

Fortinet FortiWeb and F5 Advanced WAF compete in web application security. F5 Advanced WAF has the upper hand due to its robust attack mitigation and advanced security features, despite Fortinet's cost-effectiveness.
Features: Fortinet FortiWeb provides application control, web filtering, and a built-in antivirus. It has machine learning for strong security and efficient load balancing. F5 Advanced WAF excels with DDoS mitigation, API security, and automated policy suggestions, supporting enterprises prioritizing advanced security.
Room for Improvement: Fortinet FortiWeb could improve its integration capabilities with newer technologies and enhance user documentation. F5 Advanced WAF can improve its interface and deployment ease. Adjustments in pricing and licensing for smaller businesses would be beneficial.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortinet FortiWeb is recognized for straightforward deployment and consistent support services but needs quicker issue resolution. F5 Advanced WAF offers a reliable support structure but should improve response time and user interface. Both provide flexible deployment, with F5 requiring more technical expertise initially.
Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiWeb is praised for competitive pricing and good ROI, offering cost savings in integration. F5 Advanced WAF is more expensive yet valuable for its superior protection and technology, providing substantial ROI for security-focused enterprises. Fortinet's affordability benefits budget-sensitive clients.
Time savings in daily operations come from the automatic learning and signature update reducing the need for constant manual rule management, allowing the security and network teams to spend significantly less time handling false positive application-related escalations.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
F5 Advanced WAF protects our organization and provides security, achieving a return on investment.
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
F5 Advanced WAF provides the insights and notifications I need in terms of reporting and alerting.
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
Their support is truly exceptional when I compare it with similar large-sized companies.
The expertise of engineers varies across different time zones, affecting the effectiveness of the support provided, especially during our daytime.
The back-end development team is available, and if any issue arises, they will help us immediately by providing solutions when contacted.
You can add additional boxes that combine together to achieve a bigger throughput for investigation and research.
F5 Advanced WAF has been very reliable and consistent for us; in our on-premise enterprise setup, it has been stable and predictable in day-to-day operations without any unexpected crashes or WAF-related downtime in production.
We have not faced any significant issues during deployments.
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
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.
There is excellent clarity in the LTM and the WAF.
If the GUI includes notifications and improved logging capabilities that allow us to see traffic and store logs for six months, that would be very helpful.
Fine-tuning is a room for improvement in Fortinet FortiWeb.
After the customer submits a specific question and requests troubleshooting help from Fortinet support, it takes at least three to five days to provide a proper answer.
Licensing is capacity-driven, so you need careful planning based on traffic volume and use cases, and adding features such as Bot Protection impacts costs; once licensing is clear and sized correctly, there are no surprises.
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
The price is affordable and satisfactory.
For VM machines, the price increases based on CPU configurations of 2, 4, or 8 CPUs.
Most security products charge less at the time of purchase because of competition, but when we go to renewals, the prices become very high.
Fortinet FortiWeb is cost-effective compared to solutions like F5.
The Advanced Attack Signature database is very strong and regularly updated, effectively blocking SQL injections, cross-site scripting, command injections, and file inclusion attacks while allowing selective enabling or disabling of signatures to avoid blocking genuine traffic.
F5 Advanced WAF offers the best features that are capable of stopping any type of attack, and it is a really reliable and stable product that you can rely on to stop any type of attack.
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
Fortinet FortiWeb has positively impacted my organization because most of our servers and applications are secure from hackers and other security threats.
Fortinet's pricing is way more competitive than Cisco or Palo Alto.
The machine learning-based threat detection is significant, as it uses a learning method that eases the configuration burden, making it very useful.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Fortinet FortiWeb | 8.1% |
| F5 Advanced WAF | 7.8% |
| Other | 84.1% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 25 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 15 |
| Large Enterprise | 31 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 60 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 27 |
| Large Enterprise | 36 |
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:
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."
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