good."

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

"The web application firewall brought us good security and a view of the accesses/blocks of the entire domain and subdomain that were accessed both by region (country) and IPs."

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

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

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

More Cloudflare pros

"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."

"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."

"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."

"There is a huge signature repository"

"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."

"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."

"It protects web applications efficiently."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

Cons

"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."

"Support response time could be improved."

"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."

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

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"

"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."

"The learning curve was steep initially."

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."

"Support can be challenging at times."

"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"Support is not that great."

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"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."

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

"A free version of the solution is available."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The solution is expensive."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"It is an expensive solution."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

28%

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

18%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

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...

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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...

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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.

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What do you like most about Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The product has a valuable security control functionality.

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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.

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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...

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What do you like most about Fastly?

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for h...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fastly?

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 21% of the time

AWS WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 14% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 14% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 11% of the time

Alibaba Cloud WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 2% of the time

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall Competitors

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 17% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Edgio vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly

Compared 4% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

February 2025

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

February 2025

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Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Cloudflare WAF

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

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Fastly

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

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly

January 2025

Free Report: Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Fastly

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