Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

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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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Shehzad Ali

Information Security and Compliance Officer at Carnation

Offers time and cost savings with integration, but user interface needs improvement

We are using it for our internal application development. We are testing those features of application gateways. We are integrating it with our solutions, application, Azure Application Gateway Microsoft has a vast variety of tools, and it blends very well. It provides a range of services, so it…

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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 most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

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

"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"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."

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

More Cloudflare pros

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

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

"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."

"We extensively use the solution every day. The solution is very stable; we haven’t seen any glitches."

"The initial setup process is simple."

"The setup process is very simple for me."

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

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

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"The solution was very easy to configure. It wasn't hard at all to adjust it to our needs."

"The pricing is quite good."

"I find Application Gateway’s WAF module valuable because it helps prevent layer 7 attacks."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is traffic management."

"The solution has built-in rules that reduce alerts and are easy to configure."

"The tool helps manage microservices by providing developers with a platform to conduct tests and assessments on the web application. The custom domain option is one of the most valuable features I've found. This feature is incredibly helpful for the end-users of the web application. With the custom domain feature, you can change the lengthy link to a shorter, more memorable one. For example, instead of using a lengthy default link, you can customize it to something like imail.com, which is much easier to remember and share."

"The solution's integration is very good."

"We chose this solution in the first place because it has access to Layer 7. I can control the requests and the content, which I can access on my network if I want to even if it's forbidden access to other external resources. If I want to monitor, for example, traffic, and apply this rule on Layer 7, I can do so. This was our main goal when implementing this application. We wanted to take advantage of the Gateway capabilities."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pros

Cons

"The pricing could be improved."

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

"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."

"There could be more courses with engineers. I like e-learning, however, having a specialist in a classroom is more comfortable for me."

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

"Latencies are always a problem."

"One area of improvement is in the Access Rules. Hypothetically, if we wanted to block or challenge traffic outside of the United States, the only way to currently do that (as far as I know) is to enter every single country outside of the United States. That could be a labor intensive job. A solution could be to enable users to create a rule where traffic is only allowed within a certain country."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

More Cloudflare cons

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."

"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."

"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."

"The learning curve was steep initially."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."

"The reporting could be more granular."

"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."

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

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway could improve by allowing features to use more third-party tools."

"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is harder to manage than Imperva. It is not intuitive and stable compared to other products."

"The graphical interface needs improvement because it is not user friendly."

"The support can be improved when you are configuring the system rules. The Disaster Recovery feature can be added in the next release. The price of the solution can be reduced a bit."

"It takes a lot of time for a certificate to update in the system. That is a huge drawback, affecting the load-balancing side. And when there are changes to the load balancing, it affects the end-user."

"One of the challenges we faced was the solution does not support any other PCP protocols apart from HTTP and HTTPS."

"Application Gateway’s limitation is that the private and the public endpoint cannot use the same port."

"The user interface could be better."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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 solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"A free version of the solution is available."

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

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

"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."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

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

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

"The solution is expensive."

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

"It is not too pricey."

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

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"The cost is not an issue."

"The solution is cheaper than Imperva. I rate it four to five out of ten."

"Between v1 and v2, there is a lot of change in the pricing. It is very costly compared to AWS."

"It is not expensive."

"The solution is reasonably priced compared to other solutions."

"There is some additional cost, such as extended support."

"Regarding pricing for Azure Application Gateway, I would rate it at seven."

"The solution's pricing is not complex. It is not expensive from our point of view."

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

19%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

23%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

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...

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's the difference between Azure Front Door and Application Gateway?

We found Azure Front Door to be easily scaled and very stable. The implementation is very fast and Microsoft provides...

How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?

Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the...

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Myra Security DDoS Protection vs Cloudflare

Compared 1% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 15% of the time

AWS WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 11% of the time

Akamai App and API Protector vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 9% of the time

Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall Competitors

F5 Advanced WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 12% of the time

HAProxy vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 9% of the time

NetScaler vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 8% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Compared 8% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Competitors

Product Reports

Cloudflare

Download Cloudflare product report

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

March 2025

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway report

Download Microsoft Azure Application Gateway product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Cloudflare WAF

Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway

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

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Microsoft

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

Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway