F5 Advanced WAF vs Fortinet FortiWeb comparison

F5 and Fortinet are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5, while Fortinet is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.8. Additionally, 98% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Fortinet users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Fortinet FortiWeb and F5 Advanced WAF compete in the web application firewall category. FortiWeb appears to have the upper hand with its cost-effective pricing and integration with Fortinet products, while F5 Advanced WAF excels in stability and advanced features.

Features: Fortinet FortiWeb includes comprehensive security profiles, application filtering, and advanced threat protection, leveraging its Security Fabric integration for enhanced network security. F5 Advanced WAF is notable for its user-friendly interface, advanced bot protection, and load-balancing capabilities, making it highly stable and feature-rich.

Room for Improvement: Fortinet FortiWeb could improve its integration and load-balancing capabilities, alongside UI and reporting enhancements. F5 Advanced WAF might benefit from reduced pricing and simplified deployment, along with richer reporting functionalities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortinet FortiWeb is praised for simpler deployment in hybrid and cloud setups but needs more responsive customer service. F5 Advanced WAF, complex due to advanced setups, offers solid support though it could enhance its structural service framework.

Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiWeb is cost-effective with competitive pricing, offering substantial ROI by lowering costs through integration and event handling. F5 Advanced WAF, though premium-priced, appeals for its reliability and advanced features, but may not suit all budgets.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fortinet FortiWeb Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fortinet FortiWeb

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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Kacem CHAMMALI

IT Infrastructures Administrator at Esprit

Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb

The xFF, or X-Forwarded-For feature, IP reputation, and protected hostname. We can block access using the IP address, so no one can connect to our web server or website using the real IP. They need to use the FQDN instead. Even if an attacker detects the IP address, they can't connect directly to the server due to FortiWeb and the option to protect the hostname. All traffic passes through FortiWeb. Machine learning capabilities in FortiWeb: I don't use machine learning all the time. In the initial phase of FortiWeb deployment, we use the learning process to detect the traffic passing through FortiGate to our website.

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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 solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."

"I rate its stability a ten out of ten."

"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."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"Cloudflare allows us to self-host services such as Rocket.Chat and Node-RED, in high-availability mode, thanks to round robin DNS which allows us to share one hostname between our two locations."

"Generally, I am satisfied with this product."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

More Cloudflare pros

"The support experience is better than average."

"It ensures compliance with security standards by providing features like PCI DSS checks."

"F5 Advanced WAF helps our engineers to learn the complete configuration, including fundamental and advanced policies."

"The AOF solution provides numerous security features."

"The web application firewall itself is most valuable. It provides positive security and negative security. In negative security, it blocks a task such as cross-site scripting, code injection, etc. In positive security, it lets you specify and enforce things, such as the parameters allowed in username and password fields and the number of characters allowed in a field."

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

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

"It can scale."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"The policies and the filtering are the most valuable features, especially traffic, URL, and application filtering. The solution is excellent at detecting vulnerabilities."

"It can scale well."

"Built-in security templates, AV integrated, strong threat intelligence."

"The deployment was very easy."

"Banks have to be compliant with PCI and other things, and FortiWeb is absolutely amazing in terms of providing these reports. Otherwise, they will have to spend a lot of time on them."

"The valuable feature of Fortinet FortiWeb vulnerability scanner"

"It's the extra security that is the most valuable feature. You have insight into your traffic. There are some great insights into what utilities hackers are trying to exploit. It blocks a lot of stuff from the internet."

"It's stable and works efficiently against OWASP Top 10 attacks."

More Fortinet FortiWeb pros

Cons

"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

"Cloudflare's console should be made more user-friendly."

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

"Support response time could be improved."

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."

"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"The interface is old-looking, it's not modern, which is why it's not always comfortable to use."

"The delay times on firmware patches and software updates could be better and improved."

"F5 Advanced WAF could improve resource usage, it is CPU intensive. Additionally, adding automated remediation would be a benefit. For example, an easy button alerts us of the events that are occurring, and what we want to do at the time. An automated approach where somebody could be alerted very quickly. Instead of going and reconfiguring everything, an automated approach is what I'm looking at."

"They should work on the virtualization of NGINX."

"This solution can be made more user-friendly."

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

"You have to buy another module with an extra license, to have the authentication feature."

"F5 Advanced WAF could improve the precision of the scanning. There are many false positives. They should improve their threat database."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"Though the reporting is a nice aspect associated with the tool, I feel that it has certain shortcomings and can be made better."

"Its threat intelligence capabilities may not be as advanced as some competitors."

"The product’s stability could be improved."

"Fortinet WAF came out recently, and there is not much feedback about customer experience. For each project, customers ask about the scenarios and references of the customers who have implemented this solution, which we don't have. They need to simplify the customer experience and provide more information so that we can propose Fortinet Fortiweb as a WAF solution to customers and convince them. They need to improve their service and training. We need good training to implement and use it properly and know more about it. We still don't know much about Fortinet WAF. We didn't get any proper training sessions. Other vendors like Cisco, Palo Alto, Check Point, and Barracuda provide such sessions. Whenever we receive a request from a customer for this solution, we just give the price. We don't propose this solution because we don't know much about it. We propose whatever we are familiar with and what is supported."

