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F5 Advanced WAF vs FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF) 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
Cloudflare enhances performance, reduces operational costs, and boosts revenue, with reported benefits of $903,000 over three years.
Sentiment score
7.8
F5 Advanced WAF provides high ROI through security, compliance, scalability, and low overhead, justifying investment especially in finance.
Sentiment score
7.3
FortiWeb offers 70% ROI by reducing costs, improving efficiency, and enhancing security with low false positives and resource savings.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
We have had ROI with the tool's use since it never gave us downtime and made us lose millions.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Cloudflare's service is praised for responsiveness, but some users face delays, often relying on extensive documentation for solutions.
Sentiment score
7.1
F5 Advanced WAF is praised for expertise and dedication, though response time improvements for initial queries are suggested.
Sentiment score
6.6
FortiWeb's customer support is inconsistent, with variability in responsiveness and cost, yet shows improvement in elite support.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
We'd like a dedicated account manager.
You can get a support engineer with the best qualifications.
I have interacted with F5's support, and while I have no major complaints, they could improve.
Their support is truly exceptional when I compare it with similar large-sized companies.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Cloudflare's scalable architecture is praised for efficient traffic handling, seamless expansion, and meeting diverse enterprise needs globally.
Sentiment score
7.6
F5 Advanced WAF scales efficiently, supports diverse environments, and suits medium to large enterprises with excellent load balancing.
Sentiment score
7.2
FortiWeb WAF is scalable, with large enterprises scaling easily, while medium businesses face hardware upgrade challenges for scaling.
I would rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten since I didn't encounter any issues with it.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten because I had no issues with it.
I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Users praise Cloudflare for improved reliability, effective DDoS protection, and excellent DNS services despite initial configuration needs.
Sentiment score
8.5
F5 Advanced WAF is highly stable, efficiently handles high traffic, and receives top ratings for reliability and security.
Sentiment score
8.1
Users find FortiWeb WAF stable; updates are frequent, but some encounter management challenges for zero-day vulnerabilities without FortiAnalyzer.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
 

Room For Improvement

Cloudflare users seek better analytics, integration, support, pricing clarity, and enhanced features like caching and multi-user access.
F5 Advanced WAF requires intuitive UI, clearer reporting, seamless updates, better integration, and improved support with advanced features.
FortiWeb needs better updates, integrations, pricing, and user-friendliness, with enhanced features, support, and performance for enterprise users.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
the ability to integrate with the on-site active directory instead of just AD through Azure AD
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
If some of my customers want to migrate from F5 to Fortinet Firewall, or the Fortinet WAF solution, there are some migration issues.
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare offers flexible pricing plans from free to $1,500 monthly, ideal for businesses of different sizes and traffic needs.
F5 Advanced WAF is costly but valued for robust features; pricing varies, challenging for small businesses yet negotiable.
FortiWeb Web Application Firewall offers cost-effective packages for SMEs, with standard and advanced options, though some find it pricey.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
I find it to be cheap.
It's cost-effective, but I think they should have a custom pricing model for enterprise customers based on the features you use.
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare enhances performance and security with CDN, caching, DDoS protection, easy DNS management, analytics, and intuitive interface.
F5 Advanced WAF enhances web security with anti-bot protection, behavior analysis, and flexible policy customization, featuring AI and load balancing.
FortiWeb WAF offers machine learning, DDoS protection, and compliance features in a cost-effective SaaS model with extensive integrations.
Our scenario consisted of two web servers in different allocations to control access demands, and the load balancer did the job as expected, bringing security and stability to access points.
For me, the valuable feature is DDoS protection.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
Fortinet's pricing is way more competitive than Cisco or Palo Alto.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
F5 Advanced WAF
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd)
FortiWeb Web Application Fi...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Richard Polyak - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
IgnitiusMolepo - PeerSpot reviewer
Protects internal applications and prevents target attacks
The tool secures our critical applications, especially the mobile money application, which is often targeted by attacks. The solution provides rapid protection and has proven reliable against various threats. It blocks malicious traffic, including dormant and DDoS attacks, and offers integrated Web Application Firewall features to safeguard against compromises. You can set it up for customer-facing web applications because customers don't necessarily know all the IP addresses. It uses a source-based approach where any source accessing the application is defined by its IP. When accessing the application, it checks if they are using HTTP or HTTPS and blocks them if necessary. The tool's performance and security reporting capabilities contribute positively to IT security management. Consolidating management within the solution makes it easier for IT to handle the solutions. All functionalities managed on a single box reduce the number of boxes needed for management.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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...
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...
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.
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?
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost, leading to amb...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
F5 Advanced WAF sells perpetual licenses as perpetual assets during sales without informing me that support ends afte...
What do you like most about FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)?
The most valuable features of the solution are SD-WAN, filtration, web filter, application filter, and IPS.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)?
FortiWeb uses a subscription-based license, but there is also an option for a perpetual license. It's not the cheapes...
What needs improvement with FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF)?
There are some issues pertaining to the migration. If some of my customers want to migrate from F5 to Fortinet Firewa...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
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Overview

 

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF) and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.