F5 Advanced WAF vs Huawei Cloud WAF comparison

F5 and Huawei are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.4, while Huawei is ranked #33 with an average rating of 7.0. F5 holds a 7.1% mindshare in WAF, compared to Huawei’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of F5 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Huawei users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 Advanced WAF and Huawei Cloud WAF based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet, F5, Imperva and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF).

To learn more, read our detailed Web Application Firewall (WAF) Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2026

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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 ...

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) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF	7.1%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	5.4%
Huawei Cloud WAF	0.5%
Other	87.0%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

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.

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Kallamuddin Ansari

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.

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Chinedu Omenogor

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…

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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

"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."

"The product has a valuable security control functionality."

"The setup process is very simple for me."

"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."

"It's pretty convenient and pretty easy to set up and run. And then kind of for static content, it also offers caching."

"The impact of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's integration with existing web technologies on our site's performance and security measures is quite great, actually."

"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."

"The rate limiting features and customizations in terms of URL match and applying policies are valuable to me."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"F5 helped to meet compliance and regulatory requirements."

"F5 technical support is excellent. They are experts who always provide the right solution, and they understand the problem. Their response and resolution times are good."

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

"The most valuable features of this solution are the WAF protection, Data Safe, and the seven-layer DDoS."

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

"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the security features and the protection."

"This solution is an enterprise-class firewall that provides both load-balancing and security."

"The most valuable features of the F5 Advanced WAF are the enhanced ASM and the performance. Additionally, the usability and effectiveness are very good."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"The most valuable feature of Huawei Cloud WAF is its ease of use."

Cons

"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."

"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."

"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."

"The learning curve was steep initially."

"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."

"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."

"If they add logs history within the Cloudflare offering, that would be a great benefit."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"The interface is old-looking, it's not modern, which is why it's not always comfortable to use."

"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."

"I would like to see additional controls."

"I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before."

"They should work on the virtualization of NGINX."

"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."

"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."

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"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

"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."

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"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."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

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

"As far as the pricing of F5 Advanced WAF I would rate it a four out of five depending on what features I am looking for. Imperva is more expensive."

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

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

"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"

"The price of F5 Advanced WAF could improve it is expensive."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	31

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Huawei Cloud WAF?

The most valuable feature of Huawei Cloud WAF is its ease of use.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 8% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 7% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

NetScaler vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 4% of the time

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall Competitors

Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 23% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 6% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 5% of the time

NetScaler vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 3% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

AWS WAF vs Huawei Cloud WAF

Compared 16% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Huawei Cloud WAF

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Huawei Cloud WAF

Compared 10% of the time

More Huawei Cloud WAF Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

March 2026

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

March 2026

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2026

Download Huawei Cloud WAF product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

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.

Huawei Cloud WAF delivers robust web application security features, efficiently protecting against common vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting. It is crafted for businesses seeking reliable web protection solutions.

Huawei Cloud WAF enhances web security by integrating advanced analytics and threat intelligence to detect and mitigate malicious attacks. With customizable policies, it adapts to evolving security needs, ensuring data integrity and availability. Installation is straightforward, with a scalable architecture suitable for diverse environments. Users appreciate its effectiveness and comprehensive coverage but suggest improvements in granular reporting and user interface customization for optimal flexibility.

What are the key features of Huawei Cloud WAF?

Advanced Threat Detection: Utilizes machine learning and AI to identify and mitigate new threats.
Customizable Security Policies: Allows users to tailor configurations for specific web applications.
Real-time Monitoring: Provides instant insights and alerts on web traffic and security status.
Comprehensive Report Generation: Delivers detailed analytics for informed decision-making.

What benefits are users typically looking for?

Improved Security Posture: Enhanced protection against web threats and vulnerabilities.
Reduced Downtime: Consistent performance and decreased risk of service interruptions.
Scalability: Capability to handle increased traffic loads without compromising security.
Cost Efficiency: Offers protection with competitive pricing, integrating seamlessly into existing IT frameworks.

In industries like finance and e-commerce, Huawei Cloud WAF's flexible deployment options allow businesses to secure sensitive transactions and customer data. These sectors benefit from its ability to maintain security compliance and its reliability in high-traffic scenarios. Customizable policies enable businesses to address industry-specific threats effectively.

Huawei

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

March 2026

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