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F5 Advanced WAF vs Huawei Cloud WAF comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 ...
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Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
5th
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)
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Huawei Cloud WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
42nd
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.7%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 5.3%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Huawei Cloud WAF is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF5.3%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.7%
Huawei Cloud WAF0.6%
Other89.4%
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.
reviewer2797602 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Granular security policies have protected critical applications and ensure safe user and admin access
Improvements could be made regarding the log information from the backend CLI. There are enhancements needed; if a request gets blocked on the TCP layer, there should be traces or data to verify which source generated these requests, including the source and port information for initiation. These data are missing from F5 Advanced WAF. Besides that, another improvement could be refining the bot detection to minimize false positives; it should be able to verify more granularly between legitimate and non-legitimate clients. Overall, I find everything else good. A wish list feature I have is for the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to respond more promptly. Their response time needs improvement; while they do not take excessive time, it can be enhanced, especially given it is a security product.
Chinedu Omenogor - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Operations Engineer at Galaxy Backbone Ltd
Easy to use, but its feature set could be expanded to mirror what currently exists on the public cloud
We have a private cloud leveraging Huawei technology. We use Huawei Cloud WAF to provide cloud services for governments, ministries, departments, and some private sector organizations The most valuable feature of Huawei Cloud WAF is its ease of use. It would be good if the solution's feature set…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The integration of Cloudflare with Cloud Suite is its most valuable feature."
"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."
"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."
"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."
"The setup process is very simple for me."
"It protects and mitigates damage in the network."
"The WAF and APM are very useful, the solution has been mostly stable and reliable, and it can scale."
"I appreciate the way F5 Advanced WAF builds policies by configuring a basic policy and queuing it in learning mode."
"Customers find the load balancer feature as the most valuable."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the easy identification of events and customization. We can pinpoint our settings."
"The threat intelligence function is great."
"Web attack signatures are very important for detecting web attacks."
"I like them because I like the security solution. They get extra marks compared to other solutions or competitors. There are more features than any other product I can think of. They're always monitoring, and the security features offer more than other, lesser products."
"The most valuable feature of Huawei Cloud WAF is its ease of use."
 

Cons

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."
"The blocked logs are difficult to read at times."
"The reporting could be improved if it were more granular."
"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."
"The learning curve was steep initially."
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"Cloudflare should update the version of the ModSecurity core rule set that they run on."
"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"You have to buy another module with an extra license, to have the authentication feature."
"The reporting could be clearer and embedded to include our movement data."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve the precision of the scanning. There are many false positives. They should improve their threat database."
"I would like to see a better interface and better documentation compatibility with other products."
"One area for improvement in the product is its SSO integration, which posed challenges and required significant effort to resolve."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve on its funding for WAF features. There is a need to be more advanced WAF features."
"People who want to work with the device have to be pro in Linux"
"It should be a little bit easy to deploy in terms of the overall deployment session. One of our customers is a bit unhappy about the reporting options. Currently, it automatically deletes event logs after some limit if a customer doesn't have any external Syslog server. It is a problem for those customers who want to review event logs after a week or so because they won't get proper reports or event logs. They should increase the duration to at least a month or two for storing the data on the device. F5 is not a leader in Gartner Quadrant, which affects us when we go and pitch this solution. Customers normally go and take a look at such annual reports, and because F5 is currently not there as a leader, the customers ask about it even though we are saying it is good in all things. F5 is not known for something totally different or unique. They were a major player in ADP, and they are just rebranding themselves into security. They should improve or increase their marketing as a security company now. They have already started to do that, but they should do it more so that when it comes to security, customers can easily remember F5. At the moment, if we say F5, load balancing comes to mind. With rebranding and marketing, all customers should get the idea that F5 is now mainly focusing on the security part of it, and it is a security company instead of load balancing. This is the first solution that should come to a customer's mind for a web application firewall."
"It would be good if the solution's feature set could be expanded to mirror what currently exists on the public cloud."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"The solution is expensive."
"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."
"It is not too pricey."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"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."
"There are different licenses available to use F5 Advanced WAF, such as BT, ASM, and LPM."
"It is a little bit costly, but it has all the features that are required."
"The pricing of F5 Advanced WAF is more expensive than other solutions like Radware and CD18, it is quite high."
"I am not sure about pricing but licenses are available on Google."
"The pricing for F5 Advanced WAF is comparable to a Rolls-Royce. Its price is a bit high when you compare it with other vendors. F5 Advanced WAF is a bit expensive. The customer was on a three-year plan and it was around $560,000."
"There are various plans available for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF as a Service, including a trial version."
"I think the price is very high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Government
8%
No data available
 

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 Business27
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise31
No data available
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?
F5 Advanced WAF is somewhat costly compared to other vendors, but it is worth the investment due to the stability it ...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
Improvements could be made regarding the log information from the backend CLI. There are enhancements needed; if a re...
What is your primary use case for F5 Advanced WAF?
My main use case for F5 Advanced WAF is to protect external and internal applications from cyber attacks and to preve...
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Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
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Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva, Fortinet, F5 and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: May 2026.
896,298 professionals have used our research since 2012.