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F5 Advanced WAF vs NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall 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 ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
7th
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
NSFOCUS Web Application Fir...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
45th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.0%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 4.1%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall is 0.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF4.1%
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.0%
NSFOCUS Web Application Firewall0.6%
Other91.3%
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.
it_user933945 - PeerSpot reviewer
Desktop Engineer at eros international media ltd
Offers Application Protection Against Web Attacks
There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features. The user needs to be able to manage each policy as required; the functionality needs to empower the user. There should be a complete suite of desktop provider policies available to users. Overall, it needs to be more user-friendly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."
"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."
"The most valuable part of the solution for us overall is exactly that it is a Software-as-a-Service product."
"It protects web applications efficiently."
"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."
"The setup process is very simple for me."
"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."
"This solution does a good job of preventing web application attacks, SQL injections, and cross-site scripting attacks."
"Despite a few issues, F5 Advanced WAF is performing well for me."
"I would recommend this solution; it would be the best solution for WAF."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the overall capabilities, there is not a comparable solution on the market."
"The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are the balancer and you can change policies very easily."
"I definitely recommend this solution because of the time you save on analysis."
"After implementing F5 Advanced WAF, nearly 99.9% of requests are legitimate due to the granularity and response verification by attack patterns and request blocking."
"Identification, ease of use, and ease of modifying it to most of our needs are valuable."
"Customers find the load balancer feature as the most valuable."
"Since we are using this tool for protection purposes we really appreciate the hybrid security abilities; the main idea here is that we powerful protection our application needs."
 

Cons

"WAF doesn't directly affect bandwidth costs. It saves costs on protection. However, with the correct setup, it's difficult to determine if it saves costs overall due to the fixed enterprise plan fee."
"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."
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."
"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."
"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."
"The reporting could be improved if it were more granular."
"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."
"Compatibility with multiple cloud environments needs improvement. Both stability and scalability need to be improved."
"The scalability could be improved."
"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."
"It's sometimes difficult to customize APIs with F5 Advanced WAF, which could be made easier."
"Everything is good about the F5 WAF, except the reporting. It's really difficult to set records from that device, the UI is kind of hard to work with, and the reporting must be improved."
"We get false positives sometimes."
"Support is a little slow."
"F5 Advanced WAF needs better integration within the application, like remote dashboards."
"There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features."
"There is a need for expanded licensing terms and options. There's also a need for improved and more agile customization features. The user needs to be able to manage each policy as required; the functionality needs to empower the user. There should be a complete suite of desktop provider policies available to users. Overall, it needs to be more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"It is not too pricey."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"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."
"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."
"I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution."
"There is an annual subscription for this solution."
"The cost is slightly above average."
"F5 Advanced WAF pricing structure should be adjusted to meet the need of small to medium-sized companies."
"Pricing for this solution is higher than average."
"There is a perpetual license that comes with your hardware. There is also an additional fee for support."
"The price of the solution is reasonable when compared with other products, such as FortiWeb. I am very satisfied with the price."
"The solution is very expensive so should only be used in the right environment."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
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...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
No data available
NSFOCUS WAF, NSFOCUS Web Application Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
2016 G20 Summit
Find out what your peers are saying about Imperva, Fortinet, F5 and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: June 2026.
903,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.