No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Exinda vs Symantec Proxy comparison

Sponsored
 

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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare Web Application ...
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (5th)
Exinda
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
WAN Optimization (5th)
Symantec Proxy
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

WAN Optimization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Exinda6.4%
Steelhead14.7%
Cato SASE Cloud Platform14.4%
Other64.5%
WAN Optimization
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Symantec Proxy1.7%
Zscaler Internet Access10.3%
Cisco Umbrella10.2%
Other77.8%
Secure Web Gateways (SWG)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
CTO at PlayNirvana
Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.
MJ
Senior Engineer, Team Lead, Network Operations at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Allows us to have better control over our network by shaping traffic more gently
There might be room for improvement in the speed and throughput of some of their devices. They're getting a bit slow on some of the bigger devices. It would be helpful if there were some sort of an ISP model. Also, while I don't think it would be possible for them to do, it would be better if they had the Citrix support and the visualization to visualize your network. Besides that, it fits its purpose as a shaper and accelerator. Some people would say things like, "Add a firewall to it," but I disagree. I think a firewall's a firewall, and Exinda's a shaper and accelerator.
Ganesh Basappa - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Security Consultant at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Granular control for web traffic with enhanced content inspection, but support needs improvement
There are many use cases in terms of content inspection, such as having granular control for file type extensions when trying to download file types by default. It depends on the requirements, and based on that, we customize policies. We have deployed it in an Azure infrastructure, and we have…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."
"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."
"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."
"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."
"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."
"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."
"The product has a valuable security control functionality."
"A customer can either buy 50 Mb with us or 50 Mb with somebody else, but they'll get a 70 Mb feel with us because we can shape it a little bit better."
"Compared to some of the stuff that I've used a decade ago, the Exinda solution is night and day."
"It has the ability to prioritize, providing an automatic optimization. I can put it in a hierarchy and know that certain devices will be prioritized over others. It is able to identify the traffic. It can pick out whether if its a Zoom meeting (or something like that), then it's able to put that somewhere in the hierarchy based on the traffic type."
"Getting Exinda was a life saver for our voice traffic"
"The benefit that we have seen is that if we turn it off, people notice that the applications are running slowly."
"One of the great things for us is that the solution works, and it works whether you're looking at it or not."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to create policies where we can tailor them to the customer. It enables us to prioritize apps and users for bandwidth."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to provide very granular classes of service. That's important because it allows us to prioritize certain traffic types over others, to a very granular level."
"The Symantec antivirus suite and the proxy component are the most valuable feature, and that's probably why management decided to purchase the solution."
"What I found most valuable in Symantec Proxy is that it doesn't have any limitations. It also has a simple configuration, with only one window pane, unlike Zscaler, which has multiple window panes. Deploying the agent is also more straightforward in Symantec Proxy."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the URL database, malicious URLs, policies, and policy creation."
"It enables us to manage bandwidth for users based on their privilege levels. For example, if a user wants to use a certain application or resource, we can provide access based on their privileges."
"The proxy is valuable due to its reputation and categorization features for sites, which assist in blocking malicious sites."
"The solution is scalable."
"The product is very good, and the URL filtering database is great."
"This is a stable and robust solution with many features."
 

Cons

"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well."
"The learning curve was steep initially."
"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."
"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."
"It should improve the quality of service. It can improve their connection to the internet and your IP."
"More free training on the website for those just getting started."
"There might be room for improvement in the speed and throughput of some of their devices. They're getting a bit slow on some of the bigger devices. It would be helpful if there were some sort of an ISP model."
"One of the concerns that we've had with Exinda is the fact that ever since GFI took over Exinda, they haven't really put in much time into actually developing the product."
"GFI's technical support for this solution could be better. It's hard to find information about Exinda, directly."
"The stability was terrible in version 7.0 but it's been good since version 7.2."
"The areas for improvement would be around the support service that GFI provides."
"Creating the custom application is a bit awkward. I kind of have to guess my way through it sometimes."
"Technical support is an area that requires some improvement."
"The traffic filtering could improve. Our firewall traffic is limited. Additionally, it would be helpful if there was a dashboard and reporting feature."
"They charge a lot of money yet don't give highly productive features."
"The solution is quite complex."
"Symantec was purchased by Broadcom and since this has happened the support has not been good. They do not find the solutions to our issues quickly."
"The initial setup can be somewhat complex, and deploying the system can take some time."
"Support response time and case resolution could be improved."
"There are performance issues with all of the proxies."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"It is not too pricey."
"The solution is expensive."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"The pricing and licensing are pretty fair and really competitive. There are other SD-WAN solutions that are pretty costly because they build in a service where they'll manage it for you, which is really great. I don't know if Exinda has that option as well. However, we are a small shop and cost-conscious. For things like this, we are accustomed to self-managing and this solution suits us just fine. For a tool that gives you, like the graphs and reporting, it has a fair price point."
"It is priced well for the market, for what it needs to do."
"Our cost was based on a three-year upfront CapEx contract."
"The price is too expensive compared with that of another solution."
"There is a different department that looks into the licensing part."
"The product is highly priced. There are no additional costs apart from the standard licenses."
"In terms of cost, it is expensive. Its pricing has been a challenge for us since its acquisition by Broadcom."
"There is a license needed to use Symantec Proxy."
"Licensing is based on a subscription."
"It's expensive. Clients often go to other products."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which WAN Optimization solutions are best for your needs.
894,998 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Symantec Proxy?
Pricing is difficult to specify as Broadcom sells platforms that include multiple products, making it hard to determi...
What needs improvement with Symantec Proxy?
AI features could potentially improve the proxy by helping build rules more efficiently, suggesting unused rules, and...
What is your primary use case for Symantec Proxy?
I use Symantec Proxy for surfing the internet from internal to external networks. My endpoints do not have direct acc...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
Blue Coat Encrypted Traffic Management, ProxySG Appliance
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
UMass Dartmouth, MLB Network, R&R Ice Cream, Savills, Manhattan School of Music, Blum Shapiro, Cincinnati Public Schools, City of Richmond, Genting Casinos, The Salvation Army, VoIP Unlimited, Frontier Silicon, Lakeshore Toltest, CTI Foods
Jefferies
Find out what your peers are saying about Riverbed, Cato Networks, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in WAN Optimization. Updated: May 2026.
894,998 professionals have used our research since 2012.