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F5 Advanced WAF vs NGINX App Protect comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th)
F5 Advanced WAF
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)
NGINX App Protect
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (15th), Container Security (23rd), API Security (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad - PeerSpot reviewer
It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes
Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.
Richard Polyak - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy event identification, highly stable, and customizable
Generally, F5 Advanced WAF initial setup is straightforward. However, our environment was more complex and it took us a little more time to customize the solution to where we needed it to be. Additionally, the customization didn't rectify everything. We had to do customization to a certain event to prevent attacks that it wasn't catching, but that might not necessarily be the solutions' fault. It could be more of our setup than the solution's fault and not being able to run the latest version or the newer version could be more of a limitation on our ability to put it in the right place. The whole implementation to have the solution run at the level we wanted it to take approximately five months. Our company's environment is one that we can't put a canned solution in front of. Our environment, cannot have a canned solution that might fit everybody else because of how customized this environment is. It does need a lot of tuning to meet our environment's requirements. I rate the initial setup of F5 Advanced WAF a three out of five.
Saurav Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers protection to users from external threats
NGINX App Protect secures our company's application, and it has helped me a lot, considering that we have critical infrastructure in India where we see how lots of attacks come onto our organization's servers. The tool offers protection against multiple threats present in India's IT ecosystem. The tool helps our company to make our payments secure, meaning it has the ability to provide a secure payment environment in India. Speaking about the improvements in our company's application performance since implementing NGINX App Protect, the gRPC support for the solution is very low. My company is not getting any proper documentation on how to deploy gRPC over NGINX App Protect. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. People can use the product as their company's base server, WAF, or for its proxy manager, depending on the business requirements. My company follows PCI DSS compliance because we operate in a payment-related industry. Right now, my company follows all the standards, so we comply with all the requirements and policies. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is security."
"The solution automatically detects and responds to certain types of traffic based on geolocation."
"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."
"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."
"The tool is user-friendly."
"When using services like Heroku, Cloudflare is very useful for CNAME flattening. I also use it for their end-to-end SSL with TLS authentication on nginx for securing servers."
"We're using dynamic components to build flexible pages to create and manage Git merge requests for code and reviews."
"It provides web application security and reduces bot attacks."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the security features and the protection."
"In terms of F5 Advanced WAF's most valuable features, I would definitely say its stability. F5 is one the most stable products. Either as the load balancer or the web application firewall, it is very stable."
"The support experience is better than average."
"F5 Advanced WAF secures our connectivity and combines both the main functions of WAF (balancing and web application security)."
"The bot defense capability, as well as protection from brute force attacks and OWASP Top Ten, are notable features."
"One of the most valuable features is the Local Traffic Manager."
"I appreciate the way F5 Advanced WAF builds policies by configuring a basic policy and queuing it in learning mode."
"WAF is useful to track mitigation, inclusion, prevention, and the parametric firewall."
"It's very easy to deploy."
"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its open source."
"NGINX App Protect is stable."
"The stability of the product is very impressive since it handles 60,000 to 70,000 requests or transactions per second."
"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is the reverse proxy."
"NGINX App Protect has complete control over the HTTP session."
"The initial setup was simple and took three to four days."
 

Cons

"The documentation could improve for Cloudflare DNS."
"The pricing could be improved."
"It would be good if Cloudflare could have more servers for better traffic routing or an increase in the traffic routed. This is what I'd like to improve in Cloudflare."
"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."
"Latencies are always a problem."
"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."
"The reporting can definitely be improved to offer a lot more explanation on something that may have happened or has actually happened."
"They lack a good way to manage DNS as a company, since everything is relegated to single account logins until you get to the higher levels. They have come out with a paid feature to remedy this, but I have not had a chance to fully review it yet to know if it fixes the access problem."
"F5 Advanced WAF could improve on its funding for WAF features. There is a need to be more advanced WAF features."
"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."
"There is a learning curve that extends the time of implementation."
"F5 Advanced WAF needs better integration within the application, like remote dashboards."
"The Sandbox integration feature could be improved."
"I would like to see the API Protection improved."
"Nevertheless, F5 products are generally considered to be hard to deploy."
"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."
"Currently, the policies have to be handled manually, and you have to create from scratch, which can be a bit time-consuming, in a large environment."
"I encountered issues with NGINX App Protect while trying to upgrade custom rules."
"Right now, the tool doesn't provide an option revolving around update feeds, specifically the signature update option in the UI."
"Areas for improvement would be if NGINX could scan for vulnerabilities and learn and update the signatures of DoS attacks."
"It's challenging if you need to go for a high throughput."
"NGINX App Protect would be improved with integration with Shape and F5 WAF, which would make it easy for users to manage all their web application security with a single solution."
"The dashboard could provide a more comprehensive view of the status of the connections."
"The configuration needs to be more flexible because it is difficult to do things that are outside of the ordinary."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is cheap."
"A free version of the solution is available."
"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."
"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."
"The pricing depends on the usage, but the cheapest would be around 5,000 USD a month."
"The price is reasonable."
"I give the price a five out of ten."
"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."
"F5 Advanced WAF's pricing is high."
"I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten"
"I think the price is very high."
"There are various plans available for Fortinet FortiWeb Cloud WAF as a Service, including a trial version."
"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."
"Licensing fees for this solution are paid on a yearly basis."
"The solution is very expensive so should only be used in the right environment."
"The way we deployed it, I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."
"The licensing fees for this solution are pretty expensive for what it does, but there is no alternative."
"The product's price is high."
"Really understand the licensing model, because we underestimated that."
"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."
"The price of NGINX App Protect is not much different from the products that fall under the leader category of Gartner Magic Quadrant."
"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."
"The price of NGINX App Protect is approximately $3,000 annually. All of our licenses are observed by a managed service partner."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
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 setup cost is normal, yet not the best in terms of the commercial aspect. Other competitors like Fortinet are che...
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
One improvement for AOF could be focusing on enhancing its AI engine to make it more mature.
What needs improvement with NGINX App Protect?
The product's price is high, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. The tool's licensing model...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS
No data available
NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
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Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. NGINX App Protect and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
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