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Cloudflare vs Microsoft Azure Application Gateway comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (11th)
Microsoft Azure Application...
Average Rating
7.2
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (3rd), Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Services solutions, they serve different purposes. Cloudflare is designed for Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection and holds a mindshare of 19.8%, down 20.6% compared to last year.
Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, on the other hand, focuses on Application Delivery Controllers (ADC), holds 8.8% mindshare, down 11.5% since last year.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 1, 2022
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.
Sami - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 29, 2022
High stability with built-in rules that reduce alerts and are easy to configure
Our company uses the solution to publish services that are on Azure. There is more than one way to publish services.  You can use the Microsoft infrastructure for app services including small programming, configurations related to obligations, and publishing. Or you can publish manually by using…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."
"Centralized, full-featured DNS."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."
"Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications."
"Application Gateway automatically redirects unwanted users and takes care of the security aspect. It also handles the performance side of things, which is why we use it."
"I find Application Gateway’s WAF module valuable because it helps prevent layer 7 attacks."
"The solution's most valuable feature is an HTTP solution and SSL certificate. It is also easy to use."
"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."
"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."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is an easy-to-use solution."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the web application firewall (WAF)."
"The solution was very easy to configure. It wasn't hard at all to adjust it to our needs."
 

Cons

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"An integrated SSO feature would be useful for Cloudflare DNS."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution doesn’t support wildcard-based and regular expression-based rules."
"Application Gateway’s limitation is that the private and the public endpoint cannot use the same port."
"One of the challenges we faced was the solution does not support any other PCP protocols apart from HTTP and HTTPS."
"The product could be easier to use and implement."
"Needs easier integration with the existing SIAM."
"The solution has many limitations. You cannot upgrade the VPN to the application gateway. So I started with version one, which has limited capabilities, and they provided version two. And unfortunately, I cannot upgrade from v one to v two like other services. So I have to decommission the version one and create a new one with version two. Also the version one was complex with the certificates uploading the SQL certificates."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway could improve by allowing features to use more third-party tools."
"The configuration is very specific right now and needs to be much more flexible."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."
"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The solution is paid monthly. The solution is highly expensive."
"The solution is cheaper than Imperva. I rate it four to five out of ten."
"There is a need to pay a fixed price per month to use the product. There are no additional payments to be made to Microsoft apart from the charges paid towards the monthly licensing costs attached to the solution."
"The solution is reasonably priced compared to other solutions."
"It is not expensive."
"Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is a pretty affordable product. My company needs to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs of the solution. The additional costs apart from the licensing costs of the solution vary."
"The tool's pricing model is pay-as-you-go."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
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Comparison Review

it_user68487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 6, 2013
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall
CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 GRE tunnels. We have decreased site load times on Mobile 3G from 8 to 1,6 seconds ...
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 that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
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'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 excellent support. Azure Front Door can quickly detect abnormalities before the...
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 Azure Application Gateway web application firewall software was the better fit ...
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 performance side of things, which is why we use it.
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
Azure Application Gateway, MS Azure Application Gateway
 

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.
Lilly, AccuWeather, AIRFRANCE, Honeywell
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway and other solutions. Updated: February 2023.
815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.