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 11.9% mindshare in the category. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is ranked #2 in ADC , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 15.1% 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.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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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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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Ahmed Moamen

Senior Security Solutions Architect at Orange

Protects applications with versatile authentication features

F5 offers a versatile solution that can be integrated with APM in cases where integration with an external IDB is needed. It is useful for authentication backup if the on-prem directory service is unavailable. Additionally, its WAF functionality is valuable for protecting applications from attacks. It is a versatile and strong solution that's easy to understand and deploy.

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Richard Polyak

Sr. Architect at NBC Universal

Reduces maintenance downtime and has a strong user community

The advice I would give to others who are looking to implement F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is this: look at their user knowledge base first to see if the solution truly fits what you need. On a scale of one to 10, I would give F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager a nine.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."

"The tool is user-friendly."

"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

"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."

"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."

More Cloudflare pros

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

"The product has valuable features for load balancing, monitoring tools, and HPXpress services."

"It's flexible and powerful, and the users can input their own rules to the system."

"Web attack signatures are very important for detecting web attacks."

"The solution isn't too expensive. The license allows you to license what you need and leave out what you don't need."

"The product is used to secure web applications and has the ability to use API templates and bot protection features, such as blocking requests or presenting CAPTCHA pages to end users."

"One of the most valuable features is the Local Traffic Manager."

"I like them because I like the security solution. They get extra marks compared to other solutions or competitors. There are more features than any other product I can think of. They're always monitoring, and the security features offer more than other, lesser products."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"The tech support we got from F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager directly was pretty good."

"The load balancing function, the monitors that you can create, and iRules programmability are most valuable."

"If I were to choose one key feature in particular, perhaps it would be the iRule feature. It’s a really versatile tool."

"iRule feature is useful."

"The iRule feature is very useful for inspecting HTTP. Sometimes, we use it for modifying the headers of the HTTP."

"F5 Big-IP Local Traffic Manager has better modular features especially LTM, which according to the clients, is very beneficial. Most of the users opt for a combination of big IP LTM and WAF which helps them to leverage application load balancing and enhance application security many-fold."

"We're able to do load balancing and global load balancing. When you marry those two products together, you can do a lot more. We're able to deliver our applications more securely and faster. It has improved our deliverability where we have more service across the shared data centers. We can intelligently reach all of those client connections across all of the servers and do it fairly quickly. It has helped improve our application delivery and performance."

"Along with load balancing, we perform a lot of packet inspections, URL rewriting, and SSL interceptions via iRule."

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

Cons

"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."

"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."

"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."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

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

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

"In the last two years, there has been a certain amount of downtime when using the VDM."

More Cloudflare cons

"F5 Advanced WAF could improve resource usage, it is CPU intensive. Additionally, adding automated remediation would be a benefit. For example, an easy button alerts us of the events that are occurring, and what we want to do at the time. An automated approach where somebody could be alerted very quickly. Instead of going and reconfiguring everything, an automated approach is what I'm looking at."

"The reporting portion of F5 Advance WAF is not great. They need to work out something better, as it is very basic. You only see the top IPs, I think there is more they can offer."

"The DDoS capabilities should be enhanced."

"The solution is tedious. It takes a lot of discrete settings so one needs to get detailed and granular when they use the solution. It takes you a whole lot of energy and concentration to configure. It needs to be much more straight-forward, like other web solutions."

"It should be a little bit easy to deploy in terms of the overall deployment session. One of our customers is a bit unhappy about the reporting options. Currently, it automatically deletes event logs after some limit if a customer doesn't have any external Syslog server. It is a problem for those customers who want to review event logs after a week or so because they won't get proper reports or event logs. They should increase the duration to at least a month or two for storing the data on the device. F5 is not a leader in Gartner Quadrant, which affects us when we go and pitch this solution. Customers normally go and take a look at such annual reports, and because F5 is currently not there as a leader, the customers ask about it even though we are saying it is good in all things. F5 is not known for something totally different or unique. They were a major player in ADP, and they are just rebranding themselves into security. They should improve or increase their marketing as a security company now. They have already started to do that, but they should do it more so that when it comes to security, customers can easily remember F5. At the moment, if we say F5, load balancing comes to mind. With rebranding and marketing, all customers should get the idea that F5 is now mainly focusing on the security part of it, and it is a security company instead of load balancing. This is the first solution that should come to a customer's mind for a web application firewall."

"I would like to see improved features in the F5 Advanced WAF solution, especially with a focus on enabling Kubernetes fully."

"I would not expect traffic details to pass through the web application firewall across the length of the whole application. I think that there is a web application where it can let the application function without traffic going in into the WAF."

"I think the deployment templates can be better."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"The price for F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager is very high. This aspect could be improved."

"An area for improvement in F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is that it's a high-priced product."

"The ASM administration is quite complex. The topic itself is pretty complex, so it is not easy to provide a nice, clean interface. There are a lot of references and dependencies in-between the different subareas."

"If one virtual portion is unavailable, it can cause issues."

"A more intuitive interface would be helpful."

"BIG-IP LTM's sandboxing integration could be improved."

"Not everything is intuitive."

"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."

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The price of the solution is expensive."

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

"The product's pricing is cheap."

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

"A free version of the solution is available."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."

"Pricing for this solution is higher than average."

"A yearly license for F5 Advanced WAF is expensive."

"The pricing is too high."

"The way we deployed it, I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."

"The cost is slightly above average."

"There is an annual subscription for this solution."

"F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"The price is high."

"Our company pays for the licensing cost on a yearly basis. Also, there are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"It is cheaper than the average on the market."

"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace was very simple. The main reason that we went this way was the simplicity of buying it there. It is maintained and upgraded for us, and this makes it easy to stay current."

"The price of the solution is sometimes expensive."

"It is sort of a commodity product. A load balancer is a load balancer. What will be, at the end of the day, the cheapest option or have the best performance, that is what it will come down to."

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

"The price of F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is too high."

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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823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

15%

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...

See all answers

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

The pricing and support service levels affect response times from customer service, depending on whether the support ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

The main improvement needed is related to IP intelligence. Once we start receiving traffic from repetitive IP address...

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 48% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 21% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 16% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 16% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Front Door vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 4% of the time

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

Compared 18% of the time

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

Compared 12% 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

Kemp LoadMaster vs F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

December 2024

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

December 2024

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

December 2024

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

Learn More

Cloudflare

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

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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823,795 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.