F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services comparison

F5 Advanced WAF and F5 Silverline Managed Services are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 Advanced WAF is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5, while F5 Silverline Managed Services is ranked #26 with an average rating of 7.3. Additionally, 98% of F5 Advanced WAF users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of F5 Silverline Managed Services users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

F5 Advanced WAF and F5 Silverline Managed Services both compete in the realm of network security solutions. F5 Silverline Managed Services holds an advantage due to its managed service approach, offering a more user-friendly and cost-effective integration for enterprises focused on seamless cloud adoption.

Features: F5 Advanced WAF includes DDoS protection, behavior analysis, and anti-bot capabilities, enabling detailed customization and monitoring for granular threat detection and management. In contrast, F5 Silverline Managed Services offers cloud-native features, global threat updates, and ease of integration, focusing on managed services for comprehensive defenses.

Room for Improvement: F5 Advanced WAF needs enhancements in user interface simplicity and reporting tools, as well as better pricing strategies. The upgrade process could be more intuitive, and support documentation requires improvements. F5 Silverline Managed Services could benefit from advancements in user navigation, reduced costs, and increased AI integration, with stability concerns and better documentation addressed.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: F5 Advanced WAF is flexible for on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments but can be complex to set up initially. F5 Silverline Managed Services offers smoother cloud deployment, appealing to those preferring managed solutions. Both receive positive feedback for customer support, though F5 Advanced WAF support can be slow in resolving issues, while F5 Silverline Managed Services users report higher satisfaction and accessible international support.

Pricing and ROI: F5 Advanced WAF is perceived as expensive, yet its comprehensive features deliver high ROI, justifying costs for those needing advanced security. F5 Silverline Managed Services, though also costly, provides strong ROI by minimizing operational overhead, making it a valuable investment for seamless cloud integration and managed service efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

January 2025

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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

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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DejanBlagojevic

Presales Engineer at Exclusive-networks

Mitigates more bot activity when defending web applications than any other vendor but comes at a price

F5 Silverline Managed Services is expensive. You do get world-class quality of mitigation, but I think it is still pricey. You can find similar services, potentially of slightly lower quality, from other vendors like Cloudflare or Akamai for about half the price. When you compare what you get for the money you spend at Cloudflare or Akamai, you do get less protection but you are not dishing out too much for it. On the other hand, at F5 Silverline Managed Services, you do get better protection but, but you are paying double for it. We have had mixed feedback from our clients about this. Most of them would rather pay less for a bit of a lower-quality defense than overshoot their budget. The most common piece of feedback we receive is that the difference in protection levels is not reflected in the price.

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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 most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

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

"I get a lot of value from Cloudflare's API because it enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution. You can create a domain for performing test requests before you move to the production environment and connect various domains."

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"

More Cloudflare pros

"The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its extensive set of capabilities for application protection, including DDoS prevention, and its ability to work with Pentesters and external scanners to observe user activity and eliminate false positives."

"My favorite feature of F5 is the ability to play around with the ciphers. I also like the ability to have an immediate display of the support IDs when a real blockage occurs. The protection offered is great."

"The bot defense capability, as well as protection from brute force attacks and OWASP Top Ten, are notable features."

"It's scalable and very easy to manage."

"Customers find the load balancer feature as the most valuable."

"The solution is easily accessible on mobile and laptop devices."

"The support experience is better than average."

"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

"We have a lot of businesses that we put behind this solution, and it has really helped us in terms of monitoring the logs and incidents."

"Its flexibility is the most valuable because it is a managed service. The good part is that you don't need to set it up. It just needs DNS routing, which is the easiest thing. Our client had Akamai for certain websites because they were using CDN features. They had NetScaler on the internal zone, F5 AWAFs on the data centers, and no WAF at all in the cloud. One of the main activities of the project was to move all these policies into a single WAF so that we could control and use that as a choke point. That exercise itself was very easy because it was a managed service and F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall does that for you. That's the best thing about F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall. It is easy to apply policies on-premises. If you have AWAF on-premises and you want to replicate some policies on F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, other than the policies that it applies by itself, it is easy because you have a team that supports it. F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works perfectly fine. It pretty much does everything that an Advanced WAF on-premises should do."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is the benchmark performance."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is its cloud-native functionality and the high level of protection it provides."

