F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services comparison

F5 Advanced WAF and F5 Distributed Cloud Services are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 Advanced WAF is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.4, while F5 Distributed Cloud Services is ranked #20 with an average rating of 9.0. F5 Advanced WAF holds a 7.1% mindshare in WAF, compared to F5 Distributed Cloud Services’s 1.8% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of F5 Advanced WAF users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of F5 Distributed Cloud Services users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 Advanced WAF and F5 Distributed Cloud Services 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 Distributed Cloud Services Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services

March 2026

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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 Web Application ...

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 7.1%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 1.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF	7.1%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	5.4%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	1.8%
Other	85.7%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

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.

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Kallamuddin Ansari

Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize

Application security has protected critical banking services while policy learning minimizes false blocks

F5 Advanced WAF performs well overall, but I have noticed some points that could enhance the solution. Initially, policy tuning could be simpler, as while the learning engine is powerful, initial tuning still requires experienced engineers, which can be challenging for new teams due to the complexity of options and parameters. A more guided and simple tuning workflow would help reduce the learning curve. Additionally, tighter native integration with SIEM or SOAR tools would simplify correlation and investigations for security teams, although log exports are available. Overall, these are not blockers, merely enhancement opportunities, and once tuned, F5 Advanced WAF is very stable and reliable; improving usability, reporting, and onboarding would make it even more effective for larger environments.

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Mohan Janarthanan

Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions

Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management

F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.

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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 initial setup process is simple."

"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."

"The most valuable part of the solution for us overall is exactly that it is a Software-as-a-Service product."

"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."

"Cloudflare has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple clients; I can easily go in and access their accounts, make changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."

"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."

"The setup process is very simple for me."

"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"F5 Advanced WAF has benefited our company by protecting us against revenue loss, preventing hacks that would have taken us offline or caused us a loss of revenue in different areas."

"Provides good protection from attacks."

"The solution is very robust, and I like the setup."

"The most valuable feature is that it is secure."

"The initial setup was was easy to install."

"The threat intelligence function is great."

"F5 Advanced WAF is reliable."

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

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."

"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."

"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."

"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."

Cons

"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."

"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."

"Its stability could be better."

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well."

"A key challenge arises when dealing with numerous integrations with HVAC systems. Depending on the specifics, there might be some configuration mismatches, which necessitate specific support."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."

"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"F5 Advanced needs to improve its bot protection. The solution needs to have machine learning to learn the behavior of the customer to recognize the human versus the bot. This is a difficult feature to explain to our customers. I would like documentation about the bot feature to make it easier for the customer to understand."

"Nevertheless, F5 products are generally considered to be hard to deploy."

"F5 Advanced WAF could improve on its funding for WAF features. There is a need to be more advanced WAF features."

"The DDoS capabilities should be enhanced."

"I would like to see the API Protection improved."

"Its price should be better. It is expensive."

"For me, an area for improvement in F5 Advanced WAF is the reporting as it isn't so clear."

"All features of Advanced WAF offer numerous functions, which means tuning configuration is not simple."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."

"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."

"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."

"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"It is not too pricey."

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"The solution is expensive."

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"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."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"

"The pricing for F5 Advanced WAF is comparable to a Rolls-Royce. Its price is a bit high when you compare it with other vendors. F5 Advanced WAF is a bit expensive. The customer was on a three-year plan and it was around $560,000."

"The pricing of F5 Advanced WAF is more expensive than other solutions like Radware and CD18, it is quite high."

"I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten."

"The cost is slightly above average."

"As far as the pricing of F5 Advanced WAF I would rate it a four out of five depending on what features I am looking for. Imperva is more expensive."

"There is a perpetual license that comes with your hardware. There is also an additional fee for support."

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

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

18%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	31

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

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 for F5 Advanced WAF is a bit higher, but not that high. I would say for a good amount of revenue-generati...

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

On the features I wish existed, Big-IP Advanced WAF is primarily an on-premises solution and in that solution, there ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

I am not involved in sales, so I do not deal with the pricing aspect directly. I give the cost of the solution a four...

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

There are some gaps between the implementation, expectation, and the reality. The main point is user integration with...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

F5 Distributed Cloud Services works as a Software as a Service based security, networking, and application management...

See all answers

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 8% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 23% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 5% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 5% of the time

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Azure Front Door vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 10% of the time

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 10% of the time

Akamai vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudflare vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 3% of the time

More F5 Distributed Cloud Services Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

April 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

April 2026

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

CDN

March 2026

Download F5 Distributed Cloud Services product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

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 Distributed Cloud Services excel in enhancing security, optimizing web application delivery, and ensuring robust network performance. Users value its integrated Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, global server load balancing, and intuitive management interface. It boosts organizational efficiency, reduces operational costs, and scales seamlessly, making it essential for businesses operating in distributed environments.

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services

March 2026

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Services and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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