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 Oct 8, 2024

Fortinet FortiWeb and F5 Advanced WAF are competitors in the web application firewall category. F5 Advanced WAF seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive feature set and greater flexibility.

Features: Fortinet FortiWeb includes robust security features, automated threat detection, and strong integration capabilities. F5 Advanced WAF incorporates adaptive security measures, scalability, and detailed traffic analysis.

Room for Improvement: Fortinet FortiWeb could improve its reporting tools, and it may benefit from more intuitive configuration and a simplified interface. F5 Advanced WAF users suggest enhanced performance efficiency and easier configuration steps.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortinet FortiWeb offers straightforward deployment with mixed support experiences, while F5 Advanced WAF is complex to deploy but provides responsive customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiWeb is appreciated for its affordability and is suitable for smaller businesses. F5 Advanced WAF requires higher initial investment but aims at larger enterprises with a promise of substantial ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fortinet FortiWeb Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. Fortinet FortiWeb

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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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

"Easier http to https redirect using page rules"

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

"The technical support is good."

"The attacker won't have details since my public IP is anonymous. It offers us good privacy."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

"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."

More Cloudflare pros

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

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the easy identification of events and customization. We can pinpoint our settings."

"The solution's most valuable features include application DDoS protection, bot blocking, and HTTP header verifications."

"The solution isn't too expensive. The license allows you to license what you need and leave out what you don't need."

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

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the balancer and you can change policies very easily."

"It also has antivirus and DDoS mitigation capabilities. We have enabled these features."

"Customers find the load balancer feature as the most valuable."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"The solution's most valuable feature is its security profile."

"The ability to configure multiple policies for different requirements is a strong feature of Fortinet FortiWeb."

"When it comes to blocking unknown threats and attacks, I would give it the highest score possible. We first started using AWS and its Web Application Firewalls. That was okay, but it was quite a manual process to keep it up to date, whereas Fortinet is always up to date, and the default rules or the modules that you can turn on are very easy to use."

"Other than the additional security with exploit protection, we have simpler certificate handling, as we can keep internal servers using internal certificates continuously distributed and updated by Active Directory Group Policy, while the public certificates become updated only in a single place, FortiWeb itself."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall (WAF)."

"The GUI makes it easy to scale in terms of learning and utilization."

"FortiWeb's ease of deployment is what we liked the most about it. Implementing FortiWeb was extremely fast and easy, which was a significant advantage. It comes with several preconfigured rule sets and templates."

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

More Fortinet FortiWeb pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

"Cloudflare should add more documentation and pricing to the cloud version."

"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."

"Cloudflare could offer a better view or maybe dashboards of the main resources used in the client."

"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."

More Cloudflare cons

"I would like to see improved features in the F5 Advanced WAF solution, especially with a focus on enabling Kubernetes fully."

"The reporting portion of F5 Advance WAF is not great. They need to work out something better, as it is very basic. You only see the top IPs, I think there is more they can offer."

"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."

"The GUI interface can be confusing due to similar-looking tabs for policy building, traffic learning, and event logs."

"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 the reporting. It's a bit difficult to populate, them. If you're not so familiar with the functions, such as where to find the logs and other settings."

"Users would like to have an additional IP intelligence license to handle this within WAF itself without needing to engage with the SOC team."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"The interface could have the interdependent elements arranged sequentially and wizards that go through most common deployment actions."

"We use Kubernetes, so I would like to have a plugin to configure FortiWeb Cloud automatically using Kubernetes Ingress. That would reduce the complexity of setting up an Ingress object in Kubernetes. Some competing solutions help you configure Ingress and Kubernetes automatically."

"We would like the interface to be easier to use and more user-friendly. The interface needs to be enhanced."

"They could integrate some kind of machine learning and AI facilities to automate workflows."

"We have had problems with deployments where we've had to contact technical support to resolve them."

"FortiWeb does not exist in a cloud-based form. Its only available for deployment as a virtual appliance on AWS and Azure IaaS platforms. Because of the trend to WAF environments, it would be good to have it as a SaaS. Also, FortiWeb would be more competitive if it combined WAF and DDoS protection."

"Their documentation is fairly complete, but it's sometimes a little bit difficult to search for exactly what you're looking for to resolve an issue. There have been times when we've gone to try to search for areas that we needed to get information on, and it has not always been extremely clear exactly how a particular thing needs to be set up."

"It costs too much."

More Fortinet FortiWeb cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

"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 pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"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."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"When you compare Cloudflare DNS to other solutions, such as Akamai, the price is reasonable."

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is too high."

"The cost is slightly above average."

"The way we deployed it, I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."

"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."

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

"There is a perpetual license that comes with your hardware. There is also an additional fee for support."

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

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

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is pretty good. We do pass a lot of traffic through our API servers. Something like 100 gigs of web traffic is a fair amount for reduced JSON API calls, but the cost is $50. For that peace of mind, we have thousands and thousands of customers that are protected by that $50, so it's a no-brainer."

"The pricing is in the middle. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten. It feels like a justified cost for the features."

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

"There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

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

"We are on an annual license for this solution and the price is approximately €100."

"The license cost depends on the size of the box or the size of the solution. It can go from €200 Euros to a few hundred thousand Euros a year depending on your size."

"It is fine now. We had to earlier negotiate the price."

More Fortinet FortiWeb pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

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 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 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?

The pricing of Fortinet FortiWeb is affordable and competitive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Fortinet FortiWeb?

I see no room for improvement at the moment.

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 48% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS 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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AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 16% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 16% 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

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

Fortinet FortiADC vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 17% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 6% of the time

AWS WAF vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 6% of the time

Fortinet FortiManager vs Fortinet FortiWeb

Compared 2% of the time

More Fortinet FortiWeb Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

December 2024

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Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

December 2024

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

Fortinet FortiWeb

December 2024

Download Fortinet FortiWeb product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

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Cloudflare

Fortinet

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.

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."

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

December 2024

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: 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.