"The most important feature is that they have seven firewall protection, to protect our web servers."

"The most valuable features are the configuration and configuring the process."

"Most vendors fulfill the requirements for standard DDoS protection, but F5 Silverline Managed Services has a better understanding of defending web applications like HTTP and can mitigate more bot activity than any other vendor."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services pros

Cons

"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."

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

"There are some issues with the CDN services."

"The timing aspect can lead to it being considered overpriced. This is a particular concern we have with Cloudflare, as they may struggle with accurately detecting the client."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

"Although I think it's quite good, it doesn't provide me with all the features I would expect to have if I were using Imperva."

More Cloudflare cons

"There is a gap in report management."

"I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"The contextual-based component needs a lot of help to catch up with the next-gen products."

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

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better."

"The price is high in comparison to other products."

"The product could be improved on the global load and the integration with the other solution like Cisco and Dell. As a representor of the operation, we prefer to have one platform which can accommodate all type of integration. We are also looking for more improvements in the security policy configuration."

"There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution."

"There is a lot of room for improvement with their tech support. I am not sure F5 Silverline Managed Services can be classified as having tech support."

"We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough."

"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by adding features that Palo Alto has."

"I just hope the price can be cheaper."

More F5 Silverline Managed Services cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"The price is reasonable."

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

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

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

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

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

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

"Its price is fair. We have done a couple of deals where they were able to give some kind of discount to the customers. The price was initially high for the customers, but after a couple of negotiations, it came within their budget. They were happy with that."

"I think the price is very high."

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

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

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

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

"The solution is very expensive so should only be used in the right environment."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall works based on your bandwidth. They look at the clean bandwidth and do the pricing. 20% of a total pipe would be a clean bandwidth. The list price or a non-negotiated price for F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall would be around $2,200 per application per year for everything that you need. When you get into an enterprise kind of a setup, they negotiate this to the last bit. I would easily take 20% on that, which would be the cost, but it should cover all your Advance WAF features, bot protection, tech campaign, etc. It is built as a package and gives you most of the capability. You don't get the mobile SDK, which is an additional license. Mobile SDK is required only if you're buying or if you have a mobile application, and you are going to instrument F5 or Imperva into your mobile appliance. This anyways would be an additional module. It doesn't come within the WAF, but it is a WAF feature."

"The product’s pricing is reasonable."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."

"The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better, they are not very flexible. The price of the solution is based on the requirements of the enterprise."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Insurance Company

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

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

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you hav...

See all answers

What do you like most about F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The initial setup is straightforward.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Silverline Managed Services?

The product’s pricing is reasonable.

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 3% 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 16% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 7% of the time

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

Compared 4% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 17% of the time

Arbor DDoS vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 11% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Front Door vs F5 Silverline Managed Services

Compared 7% of the time

More F5 Silverline Managed Services Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

January 2025

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

January 2025

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Silverline Managed Services

January 2025

Download F5 Silverline Managed Services product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection

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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's Silverline Managed Services is a SaaS solution delivering DDoS protection, managed Web Application Firewall (WAF) services, and managed Shape Security Fraud and Anti-bot solutions.

Silverline services include 24x7 access to F5's Security Operations Center (SOC). F5's expert security professionals use F5 products with state-of-the-art security tools to ensure the best protection possible. As an add-on to Silverline DDoS or WAF services, Silverline Threat Intelligence integrates dynamic lists of threatening IP addresses to give context for policy decisions.

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

City Bank, Ricacorp Properties, Miele, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

January 2025

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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