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F5 Advanced WAF vs F5 Silverline Managed Services comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
F5 Advanced WAF
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)
F5 Silverline Managed Services
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (26th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (20th)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Ahmed Moamen - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Rifqi Pratama Nugraha - PeerSpot reviewer
Good security and protection but needs better pricing
We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough. We'd like the solution to offer open sessions so that the session syncs to other IP faster. The protection could be a bit better in various areas. The stability could be a bit better. It could offer better pricing.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare is a security SaaS provider that provides security and protects us from any application layer attack."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"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. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."
"There are key things that are used for our enterprise customers, such as Lambda and DNS."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"Customers find the load balancer feature as the most valuable."
"I like the security features, especially against SQL injection."
"I like all of the features, but the main one is the attack signatures."
"In terms of F5 Advanced WAF's most valuable features, I would definitely say its stability. F5 is one the most stable products. Either as the load balancer or the web application firewall, it is very stable."
"The best solution for WAF."
"This solution inspects your traffic and based on that, automatically create distinct qualities for you, so you can add this to the policy already created. That's what I like most."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the WAF protection, Data Safe, and the seven-layer DDoS."
"It provides web application security and reduces bot attacks."
"F5 technical support is really good."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is the benchmark performance."
"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."
"The product’s UI is easy to understand."
"The most valuable feature of F5 Silverline Managed Services is it becomes similar to a distributed architecture."
"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 features are the configuration and configuring the process."
"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."
 

Cons

"The tool needs to improve caching of servers. The product needs to include PFX certificate as well."
"The product needs to improve its automation."
"The solution could work at being less expensive. It costs a lot to use it."
"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."
"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."
"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."
"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."
"There are some issues with the CDN services."
"It's a powerful tool yet can be complex for new users."
"One area for improvement in the product is its SSO integration, which posed challenges and required significant effort to resolve."
"F5 Advanced WAF needs better integration within the application, like remote dashboards."
"There are opportunities for improvement in updating the user interface to a more modern look."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve on its funding for WAF features. There is a need to be more advanced WAF features."
"There should be more ability to rate limit certain scenarios. The majority of the time, it is either on or off. For certain types of use cases, there should be the ability to rate limit, not just enable or disable."
"We get false positives sometimes."
"This solution can be made more user-friendly."
"The navigation is difficult to use."
"We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough."
"We need to have support for cloud protection, which is not offered by this solution."
"In terms of the scalability, this part is always so confusing because they are checking for packet count. Also, after an attack, they said that the throughput must be from gigabits but then I check my bandwidth and it is already done in gigabits. So it is a little bit confusing."
"There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution."
"The price is high in comparison to other products."
"F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, being a new product in the market or comparatively related to a new product, currently supports less number of PoPs. They should introduce more PoPs. The current number of PoPs that they have is around 10 or 12, which is still relatively less as compared to 2,400 plus PoPs that Akamai offers. The user latency or the number of hops a user needs before reaching the actual web application is less in Akamai because it has its internal fabric to route the traffic. They need to spin up more data to increase its traffic handling capability. They can also include the bot detection capability, though it is a pretty advanced functionality. If they could include DataDome like functionality, that is, bot prediction, then F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall will be top-notch in the market."
"F5 Silverline Managed Services can improve by reducing the price."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."
"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."
"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"We don't have any issues with the price."
"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."
"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."
"The price of F5 Advanced WAF could improve it is expensive."
"A yearly license for F5 Advanced WAF is expensive."
"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."
"The solution is very expensive so should only be used in the right environment."
"It's more expensive than other solutions and depending on the modules, there can be additional fees."
"There are various plans available for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF as a Service, including a trial version."
"Pricing for this solution is higher than average."
"F5 Advanced WAF technical support comes at a cost, and it's expensive."
"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 price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be reduced."
"The product’s pricing is reasonable."
"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
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
11%
Insurance Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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...
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...
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.
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, F5 Silverline DDoS Protection
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. F5 Silverline Managed Services and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.