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Cloudflare vs NGINX App Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Businesses see financial benefits from Cloudflare through improved uptime, security, and performance, enhancing returns despite measurement challenges.
Sentiment score
7.1
NGINX App Protect provided significant ROI, cost-effectiveness, and improved security, especially crucial during the Covid-19 pandemic.
You would only lose money if you had an attack and you need to calculate the cost against the risks.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
We have had ROI with the tool's use since it never gave us downtime and made us lose millions.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Customer service is highly rated, especially for Enterprise plans, but response times could improve for complex issues.
Sentiment score
6.1
NGINX App Protect customer support has mixed reviews, with varying responsiveness and cost opinions, and issues with occasional slow responses.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
We'd like a dedicated account manager.
You can get a support engineer with the best qualifications.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Cloudflare is highly regarded for its scalability, smoothly accommodating various user needs and handling significant traffic across business sizes.
Sentiment score
6.3
NGINX App Protect's scalability is mixed, with good results for small groups but issues with larger deployments and management.
It can scale approximately 10 percent, it is limited only by how much money you want to spend on the increase.
I rate the scalability of Cloudflare DNS a ten out of ten.
I would rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten since I didn't encounter any issues with it.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudflare is generally praised for stability and reliability, despite occasional issues and past outages, requiring proper configuration for best performance.
Sentiment score
8.4
NGINX App Protect is reliable and efficient, scoring highly in stability, but could improve in HTML5 availability.
I rate the stability of Cloudflare DNS a ten out of ten.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Users suggest Cloudflare improve analytics, CDN errors, support, DNS, APIs, pricing, server access, DDoS features, and documentation.
NGINX App Protect faces issues with configuration, costs, support, integration, documentation, upgrades, security, automation, and communication about features.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
Compared to other vendors and Cloudflare, there will be more downtime.
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare provides free and paid plans from $20, with straightforward pricing catering to small, medium, and enterprise businesses.
NGINX App Protect pricing ranges from $3,000 to $40,000+ annually based on architecture, usage, and renewal costs.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
The price of the solution is expensive.
When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable.
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare provides speed enhancement, security, and ease of use with CDN, DDoS protection, SSL, and traffic analytics for website optimization.
Users value NGINX App Protect for flexible deployment, security features, robust functionality, and seamless integration into CICD pipelines.
The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security.
Our scenario consisted of two web servers in different allocations to control access demands, and the load balancer did the job as expected, bringing security and stability to access points.
For me, the valuable feature is DDoS protection.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
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) (14th)
NGINX App Protect
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (15th), Container Security (22nd), API Security (4th)
 

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 18.8%, down 19.2% compared to last year.
NGINX App Protect, on the other hand, focuses on Web Application Firewall (WAF), holds 2.0% mindshare, down 2.9% since last year.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

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.
Saurav Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers protection to users from external threats
NGINX App Protect secures our company's application, and it has helped me a lot, considering that we have critical infrastructure in India where we see how lots of attacks come onto our organization's servers. The tool offers protection against multiple threats present in India's IT ecosystem. The tool helps our company to make our payments secure, meaning it has the ability to provide a secure payment environment in India. Speaking about the improvements in our company's application performance since implementing NGINX App Protect, the gRPC support for the solution is very low. My company is not getting any proper documentation on how to deploy gRPC over NGINX App Protect. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. People can use the product as their company's base server, WAF, or for its proxy manager, depending on the business requirements. My company follows PCI DSS compliance because we operate in a payment-related industry. Right now, my company follows all the standards, so we comply with all the requirements and policies. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Energy/Utilities 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 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 needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?
The product's price is high, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. The tool's licensing model is also not good. The product should have more documentation, especially like t...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall
 

Learn More

 

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.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. NGINX App Protect and other solutions. Updated: May 2020.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.