F5 Advanced WAF vs NGINX App Protect comparison

F5 Advanced WAF and NGINX App Protect are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. F5 Advanced WAF is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.5, while NGINX App Protect is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.8. Additionally, 98% of F5 Advanced WAF users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of NGINX App Protect users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

NGINX App Protect and F5 Advanced WAF compete in web application security. F5 Advanced WAF seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive threat detection and strong load balancing features.

Features: NGINX App Protect is valued for its flexibility, reverse proxy capabilities, and its open-source nature. It effectively manages traffic and integrates seamlessly with other solutions, offering features like auto-learning and bot protection. F5 Advanced WAF offers advanced threat detection using AI, robust load balancing, and exceptional DDoS protection, making it highly customizable and stable.

Room for Improvement: NGINX App Protect could improve its security features and compatibility with other systems. There is a need for an enhanced upgrade process and better support portal, alongside improved API exposure for automation. F5 Advanced WAF could enhance its reporting capabilities and address its high pricing. Simplified deployment and better integration with Kubernetes and cloud environments are desired.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NGINX App Protect offers deployment flexibility across private and hybrid clouds but faces challenges in high-throughput scenarios. Its technical support can be costly and slow. F5 Advanced WAF supports a wide range of environments including public and hybrid clouds. Although the setup is complex, its comprehensive features make the process worthwhile. Its customer service is proactive, albeit premium cost may be a concern.

Pricing and ROI: NGINX App Protect is considered expensive, yet it offers a satisfactory return on investment, particularly for its ease of integration in CICD pipelines. Pricing is moderate with costs associated with annual subscriptions. F5 Advanced WAF is seen as a premium product. Its high pricing can be an obstacle for smaller businesses, yet its robust features offer significant value, yielding a high return on investment, especially for larger enterprises.

To learn more, read our detailed F5 Advanced WAF vs. NGINX App Protect Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. NGINX App Protect

January 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 831,020 peers since 2012

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

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

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.

Read full review

Richard Polyak

Sr. Architect at NBC Universal

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.

Read full review

Saurav Kumar

Senior security architecture at National Payment Corporation Of India

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

"The tool is user-friendly."

"From what I've seen so far, there are no negatives to report as of yet"

"Cloudflare has many features."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

"Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. You don't necessarily need a certificate if you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host."

"Centralized, full-featured DNS."

More Cloudflare pros

"WAF functionality is valuable for protecting applications from attacks."

"F5 Advanced WAF has very good stability and scalability. Its initial setup was straightforward."

"It's flexible and powerful, and the users can input their own rules to the system."

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

"F5 Advanced WAF is a comprehensive community platform with a strong commitment, making it valuable for businesses."

"The solution isn't too expensive. The license allows you to license what you need and leave out what you don't need."

"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 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."

More F5 Advanced WAF pros

"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."

"It has the best documentation features."

"The tool is not complex and is very user-friendly."

"It's very easy to deploy."

"The initial setup was simple and took three to four days."

"There's a cache, or it works like a proxy, so it can speed up applications."

"It is a very good tool for load balancing."

"The most valuable feature of NGINX App Protect is its open source."

More NGINX App Protect pros

Cons

"Sometimes their more advanced caching tools can cause higher first-byte times and problems with JavaScript."

"It should confirm audit findings of the assigned area with auditees to ensure that the audit conclusions are based on an accurate understanding of the issues."

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

"The integration of LLMs on the dashboard is something that is needed in the tool."

"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."

"For the free and Pro plans, Cloudflare could use a simple bot to provide information to users. This would improve support, especially for less advanced users who utilize the free components."

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."

"DNS Management."

More Cloudflare cons

"The accuracy of the automatic learning feature needs improvement."

"They could provide better 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."

"Nevertheless, F5 products are generally considered to be hard to deploy."

"The BIG-IQ is supposed to centralize the management for all of the boxes but it's not very effective."

"I would like to see additional controls."

"People who want to work with the device have to be pro in Linux"

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

More F5 Advanced WAF cons

"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."

"The product's price is high, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. The tool's licensing model is also not good."

"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."

"As far as scalability, it takes a long time for deployment."

"NGINX App Protect could improve security."

"I encountered issues with NGINX App Protect while trying to upgrade custom rules."

"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."

More NGINX App Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"That is one of the great features. I was able to access the majority of the features and services for free."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"For Cloudflare, I recommend it heavily for small businesses with revenue under a couple of million dollars. Onboarding is easy, and they even have a free plan. This makes it simple for businesses in the $100,000-$500,000 range to try it out and see its value, allowing them to scale up their infrastructure as needed."

"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"The solution is expensive when compared to other products but offers unlimited bandwidth."

"So far I use free tier and happy with it. You can subscribe to business package if needed."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The solution is very expensive so should only be used in the right environment."

"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."

"The pricing of F5 Advanced WAF is more expensive than other solutions like Radware and CD18, it is quite high."

"I am not sure about pricing but licenses are available on Google."

"F5 bundles up services and the bundle is what you pay for rather than individual components."

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

"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."

"I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten."

More F5 Advanced WAF pricing and cost advice

"Our licensing costs are about $40,000 a year."

"There are not any additional costs we had to pay to use NGINX App Protect."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"The price of NGINX App Protect is not much different from the products that fall under the leader category of Gartner Magic Quadrant."

"There is a license needed to use NGINX App Protect."

"There are no additional fees."

"The pricing is reasonable because NGINX operates on an instance basis."

"Really understand the licensing model, because we underestimated that."

More NGINX App Protect pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

Healthcare Company

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

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 setup cost is normal, yet not the best in terms of the commercial aspect. Other competitors like Fortinet are che...

See all answers

What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?

One improvement for AOF could be focusing on enhancing its AI engine to make it more mature.

See all answers

What do you like most about NGINX App Protect?

It's very easy to deploy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX App Protect?

The product's price is high.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 49% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

Fortinet FortiWeb vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 22% of the time

AWS WAF vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 16% of the time

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 16% of the time

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs F5 Advanced WAF

Compared 7% of the time

More F5 Advanced WAF Competitors

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 22% of the time

Fortinet FortiWeb vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 15% of the time

AWS WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 10% of the time

Azure Front Door vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 9% of the time

Haltdos Enterprise WAF vs NGINX App Protect

Compared 3% of the time

More NGINX App Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

January 2025

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF

January 2025

Download F5 Advanced WAF product report

Buyer's Guide

NGINX App Protect

December 2024

Download NGINX App Protect product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

No data available

NGINX WAF, NGINX Web Application Firewall

Learn More

Cloudflare

Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

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

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

F5 Advanced WAF vs. NGINX App Protect

January 2025

Free Report: F5 Advanced WAF vs. NGINX App Protect

Find out what your peers are saying about F5 Advanced WAF vs. NGINX App Protect and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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.