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Cloudflare vs NGINX App Protect 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)
NGINX App Protect
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (16th), Container Security (21st), 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 19.8%, down 20.6% compared to last year.
NGINX App Protect, on the other hand, focuses on Web Application Firewall (WAF), holds 2.2% mindshare, down 2.9% since last year.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

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.
Tomaz Sobczak - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 25, 2024
Signature-based detection, DOS protection, and bot protection
NGINX App Protect is easier to automate and configure, or manage from an API. This is good for securing applications. However, it's not suitable for more complex tasks. NGINX App Protect positively impacted performance changes. There's a cache or it works like a proxy, so it can speed up…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Its ease of integration with Office 365 and the fact that it's a good product compared to what I had before"
"The DDoS protection is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"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."
"Cloudflare has many features."
"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."
"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"It is a stable solution."
"It is a very good tool for load balancing."
"It has the best documentation features."
"The initial setup was simple and took three to four days."
"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its open source."
"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is the reverse proxy."
"NGINX App Protect has complete control over the HTTP session."
"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its flexibility."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."
"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."
"Technical support is lacking."
"Areas for improvement would be if NGINX could scan for vulnerabilities and learn and update the signatures of DoS attacks."
"Currently, the policies have to be handled manually, and you have to create from scratch, which can be a bit time-consuming, in a large environment."
"Its technical support could be better."
"The product's user interface is an area with shortcomings as it can be quite confusing for users, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It doesn't have more advanced features like no false-positive security, which you can configure in Advanced WAF."
"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."
"They could provide a better user interface."
"The price of NGINX App Protect could improve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."
"The product's pricing is cheap."
"NGINX is not expensive."
"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."
"The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."
"NGINX App Protect is expensive."
"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
"There is a monthly or annual subscription to use NGINX App Protect. There are not any additional costs to the subscription."
"The price of NGINX App Protect is not much different from the products that fall under the leader category of Gartner Magic Quadrant."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
814,649 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
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
6%
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.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.