F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) comparison

The compared F5 Advanced WAF and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) solutions aren't in the same category. F5 Advanced WAF is ranked #2 in WAF , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 11.2% mindshare in the category. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is ranked #2 in ADC , with an average rating of 8.6, and holds a 15.4% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of F5 Advanced WAF users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 83% of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 Advanced WAF and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Report (Updated: September 2020).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

September 2020

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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

Mindshare comparison

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Application Delivery Controllers (ADC)

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

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Richard Polyak

Sr. Architect at NBC Universal

Easy event identification, highly stable, and customizable

Generally, F5 Advanced WAF initial setup is straightforward. However, our environment was more complex and it took us a little more time to customize the solution to where we needed it to be. Additionally, the customization didn't rectify everything. We had to do customization to a certain event to prevent attacks that it wasn't catching, but that might not necessarily be the solutions' fault. It could be more of our setup than the solution's fault and not being able to run the latest version or the newer version could be more of a limitation on our ability to put it in the right place. The whole implementation to have the solution run at the level we wanted it to take approximately five months. Our company's environment is one that we can't put a canned solution in front of. Our environment, cannot have a canned solution that might fit everybody else because of how customized this environment is. It does need a lot of tuning to meet our environment's requirements. I rate the initial setup of F5 Advanced WAF a three out of five.

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Mahmoud-Yassin

Head of IT Infrastructure and Security Operations at United Arab Bank

You can fully automate disaster recovery

LTM's cloud capabilities could be improved. Cloud providers all offer load balancing, but you can't get the same level of security. F5's cloud service is still not on par with its on-prem service. F5 acquired multiple companies a few years ago, but they still haven't integrated those solutions. For example, F5 acquired Shape Security, which had an excellent solution for detecting bots and automated login attacks, but F5 offers the solution in an inflexible way. It is only available as a cloud-based solution. It isn't zone-based. Some companies are restricted from sending financial data outside the country because of GDPR in Europe or other national regulations. Here in the UAE, we can't send host data out.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The features of Cloudflare were found to be more beneficial and led to the decision to utilize it over other options."

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"It is easier to configure and develop documentation to see how we have configured firewalls."

"What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

"DDoS attacks target unprotected machines. Cloudflare detects and stops these attacks using internal systems. It identifies incoming DDoS attacks, issuing challenges or blocking them immediately."

"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 is very good at mitigating threats."

More Cloudflare pros

"The best solution for WAF."

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the security features and the protection."

"Very easy to implement and works well."

"The solution uses AI to protect against botnet attacks."

"WAF functionality is valuable for protecting applications from attacks."

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the balancer and you can change policies very easily."

"I like the security features, especially against SQL injection."

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the overall capabilities, there is not a comparable solution on the market."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"The initial setup is easy."

"BIG-IP LTM is completely stable, and its performance is good."

"F5's attack signatures and automation are the most valuable features. The disaster recovery capabilities are also excellent. You don't need to do anything. It has automatic failover from production."

"F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) improves the resilience and quality of the application itself, the speed and the user experience for the application. The data that the users need from the application is actually acquired faster. So, it provides faster data acquisition."

"Secure and scalable traffic management solution for applications. Good for bigger environments."

"BIG-IP LTM's most valuable feature is that it allows you to seamlessly add more servers without impacting your application's configuration."

"It has so many features. First of all, it has a full proxy architecture, it has multiple modules. The best feature is the WAF, the web application firewall module. It also has cashing type capabilities. It has all kinds of load-balancing algorithms based on your IT requirements."

"It is a stable product from a stable company. Recently, they have been more focused on security as well."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pros

Cons

"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."

"It should be easier to collect the logs with companies like Sumo. However, based on my discussions with the salespeople, I understand that's how they make their money. With the enterprise product, they want people doing those kinds of enterprise features to do the logging. They want them to pay a lot of money, and that's where I have an issue with them. That should be a default. You should be able to get the log no matter what. The logging should be universal."

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."

"Latencies are always a problem."

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."

"Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to buy Cloudflare in my country."

More Cloudflare cons

"The solution's dashboard could be improved. When you're moving from policy to policy, the logs and the integration of the logs in other systems aren't straightforward."

"The product could be more user-friendly, particularly the user interface for administrators."

"People who want to work with the device have to be pro in Linux"

"It's sometimes difficult to customize APIs with F5 Advanced WAF."

"Users would like to have an additional IP intelligence license to handle this within WAF itself without needing to engage with the SOC team."

