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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)
6th
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 June 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.5%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 4.7%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Huawei Cloud WAF is 0.7%, 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 WAF4.7%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.5%
Huawei Cloud WAF0.7%
Other90.1%
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 Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."
"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."
"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."
"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."
"Cloudflare has positively impacted my organization by making it easier for me to handle and set up DNS for multiple clients; I can easily go in and access their accounts, make changes they need, and it's a one-stop shop."
"In general, it's a very good product: the solution is very stable, the performance is great, the product offers very good scalability, the pricing is very reasonable, the installation is very straightforward and quite simple, and technical support has a very fast response time and is helpful."
"It is configurable via API."
"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."
"The initial setup was was easy to install."
"Good dashboard and reporting."
"It also has antivirus and DDoS mitigation capabilities. We have enabled these features."
"F5 Advanced WAF secures our connectivity and combines both the main functions of WAF (balancing and web application security)."
"I appreciate the way F5 Advanced WAF builds policies by configuring a basic policy and queuing it in learning mode."
"F5 products are highly stable, top-notch solutions, and we have also the expertise to deploy and design the F5 and Palo Alto product lines."
"F5 Advanced WAF has significantly enhanced our organization's security posture by protecting critical banking applications against sophisticated threats."
"The web application firewall itself is most valuable. It provides positive security and negative security. In negative security, it blocks a task such as cross-site scripting, code injection, etc. In positive security, it lets you specify and enforce things, such as the parameters allowed in username and password fields and the number of characters allowed in a field."
"The most valuable feature of Huawei Cloud WAF is its ease of use."
 

Cons

"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"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."
"Its stability could be better."
"They have some limitations with third-party integrations."
"The ModSecurity core rules need to be updated."
"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."
"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."
"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve the reporting. It's a bit difficult to populate, them. If you're not so familiar with the functions, such as where to find the logs and other settings."
"The deployment side is quite complex."
"The solution's dashboard could be improved. When you're moving from policy to policy, the logs and the integration of the logs in other systems aren't straightforward."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve resource usage, it is CPU intensive."
"The Sandbox integration feature could be improved."
"The reporting portion of F5 Advance WAF is not great. They need to work out something better, as it is very basic. You only see the top IPs, I think there is more they can offer."
"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."
"The interface is old-looking, it's not modern, which is why it's not always comfortable to use."
"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

"It is not too pricey."
"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."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"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."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"There is a perpetual license that comes with your hardware. There is also an additional fee for support."
"After buying the program, you just pay for the support every year."
"It is a little bit costly, but it has all the features that are required."
"F5 Advanced WAF technical support comes at a cost, and it's expensive."
"The pricing of F5 Advanced WAF is more expensive than other solutions like Radware and CD18, it is quite high."
"The way we deployed it, I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."
"The price of the solution is reasonable when compared with other products, such as FortiWeb. I am very satisfied with the price."
"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."
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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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva, Fortinet, F5 and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: May 2026.
896,942 professionals have used our research since 2012.