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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)
7th
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)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Huawei Cloud WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
33rd
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 March 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 7.1%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Huawei Cloud WAF is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
F5 Advanced WAF7.1%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall5.4%
Huawei Cloud WAF0.5%
Other87.0%
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.
Kallamuddin Ansari - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Consultant at ProTechmanize
Application security has protected critical banking services while policy learning minimizes false blocks
F5 Advanced WAF performs well overall, but I have noticed some points that could enhance the solution. Initially, policy tuning could be simpler, as while the learning engine is powerful, initial tuning still requires experienced engineers, which can be challenging for new teams due to the complexity of options and parameters. A more guided and simple tuning workflow would help reduce the learning curve. Additionally, tighter native integration with SIEM or SOAR tools would simplify correlation and investigations for security teams, although log exports are available. 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.
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 product has a valuable security control functionality."
"The initial setup process is simple."
"The integration of Cloudflare with Cloud Suite is its most valuable feature."
"We like that there's load balancing, firewall capabilities, DDoS protection, et cetera, all covered by Cloudflare."
"The setup process is very simple for me."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"The rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."
"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."
"F5 helped to meet compliance and regulatory requirements."
"This solution inspects your traffic and based on that, automatically create distinct qualities for you, so you can add this to the policy already created. That's what I like most."
"The solution is stable."
"Good technology for mitigating different application attacks, e.g. DDoS, DNS, and layer seven attacks."
"It is also quite intuitive and user-friendly. They have several webinars that are actually like labs. You can use these webinars to learn about how to use all features of the product."
"The most valuable features of the F5 Advanced WAF are the enhanced ASM and the performance. Additionally, the usability and effectiveness are very good."
"It's flexible and powerful, and the users can input their own rules to the system."
"iRules are quite appealing when it comes to F5."
"The most valuable feature of Huawei Cloud WAF is its ease of use."
 

Cons

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."
"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."
"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."
"A key challenge arises when dealing with numerous integrations with HVAC systems. Depending on the specifics, there might be some configuration mismatches, which necessitate specific support."
"The learning curve was steep initially."
"Support can be challenging at times."
"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"They should work on the virtualization of NGINX."
"The GUI interface can be confusing due to similar-looking tabs for policy building, traffic learning, and event logs."
"Scalability could be improved."
"I would not expect traffic details to pass through the web application firewall across the length of the whole application. I think that there is a web application where it can let the application function without traffic going in into the WAF."
"F5 Advanced WAF needs better integration within the application, like remote dashboards."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve the precision of the scanning. There are many false positives. They should improve their threat database."
"This solution can be made more user-friendly."
"The reporting could be clearer and embedded to include our movement data."
"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

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"It is not too pricey."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"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."
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The pricing is too high."
"I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten."
"The solution is very expensive so should only be used in the right environment."
"F5 Advanced WAF pricing structure should be adjusted to meet the need of small to medium-sized companies."
"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."
"After buying the program, you just pay for the support every year."
"There are different licenses available to use F5 Advanced WAF, such as BT, ASM, and LPM."
"Pricing for this solution is higher than average."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
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 Business26
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise31
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I don't really use the rule-based logic feature or utilize the WAF's ability to scale as a cloud-based service. I don...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I'm using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall on all my domains and any client domains I have; I set them up with a C...
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?
The pricing for F5 Advanced WAF is a bit higher, but not that high. I would say for a good amount of revenue-generati...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
On the features I wish existed, Big-IP Advanced WAF is primarily an on-premises solution and in that solution, there ...
What do you like most about Huawei Cloud WAF?
The most valuable feature of Huawei Cloud WAF is its ease of use.
What needs improvement with Huawei Cloud WAF?
It would be good if the solution's feature set could be expanded to mirror what currently exists on the public cloud.
What is your primary use case for Huawei Cloud WAF?
We have a private cloud leveraging Huawei technology. We use Huawei Cloud WAF to provide cloud services for governmen...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: February 2026.
883,044 professionals have used our research since 2012.