F5 Advanced WAF vs NGINX App Protect comparison

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11,906 views|9,375 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
F5 Logo
3,325 views|2,455 comparisons
95% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between F5 Advanced WAF and NGINX App Protect based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. NGINX App Protect Report (Updated: March 2024).
772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"F5 Advanced WAF has very good stability and scalability. Its initial setup was straightforward.""It is easy to obtain dashboard compliance because security policy views are included.""The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the balancer and you can change policies very easily.""The most valuable feature is artificial intelligence and to get extra internal access.""This solution is an enterprise-class firewall that provides both load-balancing and security.""The support experience is better than average.""Feature-wise, they are always cutting edge and up-to-date. Many features aren't available via competitors. There's always a lot of enhanced critical features that just aren't available through anyone else, or, if they are, are too lightweight.""The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the overall capabilities, there is not a comparable solution on the market."

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"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its flexibility.""The most valuable feature is that there is a link in the system that will help to analyze the security of an application when something abnormal is found.""NGINX App Protect's best features are auto-learning, which creates a profile of applications that are deployed, bot protection, and force protection, which lets you configure your brute force policy and alert for and prevent brute force attacks.""NGINX App Protect has complete control over the HTTP session.""The tool's most valuable feature is the OWASP certification. Additionally, the tool's ability to enforce strong passwords and OTP within minutes is impressive. With its analytics and recommendations, it is a very good solution.""NGINX App Protect is stable.""The most valuable feature is that I can establish different services from the firewall.""It has the best documentation features."

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Cons
"F5 Advanced needs to improve its bot protection. The solution needs to have machine learning to learn the behavior of the customer to recognize the human versus the bot. This is a difficult feature to explain to our customers. I would like documentation about the bot feature to make it easier for the customer to understand.""The tool needs to improve its pricing.""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.""The accuracy of the automatic learning feature needs improvement.""Its price should be better. It is expensive.""Scalability could be improved.""The Sandbox integration feature could be improved.""Most customers encounter stability issues with the product's Big-IP logs."

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"The price of NGINX App Protect could improve.""The product's user interface is an area with shortcomings as it can be quite confusing for users, making it an area where improvements are required.""Its technical support could be better.""Setting policies and parameters through the UI should be more automated because the process is manual, where we can only edit one rule at a time.""They could provide a better user interface.""The solution needs to be improved in the e-commerce portal.""The setup of NGINX App Protect is complex. The full process took one week to complete. Additionally, we had to change the network infrastructure platform which took one month.""Areas for improvement would be if NGINX could scan for vulnerabilities and learn and update the signatures of DoS attacks."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The pricing is too high."
  • "I think the price is very high."
  • "After buying the program, you just pay for the support every year."
  • "Licensing fees for this solution are paid on a yearly basis."
  • "It's more expensive than other solutions and depending on the modules, there can be additional fees."
  • "F5 bundles up services and the bundle is what you pay for rather than individual components."
  • "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 various plans available for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF as a Service, including a trial version."
  • More F5 Advanced WAF Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."
  • "Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."
  • "Really understand the licensing model, because we underestimated that."
  • "There are no additional fees."
  • "NGINX is not expensive."
  • "The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."
  • "There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."
  • "There are not any additional costs we had to pay to use NGINX App Protect."
  • More NGINX App Protect Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the rules per the requirements.
    Top Answer:The product is not so expensive. It depends on the assets.
    Top Answer:The self-service aspect could be improved. The user interface (UI) also seems a bit outdated. Making it more user-friendly would be beneficial.
    Top Answer:The solution has yearly, three-year, and five-year subscriptions.
    Top Answer:NGINX App Protect could provide a better user interface.
    Ranking
    Views
    11,906
    Comparisons
    9,375
    Reviews
    22
    Average Words per Review
    409
    Rating
    8.6
    Views
    3,325
    Comparisons
    2,455
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    318
    Rating
    8.7
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall
    Learn More
    Overview

    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.

    NGINX App Protect application security solution combines the efficacy of advanced F5 web application firewall (WAF) technology with the agility and performance of NGINX Plus. The solution runs natively on NGINX Plus and addresses some of the most difficult challenges facing modern DevOps environments:

    • Integrating security controls directly into the development automation pipeline
    • Applying and managing security for modern and distributed application environments such as containers and microservices
    • Providing the right level of security controls without impacting release and go-to-market velocity
    • Complying with security and regulatory requirements

    NGINX App Protect offers:

    • Expanded security beyond basic signatures to ensure adequate controls
    • F5 app‑security technology for efficacy superior to ModSecurity and other WAFs
    • Confidently run in “blocking” mode in production with proven F5 expertise
    • High‑confidence signatures for extremely low false positives
    • Increases visibility, integrating with third‑party analytics solutions
    • Integrates security and WAF natively into the CI/CD pipeline
    • Deploys as a lightweight software package that is agnostic of underlying infrastructure
    • Facilitates declarative policies for “security as code” and integration with DevOps tools
    • Decreases developer burden and provides feedback loop for quick security remediation
    • Accelerates time to market and reduces costs with DevSecOps‑automated security
    Sample Customers
    MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
    Information Not Available
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm34%
    Computer Software Company25%
    Non Tech Company6%
    Media Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Government7%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider33%
    Financial Services Firm33%
    Insurance Company17%
    Computer Software Company17%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise65%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise61%
    Buyer's Guide
    F5 Advanced WAF vs. NGINX App Protect
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. NGINX App Protect and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    F5 Advanced WAF is ranked 2nd in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 55 reviews while NGINX App Protect is ranked 13th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 20 reviews. F5 Advanced WAF is rated 8.6, while NGINX App Protect is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of F5 Advanced WAF writes "Flexible configuration, reliable, and highly professional support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NGINX App Protect writes "Capable of complete automation but is costly ". F5 Advanced WAF is most compared with Fortinet FortiWeb, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, AWS WAF, Imperva Web Application Firewall and Azure Web Application Firewall, whereas NGINX App Protect is most compared with Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, AWS WAF, Fortinet FortiWeb, Cloudflare Web Application Firewall and Noname Security. See our F5 Advanced WAF vs. NGINX App Protect report.

    See our list of best Web Application Firewall (WAF) vendors.

    We monitor all Web Application Firewall (WAF) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.