F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly comparison

F5 and Fastly are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.4, while Fastly is ranked #22 with an average rating of 9.0. F5 holds a 6.0% mindshare in WAF, compared to Fastly’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fastly users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Fastly and F5 Advanced WAF are competitors in the web application security market. Fastly has an edge with its superior performance scalability and intuitive integrations, while F5 Advanced WAF leads in offering comprehensive security features.

Features: Fastly offers real-time insights, robust CDN capabilities, and seamless platform integration. F5 Advanced WAF provides extensive security features like enhanced bot protection, DDoS mitigation, and advanced threat detection.

Room for Improvement: Fastly could enhance its zero-trust security solutions and introduce more robust security features. F5 Advanced WAF could improve its deployment speed, ease of use, and expand its configuration options to reduce complexity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fastly provides an efficient deployment process and offers responsive customer support, making it easy for organizations to start quickly. F5 Advanced WAF, though rich in security features, requires a more complex deployment process that can demand more resources and technical expertise.

Pricing and ROI: Fastly offers a competitive pricing model, emphasizing CDN and scalability, delivering good initial setup value and ROI for performance-focused businesses. F5 Advanced WAF entails a higher initial investment due to its extensive features but provides long-term ROI for companies seeking deep security insights and comprehensive threat management.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly

April 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 4.7%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 6.0%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fastly is 1.5%, up from 1.2% 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	6.0%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	4.7%
Fastly	1.5%
Other	87.8%

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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Patel Parth

Technical support engineer at Adobe

Optimized ecommerce performance and improved access control through image handling and IP filtering

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are that are blocking their contents. I believe Fastly should provide regional IP addresses instead of POP IPs. Fastly should provide features similar to Cloudflare regarding a block list. Additionally, a POP address should be there with a wide range of IP addresses provided, public static IP addresses, so customers can integrate egress IPs. Fastly should provide WebP image processing on the backend instead of on the fly. It would be a very useful feature to avoid unnecessary time for browser to browser and local cookies. I believe that Fastly service has a few gaps. We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers. There should be transparency.

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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."

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

"The impact of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's integration with existing web technologies on our site's performance and security measures is quite great, actually."

"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."

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

"We extensively use the solution every day. The solution is very stable; we haven’t seen any glitches."

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

"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

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

"With F5 Advanced WAF, it was protection for online publications and for our customers that caused us to choose the platform."

"We have an SOC, and for collecting logs we are also using the F5 logs to analyze the securities and events, so having a central log management and F5 really helped us to analyze the security logs."

"Overall, the technical support is excellent."

"I appreciate the way F5 Advanced WAF builds policies by configuring a basic policy and queuing it in learning mode."

"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."

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

"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."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."

"Fastly uses configuration versioning, where you can deploy a new version in less than one minute."

"Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly."

"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."

"In summary, this solution is easy to manage, quick to deploy, and all of my customers are happy."

"The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly."

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

"Fastly combines both the CDN side and the Signal Sciences next-generation WAF, which is closely integrated with the CDN, allowing us to use both products seamlessly."

More Fastly pros

Cons

"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."

"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."

"The rate limiting functionality could be enhanced, as we find it somewhat limited."

"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."

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

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"The solution could improve by having an independent capture module. It has a built feature that you can deploy the capture on your published website, however, it's not very user-friendly."

"The solution is tedious. It takes a lot of discrete settings so one needs to get detailed and granular when they use the solution."

"The BNS module needs improvement."

"For me, an area for improvement in F5 Advanced WAF is the reporting as it isn't so clear. The vendor needs to work on the reporting capability of the solution. What I'd like to see in the next release of F5 Advanced WAF is threat intelligence to protect your web application, particularly having that capability out-of-the-box, and not needing to pay extra for it, similar to what's offered in FortiWeb, for example, any request that originates from a malicious IP will be blocked automatically by FortiWeb. F5 Advanced WAF should have the intelligence for blocking malicious IPs, or automatically blocking threats included in the license, instead of making it an add-on feature that users have to pay for apart from the standard licensing fees."

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

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

"We get false positives sometimes."

"Although we're getting some reports, we're not getting all the reports we need. There seems to be a gap in report management."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

"It's not easy to start with Fastly if you don't have VCL knowledge, so it appears very complex at the beginning."

"Stronger analytics would be helpful, like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned."

"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."

"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."

"It is missing a "staging" platform to deploy a test configuration with all of the real settings, which would allow us to properly test before putting it into production."

"Support is not that great."

More Fastly cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

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

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

"The solution is expensive."

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

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

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

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

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

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

"F5 Advanced WAF is not a cost-effective solution. Although they are attempting to reduce prices with their VE and cloud options, they are more expensive than other solutions. The solution is more expensive on average."

"It is expensive. Its price should be better. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. Its licensing is also based on the model. There are no additional costs."

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

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

"The price of F5 Advanced WAF could improve it is expensive."

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

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."

"It is an expensive solution."

"The solution is cheaper than other products in the market."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Healthcare 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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	5

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...

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

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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 Fastly?

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fastly?

I believe that Fastly should provide guidelines for their WAF blocking rules. It should be public what the rules are ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Fastly?

I am using Fastly in the Adobe Commerce Cloud project. In this project, it is working as a reverse proxy for CDN and ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Check Point WAF (formerly 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 5% of the time

AWS WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 4% of the time

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Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 21% 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 6% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 5% of the time

Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 2% of the time

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Cloudflare vs Fastly

Compared 19% of the time

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 18% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Fastly

Compared 9% of the time

Uplynk vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

Radware DDoS vs Fastly

Compared 2% of the time

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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

Fastly

April 2026

Download Fastly 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.

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Fastly

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

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

Twitter, Airbnb, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, Ticketmaster, The Drupal Association, Opera, about.com, imgur, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, New Relic, shopify, Shazam, Firebase

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly

April 2026

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.

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