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 8.5, while Fastly is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.5. 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 Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 Advanced WAF and Fastly 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. Fastly Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly

December 2024

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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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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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Nick Wilsdon

CEO at Torque

An easily scalable and stable product that provides exceptional support

The product should provide improved bot detection and management. The product should also provide support for code management. Everybody working in CDN is currently looking for ways to better manage code deployment with various authorization levels and synchronization with our lower environments. Matching up what's happening in CDN with what's happening on the origin regarding testing would always be useful.

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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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"Even when there is a high load on our servers, Cloudflare is able to cache the data and serve it to users, ensuring they can still access the website."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

More Cloudflare pros

"Very easy to implement and works well."

"F5's user-friendly interface and seamless integration stand out as the most valuable features for us."

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are SSL uploading, signature, and anomaly detection. It is overall a high-quality solution."

"There are a lot of good features."

"The valuable features vary from customers to customers. Some customers are okay with the basic features of the WAF, and some customers use advanced WAF with a few other features."

"The most valuable feature of F5 Advanced WAF is its grand unity of the implementation, where you have the freedom to configure based on how it affects your use case or your organization. With the default setting of implicit deny, you can gradually start defining and deploying the tool to align with your environment, whether it is outdated, recent, or futuristic. This allows you to customize the solution to protect you from threat actors. You have the ability to define what the advanced threat act should do - whether it should alert, deny, or both - and it will deliver based on your configuration. Unlike other online solutions, F5 Advanced WAF provides flexibility to deliver to your unique environment the way you want."

"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."

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

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

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

"Its initial setup process is straightforward."

"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."

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

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

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

"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."

Cons

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

"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."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

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

"It would be helpful if the solution could continue evolving to compete with the other solutions on the market."

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."

"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

"Compatibility with multiple cloud environments needs improvement. Both stability and scalability need to be improved."

"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."

"The administrator's user interface and some of the settings can sometimes be very complicated to understand."

"The BIG-IQ is supposed to centralize the management for all of the boxes but it's not very effective."

"The pricing could be more flexible."

"Support is a little slow."

"There is a learning curve that extends the time of implementation."

"The accuracy of the automatic learning feature needs improvement."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

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

"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."

"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."

"Support is not that great."

"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."

"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."

"The solution's pricing could be better."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

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

"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."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"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."

"We are using the free version."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"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."

"I think the price is very high."

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

"The pricing is too high."

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

"There are various plans available for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF as a Service, including a trial version."

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

"The cost is slightly above average."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

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

"It is an expensive solution."

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

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

"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."

"The pricing has been very competitive."

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

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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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

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

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...

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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 ...

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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 do you like most about Fastly?

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for h...

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?

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a ...

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

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 2% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

Akamai vs Fastly

Compared 15% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Edgio vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Fastly

Compared 5% of the time

More Fastly Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

December 2024

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

December 2024

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

Fastly

December 2024

Download Fastly product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

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Cloudflare

Fastly

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.

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.

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

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

December 2024

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.

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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.