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F5 Advanced WAF vs Fastly comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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 ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
F5 Advanced WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fastly
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
22nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
CDN (7th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (10th)
 

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
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF6.0%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.7%
Fastly1.5%
Other87.8%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
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.
Kallamuddin Ansari - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
PP
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."
"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."
"Cloudflare WAF provides protection through rules and functionalities like Cloudflare's SDRAP."
"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"For us, the key feature of Cloudflare is DDoS protection and IP hiding, especially since we are a crypto company."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"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."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the easy identification of events and customization. We can pinpoint our settings."
"F5 helped to meet compliance and regulatory requirements."
"F5 Advanced WAF is reliable."
"I like the security features, especially against SQL injection."
"F5 Advanced WAF has very good stability and scalability, and its initial setup was straightforward."
"F5 Advanced WAF offers features not available in other products."
"Identification, ease of use, and ease of modifying it to most of our needs are valuable."
"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."
"Rate limiting is a good feature that protects from volumetric attacks."
"Its initial setup process is straightforward."
"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."
"Fastly provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, and IP restriction."
"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."
"Compute@Edge features are valuable to me."
 

Cons

"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."
"We don't even use Cloudflare Bot Management because it's too expensive; you need to pay per request, and it's much cheaper to get one or two additional machines."
"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 solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"The rate limiting functionality could be enhanced, as we find it somewhat limited."
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."
"The reporting could be improved if it were more granular."
"I think the deployment templates can be better."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing."
"I would like to see the API Protection improved."
"I would like for there to be a cloud-based solution, this would also help to improve scalability."
"The user interface (UI) seems a bit outdated. Making it more user-friendly would be beneficial."
"One improvement for AOF could be focusing on enhancing its AI engine to make it more mature."
"The administrator's user interface and some of the settings can sometimes be very complicated to understand."
"I would like to see a better interface and better documentation compatibility with other products."
"We are not getting quick responses from Fastly technical support engineers. Sometimes they depend on their D3 developers."
"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."
"What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price."
"The product should provide improved bot detection and management."
"Support is not that great."
"Fastly's customer service area needs improvement."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"It is not too pricey."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The solution is expensive."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"There are various plans available for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF as a Service, including a trial version."
"I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten."
"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."
"It's more expensive than other solutions and depending on the modules, there can be additional fees."
"F5 Advanced WAF pricing structure should be adjusted to meet the need of small to medium-sized companies."
"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."
"There is an annual subscription for this solution."
"The pricing is too high."
"I've generally found Fastly to be very competitive in pricing, especially around Compute@Edge."
"It is an expensive solution."
"You need to pay a premium price for the tool."
"Fastly is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"The pricing has been very competitive."
"In my opinion, Fastly is priced competitively."
"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
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

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

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fastly and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
890,027 professionals have used our research since 2012.