"For advanced users, it would be really useful to have access and the ability to manipulate packets. If we can access and manipulate the contents of packets, even encrypted packets... that would be powerful. Since we're looking at packets arriving at our network, we would have the private key to access those packets and their information."

"The memory use in each of the appliances is problematic."

"The false positives are annoying."

"The initial setup process could be improved."

More Fortinet FortiWeb cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

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

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

"A free version of the solution is available."

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

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

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

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"F5 Advanced WAF pricing structure should be adjusted to meet the need of small to medium-sized companies."

"I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten."

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

"The pricing is too high."

"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."

"Pricing for this solution is higher than average."

"The cost is slightly above average."

"It's more expensive than other solutions and depending on the modules, there can be additional fees."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"Its subscription prices are cheaper, and it is not very expensive. From a price perspective, Fortinet is a very well-known security vendor. Subscriptions are very simple. They have a couple of licenses on an appliance, and that's it. The cost is not that big. One license is 40K, which they give with all the products. Another one includes the subscriptions for threat prevention, IPS, sandboxing, etc, which is more than enough."

"FortiWeb can be purchased in VM mode for a lower price and the same features."

"It should be somewhere about 36,000 Euros. That's the cost for three years. It's moderately priced."

"All our Fortinet pricing is bundled together for different products, like FortiGate, FortiAnalyzer, and FortiWeb. FortiWeb, by itself, is probably around $2,500 to $3,500."

"The solution gives us the best price to performance ratio."

"The maintenance fee for this product could be improved."

"The cost isn't expensive."

"The price of Fortinet FortiWeb is expensive in our Ethiopian currency."

More Fortinet FortiWeb pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

43%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

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

What do you like most about Fortinet FortiWeb?

The WAF profiles has been effective at mitigating web-based threats.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortinet FortiWeb?

I would rate the licensing cost as seven out of ten, considering it good value for money. The price is affordable and...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?

There is room for improvement in the portability on multi-cloud environments. Enhanced DDoS integration to make Forti...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 49% of the time

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Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 14% 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

Azure Front Door vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 4% of the time

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Fortinet FortiADC vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

AWS WAF vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

February 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

February 2025

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiWeb

February 2025

Download Fortinet FortiWeb product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

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

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.

Fortinet FortiWeb is a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that protects your web applications and APIs from attacks targeting known as well as unknown vulnerabilities. As the surface of your web applications evolves with each change of existing features and deployment of new features, your APIs are left exposed. Fortinet FortiWeb provides the board protection capabilities required to protect web applications without sacrificing performance or manageability.

Fortinet FortiWeb is an automatic, advanced multi-layer solution that provides secure protection by discerning irregular behavior and distinguishing between malicious and benign anomalies. In addition, the approach delivers powerful bot mitigation capacities which authorize harmless bots to connect while blocking malicious bot activity securely. Regardless of where an application is hosted, Fortinet FortiWeb will safeguard business applications by providing deployment options, such as virtual machines, hardware appliances, and containers that can be deployed in the data center, cloud environments, or in the cloud-native SaaS solution.

Fortinet FortiWeb Features and Benefits

APIs and web applications have become integral to the rising demand for business-critical applications. Now more than ever, businesses are in need of an automatic firewall that will provide them with security, without sacrificing performance or reliability. Fortinet FortiWeb offers a variety of features and benefits, including:

Security fabric integration: FortiWeb integrates with other Fortinet solutions to provide advanced protection from persistent threats.
Proven web application and API protection: FortiWeb safeguards applications from all DDOS attacks, malicious bot attacks, and OWASP Top-10 threats.
Advanced visual analytics: FortiWeb offers a unique visual reporting tool that other WAF solutions don’t by providing a detailed analysis of attack elements and sources.
Hardware-based acceleration: With fast and secure traffic encryption and decryption, FortiWeb provides best-in-class WAF protection.
ML-based threat detection: FortiWeb delivers multi-layer machine learning defense protection to defend against zero-day attacks and reduce false positives.
False positive mitigation tools: Reduce daily management of policies through advanced tools to guarantee only unwanted traffic is blocked.

Reviews from Real Users

Fortinet FortiWeb offers an industry-leading Web Application Firewall, and users are satisfied with it for a number of reasons, including the ability to control everything from the dashboard and the PCI-compliant reports it offers.

Carlos P., director of business and digital transformation at SERNIVEL3, notes, "You have the ability to control everything from one single dashboard."

A director at a tech service company, says, "Banks have to be compliant with PCI and other things, and FortiWeb is absolutely amazing in terms of providing these reports. Otherwise, they will have to spend a lot of time on them."

Fortinet

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

Lush, Barnabas Health, Options, Riverside Healthcare, Hillsbourough County Schools, Columbia Public Schools, Schiller AG

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fortinet FortiWeb

January 2025

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fortinet FortiWeb

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

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