"Scalability could be improved."

"I would like to see a better interface and better documentation compatibility with other products. It's more complicated with OWASP."

"The DDoS capabilities should be enhanced."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"I would like them to have more flexible models."

"The GUI needs improvement."

"A lot of functions that are attributed to iRules can actually be simple profile changes. iRules do have a certain performance impact. Therefore, instead of writing simple iRules, they can create certain profiles for classes that will perform the same function."

"If we decide to migrate to the cloud, I don't think that BIG-IP is a good solution and we probably won't use it."

"The license terms for "non-commercial" will are challenging for us."

"The solution is scalable."

"Performance: Using the product, applications are jittery."

"Technical support could be improved."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"We don't have any issues with the price."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is too high."

"There are different licenses available to use F5 Advanced WAF, such as BT, ASM, and LPM."

"Licensing fees for this solution are paid on a yearly basis."

"F5 Advanced WAF technical support comes at a cost, and it's expensive."

"The cost is slightly above average."

"After buying the program, you just pay for the support every year."

"The price of the solution is reasonable when compared with other products, such as FortiWeb. I am very satisfied with the price."

"It is a little bit costly, but it has all the features that are required."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution is sometimes expensive."

"The cost is high for this product, so it's not suitable for small customers, e.g. those with small environments."

"The tool is a bit expensive."

"Compared to using open-source products, the prices are not cheap."

"There are a few licensing options available for F5 BIG-IP LTM. You can have a perpetual license which is a lifetime license. You then only need to renew the support, if you choose to open a ticket with the support."

"I use a yearly subscription, which is the most expensive one now compared to its competitors."

"F5 is more expensive than other solutions, so you have to be sure F5 is the best solution to fit the requirements."

"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was good. We chose to go through the AWS Marketplace because everything that we needed was a soft appliance. We needed something to work in Amazon, and this product was available there."

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

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 GR...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about F5 Advanced WAF?

It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the r...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?

The setup cost is normal, yet not the best in terms of the commercial aspect. Other competitors like Fortinet are che...

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What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

One improvement for AOF could be focusing on enhancing its AI engine to make it more mature.

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IP?

There are no specific areas for improvement as it is already well-resolved and doesn't require further enhancements.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for F5 BIG-IP?

The primary use case includes load balancing to serve application servers and basic web application firewall solution...

See all answers

What do you like most about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)?

The solution is robust and reliable.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 22% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 16% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 14% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 7% of the time

Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 3% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

Fortinet FortiADC vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 19% of the time

NetScaler vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 8% of the time

VMWare Avi Load Balancer vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 7% of the time

More F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

February 2025

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

February 2025

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) report

Download F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

F5 BIG-IP, BIG-IP LTM, F5 ASM, Viprion, F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition , Crescendo Networks Application Delivery Controller, BIG IP

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

F5 Advanced WAF is a web application security solution for financial and government sectors, e-commerce, and public-facing websites. It offers protection against various attacks, including botnets, web scraping, and foreign entities. The solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and is often used with other security tools. Its most valuable features include DDoS and DNS attack protection, SSL uploading, anomaly detection, and the ability to input custom rules.

F5 Advanced WAF has helped organizations to expose more services to the public while providing an extra layer of protection, preventing revenue loss, and securing connectivity.

F5 BIG-IP LTM optimizes the speed and reliability of your apps via both network and application layers. Using real-time protocol and traffic management decisions based on app and server and connection management conditions, and TCP and content offloading, BIG-IP LTM dramatically improves application and infrastructure responsiveness. BIG-IP LTM's architecture includes protocol awareness to control traffic for the most important applications. BIG-IP LTM tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers and delivers SSL performance and visibility for inbound and outbound traffic, to protect the user experience by encrypting everything from the client to the server.

BIG-IP LTM provides enterprise-class Application Delivery Controller (ADC). You get granular layer 7 control, SSL offloading and acceleration capabilities, and advanced scaling technologies that deliver performance and reliability on-demand. The highly optimized TCP/IP stack combines TCP/IP techniques and improvements in the latest RFCs with extensions to minimize the effect of congestion and packet loss and recovery. Independent testing tools and customer experiences show LTM's TCP stack delivers up to a 2x performance gain for users and a 4x increase in bandwidth efficiency.

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank

Riken, TransUnion, Tepco Systems Administration, Daejeon University, G&T Bank, Danamon, CyberAgent Inc.

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

September 2020

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and other solutions. Updated: September 2020.

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838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) report.

We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.