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Cloudflare vs Palo Alto Networks WildFire 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
6.1
Cloudflare improves performance, security, and financial outcomes with affordable plans, enhancing user satisfaction and operational efficiency significantly.
Sentiment score
6.5
Palo Alto Networks WildFire provides cost-effective, centralized threat management, reducing security costs and improving efficiency in high-threat environments.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.
Owner at Hga consulting
The service generates a low rate of false positives, reducing the overhead of managing false positive events.
Presale Engineer at Westcon-Comstor
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
Cloudflare's customer service is praised for promptness, but technical support feedback varies, especially favoring Enterprise tier users.
Sentiment score
7.0
Palo Alto Networks WildFire's support is responsive and expert but varies in availability and response time, especially for smaller companies.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
Senior Consultant CDN at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.
Owner at Hga consulting
We use other solutions where support is available through Slack channels and is more interactive, with someone responding within a couple of minutes or seconds.
General Manager at bKash Limited
There is a lack of SLA adherence, and third-party partners do not provide prompt responses.
Technical Superintendent at Indian Institute Of Technology, Patna
The service response times are aligned with standards, responding within a few hours based on the problem's criticality.
Presale Engineer at Westcon-Comstor
The support is quite difficult to access promptly.
Content Specialist at PeerSpot
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Users praise Cloudflare's scalability, flexibility, and seamless tier transitions for maintaining high performance under increasing traffic and demands.
Sentiment score
8.2
Palo Alto Networks WildFire efficiently scales for diverse environments, supporting thousands of users while integrating well with security modules.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
Independent Consultant at Unaikui
Wildfire is highly scalable.
Technical Superintendent at Indian Institute Of Technology, Patna
Palo Alto Networks WildFire is scalable, and I give it a nine for scalability.
Content Specialist at PeerSpot
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Cloudflare is generally stable and reliable, with some initial setup challenges but excellent performance and positive user feedback.
Sentiment score
8.5
Palo Alto Networks WildFire is highly rated for reliability, seamless integration, and effective network security performance without disruptions.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
Independent Consultant at Unaikui
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
It performs filtering, malware blocking, and scanning.
Engineer at Taalumgroup
The solution is scalable and stable.
Technical Manager at PSR
 

Room For Improvement

Cloudflare needs enhancements in speed, support, reliability, pricing, and documentation, while expanding integration, security, and analytics capabilities.
WildFire needs improvements in integration, user-friendliness, and pricing, along with better support, automation, and global availability.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
Managed Services Manager at Adapture Technology Group
Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements.
General Manager at bKash Limited
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.
Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Integrated Technology Solution Group (ITSG)
The dashboard should provide better visibility, especially in showing how many files are sent to Wildfire and their findings.
Technical Superintendent at Indian Institute Of Technology, Patna
It is a very good product.
Engineer at Taalumgroup
The support could be improved, as it takes a while to get assistance from the vendors.
Content Specialist at PeerSpot
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Cloudflare cost-effective, with valuable upgrades and competitive pricing, despite unclear enterprise price lists.
Palo Alto WildFire offers advanced threat protection, appealing to enterprises despite its high cost, potentially deterring smaller organizations.
I find it to be cheap.
Engineer at SITMEXICO
I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
Senior Solutions Architect at Think Power Solutions
The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of affordability.
Presale Engineer at Westcon-Comstor
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare provides caching, DDoS protection, and CDN services with enhanced security features, making it vital for optimized web performance.
Palo Alto Networks WildFire automates threat analysis, excels in sandboxing, and offers robust security with cloud-based, user-friendly features.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Integrated Technology Solution Group (ITSG)
Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.
Senior Solutions Architect at Think Power Solutions
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Integrating Palo Alto Networks WildFire with various security protocols similar to a firewall has significantly improved the overall threat detection capabilities in our organization.
Content Specialist at PeerSpot
The most valuable feature of Wildfire is its sandboxing capability for examining suspicious files or locations.
Technical Superintendent at Indian Institute Of Technology, Patna
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), WAN Optimization (4th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
Palo Alto Networks WildFire
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cloudflare and Palo Alto Networks WildFire aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Cloudflare is designed for Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection and holds a mindshare of 16.7%, down 18.0% compared to last year.
Palo Alto Networks WildFire, on the other hand, focuses on Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), holds 7.6% mindshare, down 11.9% since last year.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cloudflare16.7%
Arbor DDoS9.8%
Radware DDoS8.2%
Other65.3%
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Palo Alto Networks WildFire7.6%
Microsoft Defender for Office 3659.7%
Proofpoint Email Protection7.1%
Other75.6%
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
 

Featured Reviews

M.A. Faisal - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at bKash Limited
Advanced protection has secured critical web workloads and provides clear traffic visibility
From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured. Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge. Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.
RK
Engineer at Taalumgroup
Achieve effective threat prevention and seamless integration with powerful technical support
Integration with third-party products is possible. For example, connecting a mail gateway with Palo Alto Networks WildFire allows them to handle prevention. Palo Alto Networks WildFire is a cloud-based sandboxing solution. The firewall is connected to WildFire, and XDR performs sandboxing from the cloud. WildFire conducts malware scanning and emulation, then informs the firewall to block threats based on the response. It also generates reports regarding malware and other issues. The sandboxing process involves sending sample files to the cloud for scanning, checking file authenticity, certificates, and detecting malicious code. WildFire performs multiple checks and informs the XDR agent about file status. This automatic process occurs within minutes or seconds. For unknown or suspicious files, immediate blocking occurs while samples are sent to WildFire for identification. I rate Palo Alto Networks WildFire a 9 out of 10.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection solutions are best for your needs.
881,078 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user206346 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Consultant at Webernetz.net - Network Security Consulting
Mar 11, 2015
Cisco ASA vs. Palo Alto Networks
Cisco ASA vs. Palo Alto: Management Goodies You often have comparisons of both firewalls concerning security components. Of course, a firewall must block attacks, scan for viruses, build VPNs, etc. However, in this post I am discussing the advantages and disadvantages from both vendors concerning…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business36
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise29
 

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.
How does Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall compare with Palo Alto Networks Wildfire?
The Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is a very powerful and very complex piece of anti-viral software. When one considers that fact, it is all the more impressive that the setup is a fairly straightf...
Which is better - Wildfire or FortiGate?
FortiGate has a lot going for it and I consider it to be the best, most user-friendly firewall out there. What I like the most about it is that it has an attractive web dashboard with very easy nav...
How does Cisco ASA Firewall compare with Palo Alto's WildFire?
When looking to change our ASA Firewall, we looked into Palo Alto’s WildFire. It works especially in preventing advanced malware and zero-day exploits with real-time intelligence. The sandbox featu...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
 

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.
Novamedia, Nexon Asia Pacific, Lenovo, Samsonite, IOOF, Sinogrid, SanDisk Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Radware, NETSCOUT and others in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection. Updated: January 2026.
881,078 professionals have used our research since 2012.